Abandon the urge to simplify everything, to look for formulas and easy answers, and begin to think multidimensionally, to glory in the mystery and paradoxes of life, not to be dismayed by the multitude of causes and consequences that are inherent in each experience—to appreciate the fact that life is complex.
Know that you are not alone And that this darkness has purpose; Gradually it will school your eyes To find the one gift your life requires Hidden within this night-corner.
Time to go into the dark where the night has eyes to recognize its own. There you can be sure you are not beyond love. — David Whyte from The House of Belonging (Sweet Darkness)
We risk the life we’ve known to discover something new . . . The unknown territory will open before us only to the extent that we turn our whole being courageously toward it . . . And then we must venture wherever the road leads us, in spite of the dark, in spite of the quivering of our heart. — Jack Kornfield from A New Set of Eyes by Paula D’Arcy
If we listen through our broken heart, love can gently point the way to a deeper understanding of how human life contains both darkness and light. At some point we realize that we still have choices: We will either open our heart to be healed, or we will close down to avoid the pain. — Paula D’Arcy from Winter of the Heart: Finding Your Way through the Mystery of Grief
Signs and Wonders
Reading: Mark 13:24-37
Mystery is rarely comfortable. We want to understand what we are doing here, to see more clearly how God is at work, to know how the future will unfold. This Gospel passage confounds us, reminds us that God works in the darkness as well as in the daylight. We see this in the book of Isaiah, where God says through the prophet,
I will give you the treasures of darkness and riches hidden in secret places, so that you may know that it is I, the Lord, the God of Israel, who call you by your name. (45:3)
In her book The Vigil: Keeping Watch in the Season of Christ’s Coming—a beautiful reflection on Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany—Wendy M. Wright relates words given to her by a novice master of a Trappist monastery, who said, “To be a Christian does not mean knowing all the answers; to be a Christian means being willing to live in the part of the self where the question is born.” Advent brings this home in a fashion that may seem painfully direct but can also be tremendously freeing: it tells us that we cannot see everything, cannot know everything, cannot predict everything. It tells us that, ultimately, we live in mystery.
But it also tells us this: if we stay awake; if we open our eyes in the midst of our life, with all of its wildness and wonders, then we will see: something is coming. Drawing closer. Stealing home.
A shadow is never created in darkness. It is born of light. We can be blind to it and blinded by it. Our shadow asks us to look at what we don’t want to see. ― Terry Tempest Williams from When Women Were Birds
Light Moving in the Darkness
It’s not the darkness itself that we must understand. It’s the force behind the darkness and within the darkness…the force moving through life that we must know. This is the great passage: to see deep into our own nature by meeting its reflection in everything around us. To swim with something very big. To allow the Universe to love us and to love deeply in return…to allow this story to trace itself through the chapters of our life. To live within the miracle. — Paula D’Arcy from Stars at Night: When Darkness Unfolds as Light
I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the astonishing light of your own being. ― Hafiz from I Heard God Laughing
Flow
Scientists say we are made of stars, and I believe them, although my upper arms look like hell. Maybe someday the stars will reabsorb me. Maybe, as fundamentalist Christians have shared with me, I will rot in hell for all eternity, which I would hate, because I am very sensitive. Besides, I have known hell, and I have also known love. Love was bigger.
What comforts us is that, after we make ourselves crazy enough, we can let go inch by inch into just being here; every so often, briefly. There is flow everywhere in nature — glaciers are just rivers that are moving really, really slowly — so how could there not be flow in each of us? Or at least in most of us? When we detach or are detached by tragedy or choice from the tendrils of identity, unexpected elements feed us. There is weird food in the flow, like the wiggly bits that birds watch for in tidal channels. Protein and greens are obvious food, but so is buoyancy, when we don’t feel as mired in the silt of despair.
You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it. ― Annie Dillard from Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
Darkness Is Where Incarnation Begins
Darkness is where incarnation begins. The gorgeous texts of Advent, christmas, and Epiphany shimmer with the light that God brings into our midst, as in the prologue to John’s Gospel: The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it (John 1:5). Yet if we lean too quickly toward the light, we miss seeing one of the greatest gifts this season has to offer us: that the deepest darkness is the place where God comes to us. In the womb, in the night, in the dreaming; when we are lost, when our world has come undone, when we cannot see the next step on the path; in all the darkness that attends our life, whether hopeful darkness or horrendous, God meets us. God’s first priority is not to do away with the dark but to be present to us in it. I will give you the treasures of darkness, God says in Isaiah 45:3, and riches hidden in secret places. For the christ who was born two millennia ago, for the christ who seeks to be born in us this day, the darkness is where incarnation begins.
