The act of love is the
surrender of self into life as
it is. This is a love larger than our word “love” can contain or
express. It embraces all of life and does not judge: tragedy and war, suffering
and joy, creativity and destruction. Beauty. Death. The Other. Within this
embrace of life as it is, lie acceptance, forgiveness, healing.
When we let go enough into the
depths of our being, we are in communion with all of creation. We are center
and circumference. One and many. Self and other. Without difference. We are
receivers of one another. Then the mystery which surrounds and informs us is
served. At depth, we discover that our aloneness and our bondedness are one.
Ours is an identity with all beings. Herein lies our healing, the end of loneliness.
. . .
To stay grounded I have had to
find other ways to honor the paradox of our human identity. I have discovered
that it is in the simplest, most minute experiences that I can begin to do
that. Then, I am at home, my created self. I belong. Walking. Looking at a
tree. Listening to a person, to the wind. Caressing a child. Scraping carrots
in the sink. Weeping. Laughing.
Being tender. First, I learned
to be tender with myself; to tend the needs of my soul. Then I began to tend
the other which
is also my self. If I am not tending, caring for some small portion of the
living creation, how can I commune with that creation, be it the earth or a
child, in any but the most sentimental way? A woman learns, in caring for an
infant, that she becomes bonded. A person who tends the land or gives to
another discovers the same bond. These are not moral niceties, they are part of
the mystery. They are law.
In this kind of communion with
life, new languages arise in our bodies: languages of awe and wonder, gratitude
and a joy that is overflowing. They soften us. . . . The more gratitude or awe
I feel, the more life shows forth its beauty and terror, the more my life is graced. These
are the languages of being.
Of being alive. This is a life lived with passion: com-passion. . .
.
There we await the mystery.
Richard Rohr The
Rhineland Mystics
August 2 -
August 7, 2020/ Anne Hillman
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