Cosmic Church

The “church” to which I now belong is as extensive as the cosmos. It includes everything. It’s core is the Christ by whatever name we call that Self-outpouring of God. It is a Oneness in which “opposites” are experienced as participating in each other. It is an existence in which we know our true selves by listening (“I have called you by your name and you are Mine”). Each entity in creation is the Thou of God.

At the same time and in the same belonging, is found the Flaw. The Cosmos is not complete, and it is possible that its extension is infinite as the process of creation and destruction and re-creation—the spiral of Being. Everything is rising and falling simultaneously. Therefore each and every thing experiences the incompleteness, the wound, the openness of being to Being—the falling out of being to become greater Being. This cosmic vision underlies all the great spiritual traditions that continually try to form themselves into the bond we call “religion,” and of necessity, always fall short.

The contemplative mystic is one who lives in the vision of the Oneness, and simultaneously in the experience of incompleteness, flaw, wounded-being found everywhere — the wounded/crucified/risen Incarnate God—the Cosmic Process of Creation—the Mystical Body of Christ. 

A Death In The Family

If you follow Christin’s Facebook posts, you’ve seen pictures these last two days of the fawn who come onto our porch and stared through the window as if to say “I need help.” She proceeded down past the benches and through the railing began gorging on a bush and berries that we’d seen no deer touch before. Whether she was trying to purge or downing the equivalent of Socrates’ hemlock, we couldn’t guess. Then she curled up against the warm wall of the house to await the inevitable.

 I thought of the old man Silas in Robert Frost’s poem “The Death of the Hired Man” who came “home” to Mary and Warren’s house for his final hours. 

“Euthanize her,” said the biologist when we called Fish and Wildlife. “It’s the right thing to do.” But which of us could pull the trigger? We’d admired and loved this fawn and her brother since they were spotted newborns. We decided instead to keep her as comfortable as possible and talk her through her passing. She finally let go in subfreezing temperatures about 3 am the next morning. 

We took her down the hill to our lower woods at daybreak and settled her remains at the base of a sturdy double-trunked oak. She half disappeared into the fallen leaves, disguising herself as a broken limb in her dark grey coat. 

That afternoon, the mother and her other fawn (the one-spiked unicorn) froze for a moment on our lawn staring down the hill as if they’d caught a whiff of the body. They’d had a death in their family, as had we, for we feel a true kinship with all the wild things who share “our” land. 

Rest in peace, little girl.

                                             -John

                                                                   

Before I Die

The hawk rides the air over the hollow, wings fanned, a cry that scatters all creatures small enough to be grasped by those talons. Shiku ducks underneath the deck. Mo growls. We are coming up the hill from the mailbox. The cry. Mo looks to the sky and pulls at his leash. How does he know? Shiku knows because she almost was taken, once, as a kitten preening herself on the railing of the deck, when suddenly the hawk swooped and was on her, wings beating, covering her. She didn't try to move. John believes she succumbed to the inevitable. But he, right there, rose up, waved his own human wings and cried out his own human cry against the bird. Hawk abandoned the kitten crouching under the churn of rising wings and flew away.

Danger rides the air and what are we to do? Terror rides the currents disguised as beauty. Or is it the other way around?

What fragile creatures walk the earth, all of us, even the hawk feels fragile in the current of John's human wings. We are all mere breath and bone. How take it in? How hold it in the heart? Because we must if we choose to live and be full-blown. Bones of glass, sand set to fire, made liquid, shaped with breath.

Before I die may I breathe in everything I see, hear, smell--everything that touches me or is touched. May everything, one at a time, drift on breath through mind and heart and soul and along the pathways of spine and nerves into my emptiness. And may I be formed, each bone, with that spirit, that primordial Breath, fragile as I am, into something clear, something beautiful, some one thing that contains it all. So that I can say in truth:

I am the hawk that cries out,

I am the wind,

I am the small one hiding,

I am the wing,

I am the hunger and the food,

I am the danger,

I am the beauty,

I am the bone,

I am the Fire.