Can we imagine the darkness as a place where God meets us—and not only meets us, but asks to take form in this world through us?
In the morning when I began to wake, it happened again– that feeling that you, Beloved, had stood over me all night keeping watch, that feeling that as soon as I began to stir you put your lips on my forehead and lit the Holy Lamp inside my heart. ― Hafiz from I Heard God Laughing
Star
Remember to practice the nobility that comes with promise,
to drive out west, the eyes level or lifted the mind cleared; the steering wheel invisible below the eye but still charting the needed course
and the body almost at tiptoe, leaning toward the windscreen,
the breath held and the eyes a-shiver for a falling plume of sky;
the clear, pinpoint star that just appeared above Leenane,
May you know serenity When you are called To enter the house of suffering. May a window of light always surprise you. May you be granted the wisdom To avoid false resistance; When suffering knocks on the door of your life, May you glimpse its eventual gifts. May you be able to receive the fruits of suffering. May memory bless and protect you With the hard-earned light of past travail; To remind you that you have survived before And though the darkness now is deep, You will soon see approaching light. — John O’Donohue from To Bless the Space Between Us
Because when all is said and done, the last word is Immanuel — God With Us. — Isaiah 8:10, The Message
Hope and Fear cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Invite one to stay. Invite one to stay.
— Maya Angelou from Sacred Threshold by Paula D’Arcy
A Pilgrimage of Discovery
There are no manuals for the construction of the individual you would like to become. You are the only one who can decide this and take up the lifetime of work that it demands. This is a wonderful privilege and such an exciting adventure. To grow into the person that your deepest longing desires is a great blessing. If you can find a creative harmony between your soul and your life, you will have found something infinitely precious. You may not be able to do much about the great problems of the world or to change the situation you are in, but if you can awaken the eternal beauty and light of your soul, you will bring light wherever you go. The gift of life is given to us for ourselves and also to bring peace, courage, and compassion to others. Continue reading “Hope (Advent Meditation) …”→
The blessing of the morning light to you,
may it find you even in your invisible
appearances, may you be seen to have risen
from some other place we intuit and know
in the darkness and that that carries all we need.
May you see what is hidden in you
as a place of hospitality and shadowed shelter,
may that hidden darkness be your gift to give,
may you hold the shadow to the light
and the silence of that place to the word of the light,
may you join all of your previous disappearances
with this new appearance, this new morning,
this being seen again, new and newly alive. Continue reading “The Blessing of the Morning Light to You (An Easter Blessing during COVID-19) …”→
From the very beginning to the very end, pointing to our own hearts to discover what is true isn’t just a matter of honesty but also of compassion and respect for what we see.
Learning how to be kind to ourselves, learning how to respect ourselves, is important. The reason it’s important is that, fundamentally, when we look into our own hearts and begin to discover what is confused and what is brilliant, what is bitter and what is sweet, it isn’t just ourselves that we’re discovering. We’re discovering the universe. When we discover the Buddha that we are, we realize that everything and everyone is Buddha. We discover that everything is awake, and everyone is awake. Everything is equally precious and whole and good, and everyone is equally precious and whole and good. When we regard thoughts and emotions with humor and openness, that’s how we perceive the universe. We’re not just talking about our individual liberation, but how to help the community we live in, how to help our families, our country, and the whole continent, not to mention the world and the galaxy and as far as we want to go. Continue reading “Advent Day 17: Awakening To Your Heart …”→
When we were children, most of us were good friends with mystery. The world was full of it and we loved it. Then as we grew older, we slowly accepted the indoctrination that mystery exists only to be solved. For many of us, mystery became an adversary; unknowing became a weakness. The contemplative spiritual life is an ongoing reversal of this adjustment. It is a slow and sometimes painful process of becoming “as little children” again, in which we first make friends with mystery and finally fall in love again with it. And in that love we find an ever increasing freedom to be who we really are in an identity that is continually emerging and never defined. We are freed to join the dance of life in fullness without having a clue about what the steps are. Continue reading “Advent Day 16: Second Sight …”→
If you took a blue spruce tree and planted it in the desert, it would obviously perish. How do we forget that we too are living systems, and each of us have unique environments, needs, and conditions within which we flourish or wither? — Dawna Markova from I Will Not Die an Unlived Life
You need not, and in fact cannot, teach an acorn to grow into an oak tree; but when given a chance, its intrinsic potentialities will develop. Similarly, the human individual, given a chance, tends to develop his particular human potentialities….In short, he will grow, substantially undiverted, toward self-realization. Continue reading “From Acorn Into Oak Tree …”→
