We were like Job, sitting with our own empty-handedness amidst a torrent of our own objections and a cacophony of well-meaning, but unhelpful advice. The undeserved nature of our suffering was as unchanging as the climate of loss it took place in. And the press of its weight was unremitting.
Suffering requires self care. If we were going to follow the teacher's advice and give up self, we needed a way to account for this dual responsibility of "self care and self renunciation." Some catalyst was necessary, to re-infuse our hyperlogical existence with paradox. As in a Koan, or on a Cross, something needed to suspend us between two opposites--so that the Spirit could well up within and do its work. When we looked, we saw it had been there the whole time. [bxA]
The Church says words cannot fully describe the ineffable. It says there is a perichoresis--an existence that the Trinity has "in and of itself." The mystery of God, we decided, wasn't given enough credit for working in the world. And the benevolent tension between mystery and revelation--the very paradox of the logos--this was not given its due as a creative force.
It's become a teaching, among us students of Rabbouni, that we are suspended, in the present moment, between mystery and revelation. These two realms break the façade of permanence wide open. As a framework, it has helped us recapitulate and reframe what we once saw negatively: anxiety became "creative tension." Sorrow became "grief." Desire became "vulnerable admission of need." With apologies to Buddhism and the Heart Sutra, followers of the Logos say: first, mystery is revelation and revelation is mystery, then mystery is mystery, and revelation is revelation. "Except," we said sheepishly "when mystery is revelation, and vice versa."
In the realm of mystery, ego has no authority. Embrace of impermanence and the emptiness of all things, the lack of rules: attention and loving spontaneity are the universe's only mandates. Our failures at virtue lay bare things we haven't yet even thought about: attachment, aversion, attraction, the thirst for being and nonbeing and satiation. Cause and effect are interdependent, happening together yet separate as they arise. Others do not cause us anger. Solitude is as full of reasons for rage as community: and we have thoroughly failed to see what God knows is in our hearts. It's a relational abyss in which the Almighty eventually speaks, collapsing all time into the now, rendering all potential realized, nestling our sense of place firmly wherever we "come to ourselves", and making all others simply mirrors of ourselves.
In the realm of revelation, ego renders our entire existence palliative care. When St. Paul admitted that he "died daily," he said it of every Christian. We live carrying crosses. In a climate of loss, we make Christ's passion our own: the only escape from causation is full submission to it. In the realm of revelation, we're beset by finitude and limitation. Others are a quite-real training in letting go of what we can't control. Time is linear, and we wear out shoes traversing distances. We learn from experience, build virtue, and see cause and effect as especially linked in the suffering our vices cause. Ever increasing unity with Christ, it turns out, also entails being all the more nose-to-nose with our "purgatorial predicament:" the view of our sins, except this time our ego is fully engaged in self-care instead of denial. Our dead-time, when it comes, awaits the third day, and the rising it promises.
In any incarnation, we are like students taking two classes at once, developing two opposite skillsets. Besides waiting, we need to know when to let go and when to hold fast. When we let go, we're dabble in the realm of mystery and employing the same skills addicts use when they admit they're powerless. We're admitting that thought and maneuvering and trial only led to error--and we stop ourselves in advance. We see paradox instead of contradiction: indeed every moment of living is also a dying. When we hold fast, we play in the realm of revelation. Our empowerment grows hands and feet, sees gains in muscles that aren't just emotional. We admit the accumulated pain of our past, and let it go. Taking an active role in Christ's recapitulation, we face our wounds thoroughly enough, gradually learning to converse with the parts of ourself as a compassionate parent to a responsible child--no, further, as God the Father to a compassionate Divine Son. We don't do this willfully-- our encounter with the sensations of the body is a willing one, underneath which courses the energy of the Spirit. It ascends the spine like angels did Jacob's ladder. Rabbouni's students awake to find the "ground on which they're standing"--that is, the body itself--has been holy the whole time.
Here's where the learning curve is: we don't always know when it's time to let our wills rest, when it's time to put them to work. That takes years of sustained attention, years of breathing and listening at the expense of thought, years of recollection. As the Pilgrim with his Jesus Prayer of Eastern Orthodox renown, we too "descend with the mind into the heart." The AA promise is fulfilled that says "we will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us. We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves." The miracle is this: the Son of Man's day is today, and the teacher is telling us " go and tell my students the kingdom of heaven is within them. There, they will see me."
Remember: theologians will argue about which side of the end-times paradox is is truer. "Yes, the kingdom is already here. But it's true as well that the kingdom is not yet here." For Rabbouni's students, all is realized. God's presence in the world is whole and entire and complete. When the Teacher said "it is finished," he meant it. The ego is the only veil left between us and the holy place, where God's name laces each breath. The veil will be rent, and the Spirit will dwell with us, turning our very spines simultaneously into a Via Dolorosa and a Ladder of Humility.
In the meantime, we will look upon him whom we have pierced. His face and ours are one. We are crucified with Christ, and we will spend time as both good and wicked thieves before we realize we have it in us to say "I thirst" and "forgive them, they know not what they do." When it comes from our mouth, we will indeed be talking about the mindless voices of our own psyche still desperate to be heard, cared for, protected.
When the veil of ego is torn, it is torn between mystery and revelation. When we're stretched to the breaking point, we're stretched between the unmanifest and the manifest. It's a paradox, not a contradiction: nothing is false except the parts of us that have yet to rest in emptiness. If seeds fall to the earth and die simply because the wind blows as it wills, how much more important must it be to attend to the Spirit in that place where death and rebirth are one?
We are suspended, in this life, whether we like it or not: the question is, between which two poles do we hang, and with what disposition? We have given up, become willing: in scriptural terms, we have either withstood the loss of everything or learned that, in every moment, we stood to lose it. Like Job: between what we know and what's concealed from us, we were confronted by the fruitlessness of knowledge. With minds full of the wisdom figures of old, we opened our mouths to speak of despising our lives--but the Lord made us quiet and empty. "Your life," said the Logos "is itself your penance." We asked what the Lord would give as dust and ashes, and what he'd make our sackcloth. Almost too softly to hear, over and over, he said "Everything. Everywhere. Always."
No comments:
Post a Comment