Quiet Day

 The sun rose over the eastern hills as John and I walked down to the mailbox on a Saturday morning, hoping to catch Sarah, the postwoman, on her rounds. It's our quiet day--always on Saturday. Before dawn today John set a fire in the living room fireplace where we sat in contemplation, a daily ritual, but on Saturday's we continue in the calm it instills by engaging only in those activities that bring us into the still center of each moment. Right now John is sitting on the couch reading "The Living Flame of Love," in his complete works of John of the Cross. He's facing the fireplace where the logs have burned down to coals. I think of Hopkins' sonnet in which just such coals "fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion."

It's good we have this weekly day of quiet, I think, remembering how the pain of the world wakes me almost every night around 2 A.M. and leaves me lying awake for hours, my heart filled with images of people around the world suffering from the pandemic, from wars, from poverty, from worry over the most basic of human needs and dangers: hunger, homelessness, violence, isolation...all too many to name. We've talked about it, John and I, how to spend those wakeful midnight moments and hours. We lean against the silence of night and pray. Last night I watched the stars behind the bare branches of the gigantic oak tree in the back yard. Points of light in darkness. It was as though each was a spirit of some person--an exhausted nurse on a COVID unit that I saw on yesterday's evening news, a frustrated politician, a caged child at the border. Kyrie eleison. Then the sense of presence--those whose lives have mingled for a while with mine--family, friends, teachers, all deeply loved and caring, supporting our poor injured world. I breathe those spirits of light, hoping with them, crying out with them for mercy. Often there are no words, only the breath of life. We cannot do this work alone. It is time to breathe for and with each other. 

Sometimes I write incantatory prayer/poems. Here is one that will soon be published in our local Quarterly, The Applegater. 

The incantation I want to share is entitled “Sheva” meaning in Hebrew “a fissure or wound—a house broken.” “El” means Divine Oneness, so EliSheva implies the coming together or paradox of opposites—a divine fissure or wound. It is EliSheva who speaks: 

My dear beloved,

Your times have become a tumult

Your house near collapse

Your habitation without air or water.

You are broken in the fissure of Elisheva.

I know you.

I am at the meeting place.

You know me.

You have been told of these times.

You have heard the whispers and felt the wings of that which comes.

I am the Oak 

On my branches perch the hawks

I am the Terebinth

See my red berries

See my coral colored burls

I tower above the People.

I am beauty and I am bitterness.

Break me open

Taste.

I am the fissure.

Ravaged.

Do This:

Cry out for those who cannot speak

Weep for those who have no eyes

Dig in earth for those who hunger

Plant the seed.

Feel This: 

Agony of the fawn who has eaten poison,

Silence of the bee from the abandoned hive, 

Ache of the child left on the rocks

Fear in the belly

Dark in the mind

Hold out your being like open hands.

Release it all.

© 2020 Christin Lore Weber

O EMMANUEL, COME

O EMMANUEL

GIVER OF A NEW LAW

TO ALL NATIONS

COME AND SAVE US

FOR YOU ARE OUR GOD

This morning I received three love letters from dear friends across the space and time of my life. They were more than Christmas cards; in fact they were not Christmas cards at all, must momentary impulses on the part of three separate people to shower me with the blessing of their hearts. To me, today, these friends came as Emmanuel. “God With Us.”

a virgin shall conceive

and bear a son

and his name shall be called

Emmanuel

^{Isaiah 7:14}

It really happened, my heart whispers. And it continues. Put all this together: There’s a new law. Jeshua tells his friends, “A new law I give to you. Love one another.” Love is not written in stone but in our hearts. Isn’t this the fulfillment of Ezekiel’s prophecy (11:19)where God says in him, “I will give them an undivided heart and put a new spirit in them; I will remove from them their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh.”

 The virgin has/IS an undivided heart. That heart conceives a divine child — God-With-Us — who brings this new law, Love.

Oh dear. Where are the words? As T.S. Eliot says: “Where shall the Word be found? Where shall the Word resound? Not here. There is not enough silence.” And now the music of Handel’s Messiah comes booming into my mind, “Why do the nations so furiously rage together?” And, yes they do. How can there be Emmanuel when the slaughter of children continues in Syria and elsewhere? How can there be peace on earth when stony hearts spread terror?

