O WISDOM

O WISDOM

WORD OF ETERNAL BEING

YOU REACH FROM ONE END OF EARTH TO THE OTHER

WITH PROVIDENCE AND TENDERNESS

COME AND TEACH US TO LIVE IN YOUR WAYS.

Each year I yearn for this day when at the hour of vespers we sing the first of the O Antiphons preceding Mary’s prayer in her pregnancy, the Magnificat. Each day the divine child she carries in her womb and in her heart is invoked by a different name leading up to December 23rd and the most popular verse, “O come, O come Emmanuel,” really the most paradoxical statement one can imagine because it would mean, “Come, God, who is already with us.”

In the past I wrote meditations each year as I contemplated these beautiful names of the Holy One. Then one year I slipped into the silence of awe. No more words. Until now. This morning I felt urged to delve once again into the antiphons hoping to discover there a meaning I might hold to in these present times. Whether we agree with the trajectory of these times or not, everywhere I look I hear whispers or cries of the heart. Uncertainty, ambiguity, ambivalence—all describe the heart that is aware. The whole earth is involved, from Washington to Aleppo, from the melting glaciers in the Himalayas to the flooding islands of the Pacific. Every focus of our human endeavors is affected, every discipline of thought, every tradition of belief. Where is Wisdom?

Wisdom is in the depths. We search for her, dig deep into the ground of being to unearth her jewels. Wisdom springs dancing from the Eternal, and Wisdom’s play is the spiral of creation, of universes evolving. Deep and Wide is Wisdom. Wisdom unites. Wisdom is ever compassionate and forgiving. Wisdom holds opposites in balance. When the humble and simple open the door of the heart, Wisdom enters.

Though Wisdom is not present in war of any kind, she is within the hearts of all who struggle, who strive, who mourn, who suffer violence, whose victimization results in acts of violence from which their own suffering increases. And Wisdom mourns, weeps for the suffering world while standing in the core of our carnage. Nothing that we do fails to penetrate the Divine Heart.

Our world stands in dire need of her. O Wisdom, Come.

Today is the 80th birthday of Pope Francis. This coincidence made me sit up and take notice. This pope of simplicity and inclusion and gentle love was born on the day celebrating Wisdom. That makes bells ring in my head! Happy Birthday, Papa Francis!

(to wish him a Happy Birthday: PopeFrancis80@vatican.va)

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. 

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.

Reflections--The Mirror of Being

At sunset on the feast of Clare of Assisi (August 11) I sat in my chair in the living room and watched as this image appeared on the wall in front of me. The picture I painted years ago of the swirl of energy in the universe and in the human body-soul has lately come to resemble a Madonna and Child. It's what I see that for years I didn't see. In the reflection of sunset over her is the shadow of the ancient oak that graces our back yard, which to the Celtic people is the world tree, the core, the center of the universe and of Being-Itself. It holds us grounded. Around it we dance the dance of life.

I think, then, of a woman I saw on a street bench in Port Townsend last week. Her eyes stared into nothingness. Her face resembled browned parchment. She caressed that face over and over, her gnarled hand passing tenderly down from her hairline, curling around her chin, back up over her ear, through her hair to the top of her head and down again to her face in a kind of gentle infinity motion. Her presence stopped me in my tracks. What did I see in her?

We see what is in us to see. Clare wrote of gazing into the Mirror of Christ and discovering there her true self. I tried this and all I saw was the face of Christ. I felt disappointed; I expected to find my true self. Then one day that experience turned around completely topsy-turvy, completely inside-out. Had I ever seen myself except in a mirror? No. There's the physical mirror in the bathroom, of course, and it reflects my physical face, but there is also the mirror of another person's eyes. More than that, there is the mirror of the other person as an individual. More than that there is the mirror of the world, of the oak tree, of the bird and the river and the mountain and all the multitudinous things that fill the universe. I can see my Self only by reflection.

Several spiritual traditions have the saying: "I Am That." Back in the 1990's I was giving a talk to a large group of women and found myself saying, "I Am You," after which one woman stood right up from her chair and called out with an absolute kind of certainty, "You are NOT me!" (And now I admit to thinking, Thank God!) But now I also think that both of us were right.

We are the One and we are each the Many. It's a both/and. In the mirror of the Universe, of the tree, rock and cloud, and of a near infinity of others each of us can see that she is the Many, and in the mirror of Christ the Divine each disappears into the One.

This is earth. There's no escaping incarnation. There's no escaping time and space. But time is only time for a moment (as the poet, Eliot, says). We go in and out of time. Space, also, is ever and only space. Sometimes, looking into the mirror of anything--that photograph, for example--a single individual passes through into a wonderland of Oneness, an Infinite Wholeness that might be Christ as it was to Clare, or might be Krishna, or even (and I'm not being facetious) it might be a bag lady tracing infinity on her face as she sits at a street corner in my former hometown. And in that moment in and out of time I see! As another poet (Hopkins) cries out:

In a flash, at a trumpet crash 

I am all at once what Christ is,  'since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, 'patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,

Is immortal diamond" 

Walking Stick

Take up your walking stick
And go out into the world
Shining.

...the old...lean on sticks or on each other. All mortals come to this.

         (Anne Carson in her introduction to "Herakles" in Grief Lessons.)

When people see me with my walking stick these days they ask what happened. A few have asked if the ironwood stick is a fashion statement, or if I actually need it. So I've been telling them, "I fell on my knees," and some of them wince. It's true that a month ago I did fall on my knees, then flat out on the concrete sidewalk leading up from the road to Casa Chiara. Often this leads to a discussion about care and watchfulness we need to practice as we age.

