Three Holy Things

Always have God before your eyes wherever you go.

Whatever you are doing, have the testimony of holy scripture to hand.

Wherever you are living, do not be in a hurry to move away.

               -Abba Anthony of the Desert

This morning John quoted a line from a book he received from his former classmate, Richard John Frielander. "In the Eastern confession of the Christian way Sacred Tradition rules theology and practice the way the Pope directs the Catholic Church and the Bible sets the bounds for Protestants." So now, John said, we just need to find out what Sacred Tradition means. Our recent desert pilgrimage calls us to delve more deeply into those traditions which place the human soul in the “marrow of flame” at the living center of God.

At St. Anthony’s Greek Orthodox Monastery John bought The Book of the Elders, a compilation of “sayings” of the desert Fathers (Abbas) and Mothers (Ammas). And I was attracted by an icon the monk told me was St. Mary of the Desert, but who, on research, turned out to be Amma Syncletike. 

Both of these women were fifth century desert mothers, but Syncletike’s life more closely resembles that of Santa Chiara to whom our home is dedicated. Divine attraction is always accurate even if we are blind at first to where it leads.

These treasures remained in a bag in the back seat of the car until we arrived home.

A week later, in Prescott, AZ, we happened into the Old Sage Bookshop, and I was led to a book titled Marrow of Flame: Poems of the Spiritual Journey, by Dorothy Walters. I’d never heard of her, but I picked the book up anyway. Opening it at random, I read:

Something inside me

constantly bleeds towards God.

That’s why I keep writing

slipping messages under the door.

Well, that hit home! So I turned it over and discovered it was published by Hohm Press: John’s publisher. I read half of Dorothy’s poems that evening. The next day was the day I met Regina who spoke of Dorothy as “the real thing.” A true Amma. An elder, already in her eighties, she writes of the presence of the Divine Beloved within the human soul. She transcends religious structures. Now that I’ve returned to Casa Chiara, I’ve visited her blog and come to know her better. The traditions continue to be lived out in solitary hearts, in the direct communication of human with divine.

Whatever you look at, see God.

Whatever you do, act from God’s Word in your heart.

Wherever you are, BE.

Holy Thursday at Zion

Into Zion National Park

We've satiated ourselves on beauty. This is truly a HOLY week for us; everywhere we look--Holy. Breathing Holy in, breathing out Holy. So much beauty I want to tell you all at once and my fingers catch fire, my breath becomes sparks of light. What do we do when the boundaries disappear and we are the mountain, are the coral colored sand, are the hawks, the antelopes, the wind? 

I've wandered in the eyes of at least three magnificent women these past two days. I finally got to meet Regina Sara Ryan and I want to meet her again and again over whatever life remains. We sat outside with John and Mo at the Wild Iris Coffee Shop in Prescott, AZ, and spoke of wonder and writing (she's the editor for Hohm Press where John's Yearning For The Father was published). She and I discovered we had walked similar paths in life. Synchronicities began to appear, and then the urge to share every book, every person, every place and way and song that has held meaning.

The other two women I spoke with only briefly. One in a trading post somewhere past Cameron on the way to Zion. She came rushing in to tell the owner that she knew she was late but her electricity had gone out, and then she began enumerating a flurry of other things that had gone wrong that morning, but I couldn't focus on words because I was so caught up in the most amazing eyes I have ever seen. They were silver blue with violet rings around the iris which made them gleam as if light shone on brightly polished silver underneath the purest of mountain streams. I had to tell her: "I know you had a flurry of troubles this morning, but you also have the most amazing eyes I have ever seen." She grinned. "I have my father's eyes," she said. Then I paid for a Zion sweatshirt, and she was gone. Don't you wonder about such chance meetings and the ripples they cause? I can still feel those ripples from her eyes.

Then I met a Navajo woman named Sally. She was selling homemade jewelry by the side of the road. Some of it I could have put together myself with stones and beads from Fire Mountain in Grants Pass. I really wanted to buy something from her. Then I glimpsed a primitive turquoise necklace, two long strands of green stones shot through with brown, each stone separated from the next by those tiny Navajo seed beads that have a specific name but I can't recall it at the moment. I picked it up. 

"Grandma made that," she said.

Immediately I thought of the Grandmothers, those wise women from various traditions and communities. Perhaps you've heard of them. I once leafed through a book containing their stories and photographs of their old and beautiful faces. I think of these elder women as the ground that keeps our world from spinning off into chaos. I think of them as weavers who create patterns by which our world can live. Of course I bought the necklace because it was sacred to me. And I will wear it as sacred beads, as connection to the Grandmothers and to earth.

