Glancing out the window, I marvel at an intense congregation of seagulls, wheeling and settling over and over on the rooftops opposite. As if they had all received the same message but couldn’t decipher anything other than a time to meet. 

Then later, they wheeled away together, elegant white confetti of divine thoughts, leaving an empty sky.

Each of us is the mediating principle, “raised up, between heaven and earth,” ideally embodying “the Mirror of Pure Being and the Light of a finite world.” Evelyn Underhill 

When distracted by the mud-thick sewage of the human condition, of which we are inextricably a part, we cannot deny the height of our sometimes blue-hued ascensions into the Pure Mind of Being. Entering the clarity of what is, as it is, is a release from the binding threads of limit. Limits are stories inherited from the universal mind, traffic of cultural aspirations, and all positional posits to be acknowledged but not fed. Limits are in form only. The formless remains malleable and supple enough to alter and soften the complex trajectory of its children – varying forms of coalescence.

Pure Being is the limitless purity of unassailable truth heralding a descending tower of grace to arm us to face our flickering corruptibility. 

We are what we do and do not do. 

Our actions are prayers we put out into the void. 

They ripple and cascade down the duck’s back of time, but their effect is homeopathically received, whether acknowledged or recognized. They are the scrolls of endless prayer that are our lives. 

We must keep tempering the gravity of mass consciousness as it reveals itself in us by flying off the rooftops of alarm and self-judgment and wheeling as one into the pure blue sky. 

Receiving the ever-forgiving purity of goldfish memory. 

According to Ted Lasso, goldfish have a short-term memory of 10 seconds. So, when we stray from our highest aspiration to godliness and muddy ourselves in the humus of transformative experience, we take on the goldfish mind and walk on. 

In “the attainment of the “still wilderness” or “lonely desert of Deity”: the limitless Divine Abyss, impersonal, indescribable, forever hid in the Cloud of Unknowing, and yet the true Country of the Soul,” we are wedded to the eternal bridegroom.

Prayer and attainment, grace and action meld into a seamless wonder. 

Love’s embrace allows the channels of our daily ordinariness to become an ongoing burning incense of prayer with no effort or strain. Spiraling columns of worship are visible for miles.

Flexing a wrist as prayer becomes real. 

This vibrational union of empathic opposites is the thrumming stillness behind our eyes.  

The coarseness of lower vibrations is the inescapable forming and reforming of the legions of the manifest as it claws its way up the evolutionary ladder to achieve its apeothis in the transcendent union of opposites. 

Our tiny muddy footprints on the marble floors of sacred shelters are the wounded children in us asking for the father/mother in us to protect us. We must learn how to father/mother ourselves to wholeness by drawing forth the divinity innate in each cell. Like attracts like. 

Be like unto the Father/Mother even as I am. J.C.

The Cloud of Unknowing is the blinding light of the divine having mercy on the limits of our capacities. Seeing the divine is more a matter of getting out of the way so that the fullness of emptiness can burst forth from the cages of our chests to wave itself, flowering into the visibility of our lives as we live them. Living a life as if a guest at the banquet. The mystery of the incarnation in that each of us is the Word in form.

Sitting quietly writing in an empty restaurant waiting for my beloved to join me, I muse on the incongruous details of this symphony of synchronicities. My desire for solitude is fulfilled. A hunger for the spareness of sacred self-sufficiency to give me the courage to face boredom, to face my numerous insufficiencies and incapacities, my perfectionist narcissism always knowing better than the richness of my inner poverty, denying the simplicity of my body talking to me. 

The “lonely desert of Deity” is such a rich phrase. It reverberates within me like a spinning top, pulling me into the centrifugal force of its invitation to be a spacious guesthouse for the “lonely desert of the Deity.” 

The spacious sky of our undistracted gaze gifts not only ourselves but everyone/everything we happen upon, from the mail/man/woman to the checkout clerk to the stranger whose eyes we graze in passing. To the baby who sits in front of me, just staring without any qualification but mild curiosity and comfort in just being without reason. 

My prayer now is that the “Limitless Divine Abyss” becomes the true country of our ordinary everyday soul. 

I am amused that we have the qualifying phrase Limitless Divine Abyss placed on our business cards! What a world it would be where such a declaration of self is accepted as perfectly usual and proper!

Back to the concrete. Now cooking pasta sauce with broccoli and mushrooms. Trying to treat the process as a sacrament of some kind. What tiny wrist flexes achieve this moment of gratitude and reverence for the ordinary?

AVZ

CAPABLE FLESH 

The tender flesh itself 

will be found one day 

quite surprisingly— 

to be capable of receiving, 

and yes, full 

capable of embracing 

the searing energies of God. 

Go figure. Fear not. 

For even at its beginning 

the humble clay received 

God’s art, whereby 

one part became the eye, 

another the ear, and yet 

another this impetuous hand. 

Therefore, the flesh 

is not to be excluded 

from the wisdom and the power 

that now and ever animates 

all things. His life-giving