But one friend simply said, "Now you have fallen on your knees," repeating almost exactly what I'd said, but with far deeper meaning. We speak of falling on our knees before the sacred, the inexplicable, in an attitude or posture of existential wonder. We fall on our knees in humility, in recognition of the paradox of our being, the combination of mud and magnificence, of frailty and glory. We fall on our knees in grief over all we haven't understood, and in awe over what yet will come to be revealed.

Falling on my knees in such a physical way taught me something about spiritual falling that I hadn't considered until I was made aware of that larger dimension. I couldn't get up on my own. I couldn't walk on my own. I couldn't rise from a sitting position. I couldn't sit down once I was standing. In the space of a breath I lost my independence. To the rational mind all this appears obvious. Ask anyone. But when the fall actually happens the rational mind goes dark. The body expects to act as always and is surprised. We fall from pride. We fall from the illusion of independence. We fall from arrogance. We fall from self-centered inattention. We fall from anger and self-adulation and attempts to control. We fall, if we can see and accept it, out of our limited egos into love."

At every level of being life requires love and the help love gives. Falling teaches that. If John hadn't been across the road and seen me, and if he hadn't called our neighbor Cliff for help, I might still be lying there. The three of us leaned on each other.

In the myth even the strongest human ever to walk the earth falls. As Anne Carson explains in her introduction to her translation of Herakles by Euripides: "Herakles ... enters gloriously upright but is soon reduced to a huddled and broken form. His task in the last third of the play is to rise from this prostration, which he does with the help of Theseus. Euripides makes clear that Herakles exits at the end leaning on his friend...a new Heraklean posture...collaborative heroism."

"When I am weak, then I am strong," writes Paul of Tarsus. Why? Maybe in weakness, after the fall, my life-story disappears in the realization that I fabricated the whole thing. When I fall and am picked up and supported by love, the play ends. No more illusion. No more strength based on an invention that I am separate and sufficient unto myself. I am connected. I lean--upon my walking stick, upon my friend--whoever, in any moment, that turns out to be.

As Yellow Deepens To Brown

An email arrived this morning from my dear friend, Allison Scott--exquisite photographer, maker of greeting cards, tender soul. tinyurl.com/alicatcards. She always inspires me by choosing among her many works of art one that conveys a grace that is moving in my soul. This morning she has added a stanza from one of Wendell Berry's poems.

Did I believe that I had a clear mind? 
It was like the water of a river
flowing shallow over the ice. And now
that the rising water has broken the ice, I see what I thought
was the light is part of the darkness."

Wendell Berry, from BREAKING

Sunset of the Yellow Years

June, 2003 of the Yellow Years--photo by Krista Karels

This morning I awoke to a voice in my head yelling over and over at me: "I can't do this any more!"
"Do what?" I inquired. "And who IS this, anyhow?" Total Silence. I continued to lie there, not moving, not wanting to disturb this ... whatever it was ... this awfully uncomfortable thing inside me.
By this time in life I know what to do with the uncomfortable things. Observe. Gaze. DO NOT MOVE FROM THAT SPOT! Look it straight in the eyes (or, in this instance, listen to every vibration) until it yields up its secret truth. Something has pushed it from its comfort zone out to the edge of consciousness. Don't let it fall into obscurity. The temptation to think of something else--to forget--to avoid--to fight with someone/anyone--to grab the Kindle and click onto the latest book--to focus on anything but THIS which is so obviously overwhelming.

I kept my eyes closed. I knew what to do: go to that place where dreams arise. I'd been dreaming something, hadn't I? Yes.

I make my way through a complete dark.

The Way has no delineation.

The Yellow Years are gone.

I must leave this yellow house.

Ah. The house again. The deconstruction. The re-construction. The color of the paint. The whole thing is a metaphor for a powerful and essential personal transformation. Suddenly I'm aware that "this" which no longer can be done or be in charge is the "old me." I'm no longer in my "yellow years." They were beautiful years of roses and song and dancing. They were years of intense creativity--of writing all the books. They were the John Weber years of romance and dreams coming true. We found this house in those years, a sunshine house on a hill. The yellow years were a gift beyond words. But even the most beautiful that this world has to offer cannot be enough. What does sunshine do, after all, but penetrate the earth to transform what is living but unseen within and make it grow? 

John Weber became ill in 2003, just before the lovely picture of the yellow house was taken. He died in 2008, and the yellow began to fade. With John Sack I am beginning to find a deeper self I haven't yet completely come to know. It seemed to come upon me suddenly, the requirement I spoke of yesterday when I said the skin needed to be ripped from the house. Even then I hadn't awakened to the passing of the yellow years. I haven't wanted to let them go. But the new self in me was becoming claustrophobic in this yellow house. (Can you know what I mean? Have you experienced this? It's such a paradox, don't you think?) But yellow is but one color on the spectrum, while brown contains them all.

I read a poem the other day by Lisa Ciccarello that may also have contributed to the intensity that drives such experiences to the surface. Let me share it:

Here is how I control my heart: I string each thought one behind the next, like beads.  I wear the answers I am waiting to give. The jewelry becomes heavy as soil.  My long blink is a scream & a yes. There are things I have to say, but they do not yet know the questions they must ask. & a blink is no word; if they misunderstand— A heart is just soil. Ask anyone. A heartbeat is a blink. A long blink is a scream. A longer blink is sleep. All night I am screaming.

John Weber and I at sunset of the Yellow Years--taken by Krista Karels

Most Recent Book by Ciccarello

At Night

(Black Ocean Press, 2015)