I will not break faith with my awakening heart
~James Finely
November 12
The Peacock card ~ Perfection & Beauty. Symbol of power and beauty and charisma; associated with Quan Yin; the eye of the feather reflects the eye of god and the eye of the heart. Live fully the beauty given to you. "I am nature's work of art and I am aware that I enchant my surroundings with my beauty."
The Pearl and Larimar card ~ Water. Surrender, release, patterns, triggers. The light of the Divine Mother. It's radiance brings calm and centering. The pearl holds you through old patterns and wounds surfacing, bringing release and growth. Feminine and gentle, it stimulates the heart chakra to open, wrapping you in glow of love. Larimar helps you surrender to the flow. Holds dolphin energy. The dolphins want you to work with larimar for joyful release and to connect with inner child and fun and play.
Reading from Thomas Merton:
What is serious to people is often very trivial in the sight of the Beloved. What might appear to us as ‘play’ is perhaps what the Beloved takes most seriously. At any rate the Beloved plays and diverts Herself in the garden of Her creation, and if we could let go of
our own obsession with what we think is the meaning of it all, we might be able to hear
Her call and follow Her in Her mysterious, cosmic dance. We do not have to go very far
to catch echoes of that game, and of that dancing. When we are alone on a starlit night;
when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers
to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment they are really children; when we know
love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet Bashō, we hear an old frog land in
a quiet pond with a solitary splash.—at such times the awakening, the turning inside out
of all values, the ‘newness,’ the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves
evident, provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.
For the world and time are the dance of the Beloved in emptiness. The silence of the spheres
is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena
of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our
own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness, absurdity and despair. But it does not
matter [very] much, because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the
joy of the cosmic dance which is always there. Indeed, we are in the midst of it, and it is
in the midst of us, for it beats in our very blood, whether we want it to or not. Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join in the general dance.
He begins, first, really meditating on the poetry of creation—see, that “the world and time,”
or “the dance of the Lord in emptiness”; “the silence of the spheres.” And the spheres here
mean the heavenly bodies—the sun, and moon, and stars overhead—so, “The silence of the
spheres is the music of a wedding feast.” And so, he sees creation then as the infinite presence
of God in the “let it be,” like, “let there be stones, and trees, and stars, and you and me.”
He once said in a talk in the monastery, he said, “Creation isn’t something that just
happened in the beginning and then God walked off and left us to our own devices.”
He said, “Creation is going on all the time. That creation is absolute and perpetual.” So
ultimately speaking, God, the infinite presence of God, is pouring itself out, giving itself
away and presencing itself as the intimate immediacy of our very presence, the presence of
others, and the presence of all things in our nothingness without God. This gift of God is
the absoluteness of the gift, God giving us her very presence, his very presence, and pouring
itself out as a gift and miracle of our very presence. It’s absolute in this sense that if God were
to stop loving you into your chair, wherever you are listening to this at the count of three,
at the count of three, you’d-- [cell phone ringing] Oh, and it’s a robocall to make it perfect.
Probably selling aluminum siding, or something. [laughter] Okay. All right. Before we were
so rudely interrupted. Okay.
As you listen to what I’m saying right now, if at the count of three, God would cease loving
you into you listening to me right now, at the count of three, you would disappear. For you
are nothing, absolutely nothing, outside and other than the love of God giving itself to you
as your very life. But it’s your very nothingness without God that makes your very presence
to be the presence of God. And that’s the paradox that lies at the heart of all reality, which
then renders the universe as God’s body and that it’s bodying forth the love that’s uttering it
into being.
St. John of the Cross says, he said, “In the beginning, the beauty of the created order of
physical things, the world, in possessiveness at heart, it can be seductive. We want to own it.”
He said, “As we go more deeply into being present to the beauty of the Earth,” he said, “We
realize the Beloved has passed this way in haste.” That is, we see traces of the divine in the
holiness of the material world, the sound of the rain, the smell of a rose, the darkness of the
night. And he said, “Then,” he says, “I realized my Beloved is the mountains.” See, there is a
point that the mountains are God’s body, that the mountains are bodying forth the love of
God giving itself as the concreteness of all things.
So here Merton begins by bearing witness to the already perfectly holy, to the sacred nature
3
that ultimately, the God-given godly nature of what is; that. Next, he says in this text,
he says, from time to time, he says, we do not have to go very far to catch echoes of
that game and of that dancing. As grand as this is, paradoxically, we don’t have to
go very far to see it. Where he says when we turn to see a flock of birds descending;
when we see children in a moment they are really children, who we know love in our
own hearts; the Japanese poet Bashō hearing the splash of the frog. At such times that
turning inside out of all values, the purity of vision that make themselves evident, you
get a glimpse of the divinity of the intimate immediacy of our life.
And at such times when it’s actually happening, when the quickening is happening,
then you realize, just for a moment, like, what a fool I am to worry so; where you
realize that things already are unexplainably, infinitely more than okay. See? There’s
somehow a kind of a boundary-less generosity that’s pouring itself out in the intimate
immediacy of this very moment.
So, I’d like to take one of these moments as an example, because Merton is inviting
us to become students of these moments, because they tend to be very subtle and
fleeting, and we tend to walk away. It’s like we were running roughshod over what
we’re looking for. So, if we can slow down enough to catch up with ourselves, to pay
close attention to reflect on the way we are in one of these moments.