Yet, the world was no different that year in Bethlehem. It was likely not a silent night. Chances are there was no comfort for that virgin/mother in the cave behind the too full Inn. I suspect people were grumbling about Rome upping their taxes and taking their names. The shepherds probably were cold and trying to get a bit of sleep in shifts somewhere on the rocky earth. In  houses throughout the town other mothers tried to quiet their babies with lullabies, not knowing that in only a few weeks Herod’s soldiers would raid their homes and kill their sons. Into this Emmanuel would come.

Eliot was wrong.

Even in and out of the raging the Word of Love is spoken, heard, found. Emmanuel. Go deep inside. The divine one is what you are. Emmanuel is your deepest being. Even in the body broken—Emmanuel. Even in the bombed city—Emmanuel. Even in the murdered child—Emmanuel.  In the refugee—Emmanuel. Deeper than the anger and fear of the terrorist—Emmanuel. May the stone dissolve to reveal the heart’s tender flesh. It’s the time for it to happen.

May you receive a word of love today, and may your heart be tender to receive.

Let the New Law come to all the nations and into every heart.  Let Divine Love come.

O EMMANUEL, COME

O RULER OF ALL NATIONS

O RULER OF ALL NATIONS

TRUE DESIRE OF OUR HEARTS

YOU ARE THE CORNERSTONE

BINDING ALL OF US

INTO A HOME FOR GOD

COME

FREE US

WHOM YOU HAVE FORMED FROM EARTH

My heart aches as I meditate on this antiphon. All the centuries of our tearing apart of this earthly home which is not so much a place for us as it is our very body. We are the body yearning. We are the body yearning for that alchemy, that binding, that element of Being, that Suprapersonal Light, that Transformer, that True Light that enlightens everyone who comes into the world. 

We are the heart of the One. we are the mind of the One. We are the mouth through which the Word is spoken. We are the feet and the hands and the wombs. We are the wings. We are the cry, the song, the calling of whales. We are the seas. We are the mountains and rivers and lands. Why do we tear ourself apart? We are the woman on her knees weeping for her children. We are Rachel  and our children are the stars. We are the sky and we are the caves reaching to the center.  

How can I say it? The blood of God flows through us all. How can I find the words? Oh desired One, you do not come; you are already here, but we don’t see you, feel you, know you in our poor abused body. Our brother, Paul, could see when he questioned: Can I say to my hand, “I have no need of you?” Our sister, Mechtilde, knew when she wrote: "The day of my spiritual awakening was the day that I saw, and knew that I saw, all things in God and God in all things.” Our brother, Francis, recognized the kinship of all creatures in one living body—Brother Sun, Sister Moon, even Sister Death, because I can die and you can die and the Body of God remains.

O Ruler of all nations, O Holy One, O Cornerstone that unites us, touch our eyes and hearts to see who we really are. In all this vastness each is a reflection of the All. In loving anything we increase the One Eternal Love we are and have always been.

O RULER OF ALL NATIONS, COME

O RISING DAWN

O RISING DAWN

RADIANCE OF ETERNAL LIGHT

BRILLIANT SUN OF JUSTICE

COME

LIGHT UP THE DARKNESS

THAT HIDES OUR PATH TO LIFE

Today spiritual traditions meet and merge in the Rising Dawn. Medieval and modern Christians sing Winter Solstice songs. Stone Age peoples watch in the shadows of their henges for perfect alignment at dawn of the heavens with the earth. Today we check celestial positions of sun, moon and stars on a smart phone app. Or we meditate on the significance of this time and our personal connection to the universal however it is manifest, and today we feel a turning point. All the antiphons seem to be indicating this, though, the flicker of light in the most profound darkness, and today, the way it rises as the Sun of Justice.

In the shower this morning I found myself singing a verse from an Advent hymn I learned years and years ago. I must have been about 18. “People Look East.” It had been recorded by the Grailville Retreat Center in Loveland, OH.

Stars keep your watch though night is dim,

One more Light your bowl shall brim,

Even beyond the frosty weather,

Bright as sun and moon together.

