La Mer: Carrefour (Day 19)

The stressful half-hour drive through heavy tap-tap traffic was worth the plunge in the ocean just outside of Carrefour. It was the warmest water I have been in, lined with cold currents that felt about twenty degrees cooler, and so salty that our eyes burned simply looking at it.

I was able to commune with the sea once again, even taking a boat ride worthy of Brendan himself—handmade with wood and tar, a skinny, gnarly man at the helm with the flimsy oars, six of us on the waves together, with Brendan’s presence, seven. Just viewing the horizon, nature’s greatest Rothko painting, gave me time to meditate on oneness again.

The horizon, deep azure water meeting turquoise air, rests on the sharp line. Are the two blues different entities? Is the dividing line a third? Or can they all be melded into one whole picture, three spaces equaling one plane? There is so much in Taoist writings about how the One divides into two, then the two add up with the original to make three, and then to ten thousand. This is very similar to our idea of Logos that was separated from the Divine source to bring creation into being; the Divine reencounters the Logos to bring forth a third, the Spirit. With these Three, all things are possible.

During my daily communion readings, I have been taken through the story of Elijah in 1 Kings. I have become even more familiar with it because, coincidentally, the passages in my year-long Bible for this week have been the same story. I am drawn to the powerful, esoteric myth of Elijah’s night on the mountain, the coming of the windstorm and the earthquake. I do not mean to say that it did not happen, but it is written in a parable style. It does not have to be literal, but more archetypal; in such a way, it can reveal more truth than facticity, and therefore more powerful.

Elijah is fleeing his enemy, King Ahab, and so he runs to a cave. The cave, according to Joseph Campbell and Jung, is the unconscious. Here Elijah flees into himself in order to find God. The Lord speaks to him, a simple question, “Why are you here?” Elijah answers. Then he undergoes the spiritual tests on the mountain, the trial of spirit (the windstorm in the heavens) and of self-power (the earthquake in the land). These about were external things, in a sense, experiential moments. But God was not in the outer things, or there reflection in Elijah's mind, no more than the Pharisees’ struggle: the outer rituals of Judaism without inner conversion never yielded spiritual results. Perhaps Elijah, too, struggled with the religiosity of spirit and law.

Suddenly God sends the fire, “the demolition of religious facades....’Whoever draws near to me, draws near to fire’ runs one of Christ’s apocryphal sayings, and each of his words, his actions, and his miracles is fire—a fire all the more consuming because it is not the fire of justice [external action], but of love.” (Michael Hollings, “Therese of Lisieux”) This realization of already-being-loved by this mighty fire, of already being-on-the-way, helped Elijah be-open to what was there all along: the still small voice of God inside of himself. Only then did he return to the opening of the cave, to the outside world, to be asked the same question; he gives the exact same answer (remember the Zen method: find the simplest answer, leave it, study and meditate on it until you arrive at the same conclusion as before, but in a new way). Then Lord drags him back through the wilderness in order to anoint Elisha as his successor. Soon after he confronts Ahab again. “So, my enemy has found me!” taunts the King. But Elijah has found his true power and speaks of Ahab’s fate-to-come. He has come to himself and the true nature of God’s love for him, Elijah, beyond experience and religion.

This reminds me of something I read last week regarding St. Therese: “’Yes, I believe I have always searched for truth. Yes, I have always understood how to keep my heart quiet.’ Such is humility, which holds her on the narrow ledge between the abyss of truth on one side and that of lying on the other. Such humility is no virtue, but the sign that one possesses no virtue, since, ‘it all flows from him.’ …She does not produce light, she reflects it….’My soul also appears to be radiant and golden because it is exposed to the rays of love.’” (Hans Urs Von Balthasar, “Therese of Lisieux”)

As I was reading Richard Rohr today, I came upon a corollary message, this time of Mary, Mother of God: “Upon receiving the sacred word [of Jesus’ birth], Mary does not contemplate, she acts immediately....There is no mention of planning, companionship, means of travel or encountered difficulties…The events themselves will be her guide and teacher. The plan will be given by God through life’s encounters. Reality is her teacher…Decisive action beyond our own fears gives us a sense of our own power and the power of God within us. Mary offers no refusal or false humility….She can hold her power comfortably because she knows it is from Beyond. She does not need to protect or deny it. It is hers to hold and offer….” (“The Wild Man’s Journey”)

Today, God was in the still, small voice; in the boatman, the puppy frolicking in the sand, the coconut falling from the tree, the speck of salt floating in the sea. And in me. He is the sum of the balance between dark blue and blue with the dividing line in between: heaven making earth more heavy, earth making heaven more light. He is found in experience balanced with meditation and meditation seeking experience. We make ourselves free from ourselves in our own releasing of true self-esteem and power; in that moment we can yield to His being-coming. He sits in the space that comes to us when we are open to Him. And these moments, as for Elijah, help us to be-open. Both/and, sky and sea, openness and experience, action and contemplation. Each reveals the other to be what it is. Religion is put into true perspective only in this love, as a way to be open to it, to bind body, mind, and spirit holistically as one. Today’s Gospel reading for me was: “Be perfected as your Father is perfect.” This can also be translated, more appropriately, “Be whole (holy) as your Father is (whole) holy.”

Jesus brings this wholeness through the realization of God’s great love, unearned, transpersonal for all people. He does not abolish religion, but makes it reflect its true purpose: the way of love. The way of love, then, like meditation, opens up a more perfect understanding of the law. He fulfills it, like a key fulfills a lock’s purpose as the lock gives the key purpose. They are two sides of the same coin. They are two portions of the same horizon.

Spirit and law yield to be one entity: love. Two reduce back down to one and point forward towards three.

This, as Kierkegaard postulates, is the hardest thing for us to grasp: that neither spirit nor law can move us towards God or towards ourselves--only the love of God is capable. Accepting this love, nearly impossible.