"What is your grandmother's name?"

"Julia." Ah, yes. The jewel. 

Sally

The beauty of the women, the beauty of the earth. How can I not be grateful to belong to such a sacred community as this? All through Zion my heart beat an earth rhythm, the golden earth reflected the sun, each moment fell into the one before as into the eternal

The Desert Will Flower

Along the highway south towards Florence, AZ, the desert flowers are in bloom. Such a gasp of color--such a cummings-like "sweet small feet of April into the ragged meadows of my soul." More than normal winter rains turned the mountains green and filled the washes with yellow, coral, lavendar, creamy white, blossoms. The Joshua tree branches burgeon with a spring green that is almost white.

We were on our way with Mike and Darlene Weber to the  St. Anthony's Greek Orthodox Monastery. In 1996 Monks came to the Arizona desert from Mount Athos in Greece to begin construction of this magnificent and holy place. Much of the design and art work came directly from Greece. As we prepared to visit, clothes were a big consideration. It was a bit like going into a foreign country. Women wear veils or shawls and long skirts. Men need to cover their arms and legs -- so long pants and long-sleeved shirts in the desert heat. We had a moderate day, though, so heat wasn't a problem. Darlene, Mike and I caught up on the Weber news as we made the hour long trip south from Mesa past the little town of Florence where the monastery is located. At a gathering place at the entrance to the large grounds, we were checked for appropriate clothing. I passed muster even though my sleeves came midway between my wrists and elbows. Something in me is ok with this monastic dress code, but something else questions the theology of human nature that requires it. I dropped all that for the time being and simply relaxed into the holy beauty of the place itself.

The main church of St. Anthony--icons everywhere--and gold

Our Lady of Arizona

A pilgrim in Prayer

St. George's Chapel---or maybe it was St. Nicholas (sorry, bad memory for details)

The monastery has seven chapels dedicated to the elders -- those holy "mothers and fathers of monasticism" who have gone before.

desert in bloom

The walkways from chapel to chapel were beautifully landscaped with desert plants and large trees that provided shade. I loved these little pink flowers.

and these on a branch of of what seemed a desert cedar

When we first began walking the paths, many of the monks were still outside working. They soon disappeared, probably into their various residences, because no one was in any of the chapels.

Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom)

The reproductions of icons we found in the gift store can't do justice to the originals -- hundreds of them -- that cover the walls in the chapels. They are breathtaking. I was constantly lagging behind taking pictures of them, but now I discover that I missed some of my favorites simply because I don't read Greek! So I didn't know who they were. But I ought to have snapped a picture anyhow. My hearts aches for St. Mary of Egypt, one of the desert mothers whose eyes haunted the barren rocks and whose chanting echoed off the stones.

The final chapel was that of St. Seraphim, the most honored of the desert fathers. That's the holy man in white. Here was the first place I really wanted to kneel. More like a roadside shrine than a chapel, it radiated the simplicity of those early Greek Orthodox hermits of the desert. I could have stayed ... and stayed. Hurrying to catch up, I found the others on the way to the gift shop where John bought a book of the sayings of the Elders (the desert mothers and fathers), and I bought a small icon of St. Mary of Egypt because when I held the work in my hands it wouldn't allow me to put it back on the shelf. I suspect she has something important to tell me, so I will listen in the silence of my heart.

In the Desert

Many have written of the desert, and especially of the high desert. John is writing about the realm of desert spirituality now, as he progresses in his work on Mystic Mountain, in which he claims to be writing everything he knows about God and the spiritual journey of human life. It's early morning on this particular day at a Holiday Inn Express in the high desert of Lancaster, CA. Both of us are more than usually quiet, attempting to recover from a twelve hour drive yesterday. May whatever I possess of common sense prevent me from such a stunt ever again. Maybe, though, this exhaustion is the way the desert has its way with us. The wind. The heat. The dry. I've slowed to the speed of bare feet on rocks. My eyes squint at he chimera on the horizon.

YOU WILL BE THE LIGHT

Image by Alison

A line from my reading about Chiara of Assisi stopped me early this morning. My eyes went back and back to it. "God loved everything into being." Well, of course. I knew that. Did I? With my mind I did. But with my heart? Back again the line of words pulled my vision, and back again. Everything. But some things seem so dark. Some things I don't want to look at. I want them outside my line of vision. I want to close my heart, close my mind, close my door. But I couldn't deny it: God's imagination is infinite, and everything God imagines is loved and love actualizes it. During John's and my morning contemplation the thought kept returning. During contemplation I want my mind quiet and open so that the Eternal Spirit can work in me. I tried not to pay attention to the flood of words--distractions. A river, even an ocean of words flooding my mind, then thoughts of the computer, thoughts of songs. that great song by Delores Keane, "You'll Never Be the Sun." I heard the melody in my mind. Such an inspired song. Such a fine artist. "Even on the deepest ocean, you will be the light."