People look east and sing today,

Love the Star is on the way.

I learned the O Antiphons first in Latin as Gregorian Chant. This one is O Oriens. (Translated as: O Rising, O Appearing, O Originating, O Daybreak, O Dawn, O Sunrise, O East.) This is the dawn of something wholly new, something original, Light beyond light in the mind, the heart, the soul, the spirit, the nations, the world, the universes, the entire cosmos. This is the dawn of a new consciousness, an enlightenment, a new way of being in which Light and Love are identical. It is right here for anyone to see—all we need is to look and receive. Or stay in darkness. It’s up to us.

O Rising Dawn, Come

Dawn at Casa Chiara

O KEY OF DAVID

AND SCEPTER OF THE HOUSE OF ISRAEL

YOU OPEN AND NO ONE SHUTS

YOU SHUT AND NO ONE OPENS.

COME

 DELIVER US FROM THE PRISONS THAT HOLD US

FOR WE ARE SEATED IN DARKNESS

OPPRESSED BY THE SHADOWS

OF DEATH.

It couldn’t get much darker. The year is about to tip, but we can’t see it yet. It was midnight when I woke and looked out the tall windows beside the bed at the shadows of trees. What is my prison? I wondered as I lay there wide awake. There would be no going back to sleep, not tonight. Tonight I’d be searching for the key to a prison so dark and filled with shadows it sometimes even seems to have no door.

“When is a key a scepter?” my mind inquired. It is a trickster, that mind of mine. “When is a key a You and not an It? the mind rambled on. (And to demonstrate the wonder I am in over all of this, I will tell you that it is now eleven minutes after two in the morning, and gazing into darkness as I’ve spent the time, these are all the words I yet have written.) Memory reminds me that almost fifty years ago I had a dream in which I chased a key down a street, and every time I bent to pick it up it moved on ahead of me as if leading me to something or somewhere else. Eventually I was in a poor section of the city. The key rolled up against a door and stayed. I picked it up and placed it in a lock. Turned it. Opened the door and found myself looking at my Self. “What is the door opened by the key? What is on the other side?”

In both the antiphon and in my youthful dream, “I” do not open the door. The antiphonal key is David. Note the key does not belong to David, it actually IS David. And by association and genealogy the Key is the One we invoke with COME: the same as was represented yesterday by the Sacred Tree, the Endless One with all the emanations. The Holy One in the Fire of Being whose name cannot be spoken except with innumerable adjectives.

The door to the prison is opened by the Key of David. The “David” within our souls, our relationships, our countries, our governments, our world—who/what is he? We need to know that or we won’t have the Key to the mystery of opening and closing. My mind teases me, “Why not call your new friend the Rabbi David? Ask him. He should know.” But my heart counsels me to go to the stories. The biblical stories reveal the qualities of the historical David, and each of those qualities are essential to the Key by which we are released from our prisons. The stories are many. Some of us know all of them, others know a few like the one in which he uses his slingshot to kill a giant. If David is the Key to our release from darkness and death, the stories tell me he is fully human, a paradox of glory and ambiguity.

David held opposites together. He was the child-shepherd/king,  mystic poet/warrior, beloved/betrayer.  This is the Key that opens the prison door, that tips the darkness towards the light, that unlocks the way through the shadow of death into the fullness of Life: the acceptance of all our contradictions. And the Key is on the inside. To be human is to be a paradox, and to accept that in the deepest night of our souls, of our nations, of our world, a time of death itself, we can, like David did, throw off our prisons like clothes become too small, and accepting what we are—the Light of God in the clay of earth—we can dance before the Tabernacle of the Great I AM.

This is the Key.

O Key of David, Come.

ROOT OF JESSE

O ROOT OF JESSE

YOU STAND AS A SIGN FOR ALL PEOPLE

BEFORE YOU ALL RULERS KEEP SILENT

FROM YOU EACH NATION SEEKS HELP

O COME

FREE US; DO NOT MAKE US WAIT.

The great urge is to get political about this antiphon, probably because it does actually sound political. It sounds like the Root of Jesse is somehow a source of help and freedom for all nations and their leaders. It is political, but it is also personal, and also cosmic. It is central to most spiritual traditions and an archetype of the collective unconscious of humanity. I was awake most of last night meditating on this, this sacred tree.   

