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 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.

Deep Silence

“When a deep silence covered all things and night was in the middle of its course, your all-powerful Word, O Holy One, leapt from heaven’s royal throne’ (Wis 18:14-15).

These are the sacred nights and days. Now is the moment that darkness is pierced by all-creating Light. Now begins the dance of the soul, the poem of the cosmos, the song of universal being. We are in the seasonal celebration of Eternal Being made manifest, of the Eternal Word made flesh, made blood and bone. This is the inner experience of the dark world, of the fragile human, when Divine Light suffuses the darkness, and leaps through our unknowing as the Word of life and truth, the Word that cannot be spoken but only lived.

John and I call 2015 the Year-of-Things-Falling-Apart. The siding on our house fell apart, the deck fell apart, the neighborhood seemed to fall apart when the marijuana growers moved in next door and across the road. Our quiet fell apart for three months as construction workers occupied our living space. The freezer fell apart, and so did the heater/air conditioner--all of it needing to be replaced. Beloved friends and family members became ill, some passed into eternity and our hearts fell apart for a time. All of this plus the earth herself, and the worlds we have established upon her, suffering from environmental illness and human wars and the increased spread of terror. Night surely seemed in the middle of its course. 

This afternoon, two days into 2016, John and I sit reading in the stillness of this mountain home. Sunlight suffuses the mossy green branches of the oaks in the back yard and reflects off the snow on Woodrat Mountain to the north. John's deep into deCaussade's classic on the sacrament of the present moment, and I'm studying Brueggemann's work on prophetic imagination that has me making associations with the upcoming national election. For a while he was reading a line from his book to me, followed by my reading a line from my book to him. Strange how that worked: it was difficult to avoid the conclusion that living in the Now results in prophetic action. I'm reminded of Eliot's line, "Where shall the word be found? Where shall the word resound?" He answers himself: "Not here. There is not enough silence." 

Ah. And where is silence? It must be...Yes...I remember now...it's in the moment. Prior to the questions. That is where the silence is. That is the 'where' from which the Eternal Word leaps. That is the moment before the crying out, before the chaos enters. That is the moment of pure being, the moment of truth, the prophetic moment in which the New is possible -- the new step, the new idea, the new choice, the new awareness, the New Year.