OH. Now how can I say this? I'll start this way--here's what I saw. I saw all those "distractions" shimmering with light. I saw them dancing through my mind on a light within me. I saw that everything, no matter how dark it seems to my own judgment, can shine in that light. It's a way of looking and a way of surrendering. I don't have to try. I don't have to get rid of anything. I don't need to chase away what I don't like. I can simply sit there and let it come and go and be bathed in that light I don't cause, that both isn't me and IS. What a relief! Everything, every unique thing, every material, mental, emotional, physical, psychological, spiritual thing in all of the created universe has been loved into being--and all any of us needs to do is let light shine upon it.

So -- I give you a lovely contemplation of Delores Keane's song along with Teri Gower's photographs that shine light into the deepest dark.

Contemplation of Light

TREE OF LIFE

Ancient-Tree-Love by Alison Scott

Holy Lent begins today. I'm thinking of trees, of this tree, of the tree of the cross, of the Tree of Life. The tree from the movie, Avatar, comes to mind; how could it not? And I'm also thinking of violence, and who is not? I'm thinking of Mother Earth and how we humans in North Korea stuck a shaft of metal inside her and then blew it up. That's not the first place we did that. How we have shaken her. I'm thinking of the random shootings, violence of all kinds. Violence of word, of action, of avoidance. Stupid, meaningless, avoidable violence. I'm angry and my anger makes the violence feel personal, and I want to kneel, I want the to be marked with the earth's clay, I want to cry out FORGIVE!

Just look at dear Alison's tree. Look how old she is, how wizened, how amputated of limb, and yet how she is still alive. Look at the green.

I feel wild. I want to rant and rave, to dig in the dirt, to smear it on my face, to confess my sins, to throw my illusions on the fire, to burn all my false hopes, to turn them to ashes and turn again, and turn.

Be converted (turned again) and live is the watchword of this time, a Wednesday of Ashes. Can I? Can we?  Chiara tells us that the tree of the cross is a mirror. She says to look in that mirror until we see ourselves. OH. MY. GOD. The one I see has submitted to and become the violence of the world simply for the love of everything that is. I pray to understand. I pray to know how to turn the whirlwinds of violence within myself into love, into the fire of love, a roaring consummation of all that hinders life.

"This is what Clare asks us to consider in the mirror--are we willing only to look on suffering from a distance or to shut it out from our lives or control it by whatever means possible? Or are we willing to enter more fully into the suffering of the other to know God and ourselves in a deeper way?...Discovering who we are--our identity--in the mirror of the cross empowers us to embrace ourselves despite our brokenness and flaws and, in turn, to embrace others with their brokenness and flaws. In the mirror of the cross we discover what it truly means to be loved by someone greater than ourselves." (CLARE OF ASSISI: A Heart Full of Love. By Ilia Delio.)

We Rise in Darkness

First coffee comes at 5:30 this morning. The quarter moon has already set and except for the brilliance of stars, the hermitage wakes in darkness. The nights already grow shorter, however. Since the December solstice we’ve gained a half hour of daylight in the morning and another half hour in the evening. With midday temperatures in the sixties, the itch of spring already teases our afternoons. And already, I’m missing the winter.

We are creatures of the dark. We are conceived and our bodies form in darkness. We protest with all the strength of our newbie lungs when we are pulled into the light of birth. Our vital organs function in the darkness of our shells. Thoughts smolder in the darkness of our minds until we breathe them into daylight. Darkness, even though it has come to represent danger or evil, is our most natural element and, during the winter months of introspection, is the actual condition in which we spend most of our hours.

No wonder the spiritual masters insist that Spirit can lead us to the Godhead only in obscurity, that we can glimpse divinity in this life only as “through a glass darkly.” John of the Cross wrote of the dark nights of the senses and spirit, “To reach a place that you know not, you must go by a way that you know not.” No wonder, then, that our deepest inclination is to plunge ourselves in darkness, like plants that in their botanical wisdom root themselves in the rich underground.

The message of winter, the message Christin’s sister Liz received during her final weeks, is “Be still and wait.” Endurance is all in the “bleak midwinter” until we are led once more to the annual renewal of spring.

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.

To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,

and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,

and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

-Wendell Berry, "To Know the Dark"

~John