Leaving for Orphalese

Lectio Divina poem for this morning: The opening scene in The Prophet, where he is standing looking out to sea and sees his ship coming to take him back to Orphalese, his home town.

We are all, always, leaving for Orphalese,
The remembered country of the heart.
Looking for home in the faces of strangers,
Dreaming of the dark cypresses and the mellow stone.
We stand at the edge of the fathomless sea
And look towards the West,
Dreaming of the impossible islands of legend.
But we must turn our faces to the land
And the people among whom we walk
And love them for who they are,
Cherishing their inmost flame
That burns with the same ardour
For their own personal Orphalese.
Let us not look for Orphalese on some distant shore
But find it here, now, in our own hearts.

Yvonne Aburrow, 9:30, 14-7-12

Contemplative prayer

"When you pray, rather let your heart be without words than your words without heart." ~ John Bunyan

"Prayer, springing from a deep place in the heart, may bring healing and unity as nothing else can." ~ Quaker Advices and Queries

"To navigate this ancient way of prayer is to “put out into the deep,” as Luke says, let down our nets for our catch. Paradoxically, we discover that it is we ourselves who are caught and held in this net…" ~ Martin Laird

"What awakens in this awareness is the sanctity of the other, and to see how all things are reflections of this mystery that we call God. We’re simply one with all that is, the way that God is one with all that is. And the illusion that we can possibly or have ever been separate from God falls away." ~ Martin Laird

"When you are praying, do not shape within yourself any image of the Deity, and do not let your intellect be stamped with the impress of any form; but approach the Immaterial in an immaterial manner, and then you will understand." ~ Evagrius Ponticus

"The Tao that can be named is not the true Tao" - Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching

“Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him.” ~ Thomas Merton

“If a man is to live, he must be all alive, body, soul, mind, heart, spirit.” ~ Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude

“But there is greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question.” ~ Thomas Merton

“When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children, when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet, Basho, we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash - at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the "newness," the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, all these provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.” ~ Thomas Merton

Towards a theology of prayer

I am currently reading the excellent A Book of Pagan Prayer by Ceisiwr Serith.

The prayers in it are wonderful, and I shall certainly be using them for my own spiritual practice. I'd like to thank Ceisiwr for reclaiming prayer as a Pagan spiritual practice.

However, I am somewhat uncomfortable with the theology of prayer expressed in the opening chapters. To me, the deities are fluid, changeable, and not necessarily real. I tried to regard them as real and it only led to heartbreak and craziness.

Spirits of place are real, because our interactions with place are real. Mythagos appear and disappear as mind interacts with the land. (A mythago is an entity that emerges from the interaction of psyche and landscape; the word was coined by Robert Holdstock.)

So, my theology of prayer is that when we pray, we are communing with our innermost depths, which connect with the Divine within us. Such prayer can be wordless, or involve very few words; it may focus on an image, or the land itself. It moves beyond desire on the part of either the Divine or the one who prays, to a communion between the two. When we pray for other people, we hold them in our minds in a loving way, focusing on the idea that we all "live, move and have our being" within the Divine (this was originally a pagan concept). So we commune with them at the level below individual personality, in the collective unconscious.

As the Divine has many forms and faces, I think Pagan prayer can remind us of this, and also of the sacredness of the Earth, and the immanence of the Divine in the world. The only God I really believe in is the NeoPlatonic Divine source, which is manifest as the universe itself, Deus sive Natura - Spinoza's God. And then I perceive it as feminine, i.e. the Goddess. I like the idea of a deity that both includes and transcends all genders -- but I respond most to Goddess-talk.

I think contemporary Pagan spirituality would be deepened if Pagans started to pray; and if we extended our understanding of prayer beyond petitionary prayer (which has always been dismissed by Pagans as "passive magic" - and rightly so, in my opinion) towards contemplative prayer - which is losing the ego in contemplation of the beauty of the Divine.

Mystic moments

Last year, I had one of those moments where everything seems illuminated from within, filled with light. I've had a couple of such moments before; once in about 1994 I had a vision of Yggdrasil, possibly inspired by the poem Hertha by Algernon Charles Swinburne, where everything suddenly seemed to be right, and to fit together and make sense; also around 1989 I remember my first experience of the Goddess was like a big bright light shining in the night.

Of course one expects these things to happen in ritual; it's when they happen spontaneously without any particular prompting, and with such intensity, that it's really mind-blowing.

Last year's experience was approximately between 2 and 3 pm on 8 July 2007 on the Pennine Way, just west of Manchester. I was walking along looking at the plants and trees and everything seemed to glow with an inner glow of divine presence. Sort of nebulously numinous. Everything seemed interwoven, coinherent even; all part of one enormous Being of light.

Has anyone else had something similar?

breathing

I just read these interesting articles on the Tzimtzum (the Divine contracting in order to make space for the creation). It sounds, from the articles, as if the Tzimtzum only happened once, at the beginning of time - but I thought it was happening all the time, that creation is constantly sustained by the Divine - certainly that is the insight provided by quantum mechanics, that bosons (the 'God particle') are continuously winking in and out of existence. Certainly one of the articles says that the Divine is both immanent and transcendent.

I think (but I'm not sure) that the patterns of Islamic tiles often represent this constant expansion and contraction of the Presence - kind of like breathing.

I was trying to convey a sense of the Tzimtzum in my poem, Thou Godde. I think I managed to convey a sense of the Tzim, but less so the Tzum. I wanted to add something about returning to the source in a breath and then breathing out again, something that conveys the constant flow of inbreath and outbreath, always and everywhere. This poem that I wrote about the Grail almost conveys it, and perhaps this one, The hinge of the door, too. Also, this poem, Resonance (though with perhaps a little too much emphasis on a holistic perspective) was an attempt to convey a Taoist view of the constant dance of being and non-being.

I also want to write something about spirit of place, how the manifestation of spirit is different in different places, and has a distinct personality or identity (but is not a discrete entity).

Who, not what

In the end the contemplative suffers the anguish of realizing that he no longer knows what God is. He may or may not mercifully realize that, after all, this is a great gain, because “God is not a what,” not a “thing.”

That is precisely one of the essential characteristics of contemplative experience. It sees that there is no “what” that can be called God. There is “no such thing” as God because God is neither a “what” nor a “thing” but a pure “Who.”

He is the “Thou” before whom our inmost “I” springs into awareness. He is the I Am before whom with our own most personal and inalienable voice we echo “I am.”

~ Thomas Merton

That's exactly it. As Lao Tsu said, I don't know what it is, so I call it Great.

Godde bursts the boundaries of all our attempts at definition. Every time I try to rationalise or quantify or describe the experience of the Divine, I experience some kind of diminution of the opening, expansive Presence. But it must be remembered that the Divine is both expansion and contraction, both darkness and light - the heartbeat of the universe. The rejection of the darkness of Godde diminishes the Presence. The wave and the wind are one motion: the the trough of the wave is the peak of the wind, and the trough of the wind is the peak of the wave, and each is in the heart of the other. Yin and Yang in the eternal Tao.