FROM THE BOUNDARY: Snow-Snow’s song
I’ve just come from my chapel, the Chapel of St Francis and the Angels.
The Feast of the Divine Mercy was very much in mind. By ‘mercy’ we
don’t mean “OK, I won’t hit you. You said ‘sorry’.” We mean the loving
kindness that inexorably flows from the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
‘Jesus, I trust in you.’ I say morning and evening prayers in the
chapel. The word ‘sin’ rarely intrudes – well, save in the sense of
‘missing the mark’, some recognisable stupidity of mine which affronts
my true self and which, in varying degrees, demonstrates that I’ve let
myself down. I don’t see these ‘missed marks’ as putting me at odds
with God. I’m not perfect, but the important thing is recognizing the
idiocy for what it is and doing something, so far as possible, to
remedy it. I work on the principle that God accepts me as I am, and
that He certainly wouldn’t want me to root my life in Him in fear of
displeasing Him. It’s me I’m harming, not the Divine.
Did we create God from fear? Is God the personification of fear?
Nor, in my prayers, do I contemplate God as an ‘entity’ wholly
separate from me. ‘Dualism’ is not my thing. Jesus tells us that the
Kingdom is within us; Kabir that He is within us and without us, that
in Him the inner and outer worlds are indivisibly one, that there are
no words which adequately tell us that which He is.
Our language is very limited. To speak of ‘Lord’, ‘He’, or even ‘God’
for that matter, if not understood as shorthand, is to commit us to
anthropomorphism, attributing to the Divine human qualities so that
‘He’ just becomes a glorified me or you. These days I speak of the
‘Divine’, of the ‘Breath of my breath’, of the ‘Light within all
light’, of the ‘Soul within the human soul’, of ‘the Divine Heart
within my own heart’, of the ‘indwelling Divine calling us from the
very Heart of Life’. We’re all ‘of You’, ‘in You’, ‘one with You’,
‘together One’. I suppose it’s my way of expressing Paul Tillich’s
idea of God as the ‘Ground of all being’.
Weren’t we, and all things, born of the Divine? Aren’t we, and all
things, sanctified by that original Blessing?
Usually, my prayers aren’t rooted in book texts, but from my
‘consciousness’, that’s to say from the heart, where the Kingdom is,
not my mind. The mind is a beggar with a bowl. The heart is a rose
which gives its fragrance to everyone. It’s rooted in love – a sharing
of consciousness with people, animals, birds, all life. That love
acknowledges the Divine presence in all things, and responds to the
Divine’s beckoning from all life.
I guess they’re ‘child prayers’ – unadorned, spontaneous, free.
When we say that God is Love, can we turn it around and say that Love is God?
All of which is an overture to Snow-Snow. He’s a grey and white
flecked- feathered chick, and for the past three months or so he’s
shared my chapel with me. I found him in the garden with a peck wound
to the head, and if I’d left him there he would have died. So I took
him in, found him a nice big box to sleep in, courtesy of Mrs Bynoe,
when he isn’t pottering around the chapel or perching on me. He spends
much time cuddled in my lap, and we both have a tendency to fall
asleep together. He likes being sent to bed with Paul Robeson
spirituals, but prefers grapes and baked potatoes.
In my time with him, he’s been as good for me as me for him. He’s kept
my thoughts ‘involved’ during the lockdown, with life and reflections
about the Divine. He’s reminded me that life is dependency. We
couldn’t make it without each other. We, creation, are one. Oneness.
It’s a Divine precept. It’s the Divine Heart beating.
Go safely, then – until the next time.
Fowl-thoughts, from the boundary: “Wise man is the rooster of the
universe. He awakens the unawake” (Mehmet Murat ildan).