So, imagine you’re driving home from work towards sunset, and you’re out on a
somewhat deserted stretch of road, wherever, and the sunset is particularly striking;
beautiful. So you pull the car off to the side of the road, you turn the car off, and you
sit there, and you give yourself over to the beauty of the setting sun giving itself over
to you, like that. And it’s one of these moments. It’s so simple. It’s like blessedness,
like that. And then you realize it’s been a timeless moment of time in sequential
time. You realize it’s getting dark, and so you start up your car. You stop at the store
on the way home to get some groceries. You pull in the driveway. You go into the
kitchen. You take out the trash. You get the mail, and you’re standing in the kitchen
going through the bills and the advertisements, and so on. And standing in your own
kitchen, you remember the moment with the setting sun on your way home. And you
ask yourself this question, “Why do I spend so many of my waking hours trapped on
the outer circumference of the inner richness of the life that I’m living? Why do I let
the centrifugal force of the momentum of the day’s demands spin me out into shallow
places where what I’m looking for, I’ll never find it there. Why do I do this? I don’t
like living this way. I want to take the mystery deeper.”
Imagine you’ve inherited a large, elaborately furnished mansion. Some rich relative
died and you have this beautiful mansion. And you go to your inherited, elaborately
furnished mansion, and you’re just delighted about the thing. The thing is you don’t
have the keys to get in your mansion. So, you have to live in a little tent behind the
garage of your elaborately furnished mansion. And on a weekend, you invite all your
friends and relatives over to show off your mansion. And after the little cookout,
you casually say, “Would you like to see the place?” And they’re peering through the
leaded glass windows. “Here’s the grand hall, the library, the music room. Let me get
a ladder. I’ll show you the bedrooms.” They say, you know, “It’s an amazing place you
have here.” And he said, “Well, I like it, but I don’t have the keys.”
4
I want to take it even deeper. What if all along you’ve been living in the mansion
all your life but through a tragic mental condition you think you’re living in a little
tent behind the garage? And every week your psychotherapist comes over for your
weekly session, and your therapist says, “Look, I wouldn’t, honestly, I wouldn’t lie
to you on this one. You’re in the mansion. You’ve been in it all along.” You say, “No.
No. I-- As a matter of fact, I don’t even think I deserve to even try to get in there,
actually.” That in God, we live and move and have our being. We’re living our life in
the vast interiority of God pouring herself out and giving herself away as every breath
and heartbeat, as every passing moment of our life. This is confusion. Jesus called it
blindness. The Buddha called it ignorance. We don’t see the God-given, Godly nature,
the boundary-less generosity of every blessed moment of our life.
So, in this way then—see, in this way—we start to see that as I start to have faith in
my moments of awakening, I will not break faith with my awakened heart. In my
most childlike hour, in the arms of the beloved, reading the child the good night
story; in the pause between two lines of a poem, lying awake at night, listening to
the rain, I was intimately accessed by a fullness without which my life will be forever
incomplete. And having tasted it, I’m incomplete without it, but I, by my own finite
powers, cannot find my way to abide in it. This is the graced discontent of the seeker;
see, that one was granted something, and I will not break faith with my awakened
heart, but that which was granted to me-- And I also know, the intuition is, that in
this moment, it isn’t as if something more was given to me, but a curtain opened and
the infinite love that’s always been given to me, it touched me. And so, I then seek to
know how can I then learn to accept in humility that actually I tend to get absorbed
in my obsessions over what I think is the meaning of it all, and I catch myself
imposing of it upon myself, the very dilemma I can’t bear? And here I am. Here I am.
And then Merton says that it doesn’t matter very much because no despair of ours
can alter the reality of things. We’re staying in the joy of the cosmic dance, which is
always there. Indeed, we are in the midst of it and it is in the midst of us for it beats
in our very blood whether we want it to or not. And I think this is the beauty of the
teachings of Thomas Merton and the mystics: Am I to put my faith in my ability to
abide in that which I know always abides in me and I in it? Or, am I to put my faith
in the love that loves me so, and is giving itself to me in my inability to abide in it?
See, in my inability to abide in it, it abides in me as precious in my confusion and
precious in my wayward ways. See?
And so, the distortions of a truth did not have the power to destroy the truth being
distorted. And we live in perpetual distortions, but the truth is pure. It is pure. And
there’s this love that gives itself to us. And then he says, “[But] the fact remains, we’re
invited to forget ourselves on purpose, [to] cast our awful solemnity to the winds and
join in the general dance.”
And how do I do that? Our meditation practice is where we do that. We come
out from behind the curtain, and we risk getting vulnerable. We risk being empty
handed. We risk living without answers. We risk learning to lean into the love that
loves us so in our confusion. And we learn to sit there like an unlearned child that this
love might take us and guide us to itself unexplainably, which is our practice. That
5
in our practice we forget ourselves on purpose, all our obsessions, our compulsions, they’re
still there, like the buzz that circles around waiting to have their way with us. But in our
intention, we can keep the intentionality of our heart focused on what our heart knows is
true and what Merton is bearing witness to when he talks to us this way. And so, this is our
first meditation.