I’m a dreamer and several weeks ago, before I was thinking about O Antiphons at all, I woke stunned by a dream of this tree. I stumbled into the Morning Room at Casa Chiara and, still reeling from what I can only call an encounter, I wrote the dream like this:

“I’m with a group of women, and we are entering into a deep forest by a large body of water. The mood is one of awe and discovery. The deeper we go, the more the canopy of trees covers the sun and the forest is cast into shadow. Through the shadows I see two overwhelming giant redwood trees—the biggest in the world. A person standing next to the larger one would seem the size of an embryo, or a bean, or a tiny river stone. I call out to the others and all of us attempt to move closer to the majestic trees. However the closer I get to the larger tree, the more dense the feel of it becomes—the less space there is around it—until I’m feeling crushed by the presence of the tree itself. It’s almost as though I am being weighed down “under” it, as though I am among its roots, part of it. I’ll be subsumed if I go farther, and yet the attraction and magnetism of the tree is profound.”

Most ancient cultures envisioned a “world tree” at the core of their spiritual life, of their cultural mythology. This image connected the earthly realm with the heavenly. It was the totem pole, the sacred oak, the Tree of Life in Eden, the tree of generations with Jesse as its root. The early Christians traced the genealogy of Jeshua (Jesus) back to Jesse, the grandfather of King David, and saw him as the flowering of that Root, the new World Tree that would reach out beyond a nation to include in its branches the “Others” or strangers then called Gentiles. Jeshua himself would be the Sacred Tree on which the opposites of the world would be reconciled. This is a lot to put my mind around. No wonder my dream stunned me.

The Sacred Tree, though, is even more than a human tribal or world genealogy. In the mystical Jewish Kabbalah it becomes the flowing of God into and through the created world. From Ein Soph, the divine emptiness, to Shekhinah, God among us, the tree’s branches are the energies or emanations of Being itself called the Sefirot. I recommend Daniel C. Matt’s book, The Essential Kabbalah, for meditations on each of these divine emanations, or as Matt says, “stages of God’s inner life, aspects of the divine personality…emerging from Ein Sof, the Endless.” They are the branches of the Sacred Tree and are:

1. Crown/Will/Nothingness,

2. Wisdom/Beginning,

3. Understanding/Womb,  

4. Love/Grace,

5. Power/Judgment,  

6. Beauty/Compassion,

7. Eternity/Prophecy,

8. Splendor/Prophecy,

9. Foundation/Covenant,

10. Presence/Kingdom/Communion/Queen.

Here is the sign before whom rulers keep silence and nations seek help. Personally we enter through the roots and are drawn upwards. God does not change as we ascend, but we do, and as we share in the higher emanations of Being our hearts are transformed and our spirits overflow. IF we are willing. IF we dare to be absorbed into the roots of the Sacred Tree, even though there’s fear in it of oblivion. It will not be oblivion for the person, the nation or the ruler. It will be presence, covenant, splendor, eternity, beauty and compassion, power of right judgment, love and grace, understanding, wisdom and union with the Unending One.

O Root of Jesse, Come.

O ADONAI, O ELOHIM

O ADONAI, O ELOHIM

LEADER OF ISRAEL’S HOUSE

WHO SPOKE YOUR NAME IN FIRE TO MOSES

AND UPON THE HOLY MOUNTAIN CARVED YOUR LOVE AS LAW

COME

AND WITH YOUR OUTSTRETCHED ARM

FREE US.

O Unspeakable,

O One containing everything

O Name without sound

O Great I AM,

You draw the majesty of all the gods into your One creative fire

Outside You nothing is.

Because we cannot say your name

We call you Adonai, the leadership, providence going forth,

We call you Elohim, the genesis, the ‘let it be’ of creation.

We drop the letters and sounds we can utter

Into the unutterable YHWH.

And we hear you in the fire,

We hear you in the thunder,

We hear you in the heartbeat,

I AM THAT I AM.

O Come!

(for further explanation of these Hebrew names see http://www.myredeemerlives.com/namesofgod/adonai-elohim.html )