You're the one I am speaking to. The body is an echo chamber, and you're the absence that's present there to teach me. Right now, we wait. We eat, we walk, we weep and we wait. Soon, it'll be a fair question--why are you looking for the living among the dead, I mean. But for now, dying's got a heft and a weight worth respecting, worth being quiet for, worth staring into. We call into the garden, we betray our location, and no one calls back. At first, it's a mournful thing, to be the only ear hearing the sound of your own pain. But then, sound reverberates through a whole history of ignored trauma stored in the body. After a while the pain shifts, becomes more spacious. Grief is a darkness, and eventually our eyes adjust. There's more here than you think. [bxA]
When we hear the sound of our own words, it's the body doing its work. Become like I am, subject to paradox, fully and for the long haul. When that happens, the Word is first to break the silence. Suffering may eventually tap out. Death may eventually blink first. The Universe reflects God's intelligence more than we might think. But what suffering and death do is their business--no one can change any of it. What I'm wondering is this: do we have it in us to go slow, to be conscious, to grieve?
"What is there to grieve?" you ask. Just this: the hard truth of impermanence. This is what I've been trying to show you. This is what every flower, every blade of grass, every laughing jag has been trying to show you. Life isn't contradictory--that's ego talking-- it's paradoxical. Falsehood and truth don't compete. Everything is true and false at the same time. Every moment is a birth and a death. Every fulfillment's a reward that comes at a cost. Every word sounds for a moment, then dies away. Before students become teachers, the whole drama gets internalized. Teachers die, students die, teachings die. You can call it "dying, rising and ascending" or the "hero's journey"--whatever you like. This is how mystery works, when it manifests. It's terrifically uncomfortable, and only partially reflects totality's unknowability.
I want to say that you are totally safe. You'll crash your car. You'll lose loved ones. You'll go years without connecting to any of life's joys. You'll die yourself: suddenly, maybe, or prolongedly, it doesn't matter. Be in this moment so deeply that it ceases to be an ending or a crisis, and instead draws your fascination. You have lived before, and will again. I am life itself: to become like me is the only newness. You have never not been here, now. You will never be anywhere else. From the standpoint of the work you have to do, past and future only exist to bring you here. Come here, then let go of them.
In the moment's deep solitude, you are never alone. You are hanging here with me. Behold the Cross. Behold the cruciform burden of your own bones. Feel their weight. It doesn't matter whether you hallow a name or not. Like me, you're suspended here. Perhaps, soon, you'll give them up. Maybe, in a moment, you'll know the heavy and the light, the descent and the harrowing and the rise. But for the moment, breathe. It's hard, it's heavy, and it's totally ok. All the parts of it, even the darkest bits, are love. I want to say "I love you" but the words are too distant. Love is like being: you are only as far from it as you are from yourself.
I am the one who is speaking to you. Who do you say that I am?
