AT HOME IN OUR HEARTS
What if the Holy One were hidden,
the truth at home in our hearts.
What if truth were a person,
rather than a set of concepts,
fruitless rules.
What if truth were a body broken,
not unlike our own,
prone to shattering.
And a body resurrected,
that all its broken pieces,
married to our own,
might bring us into wholeness.
What if our body were a vessel
of the Divine
a place where God lives as the Invisible,
despised and rejected,
as vulnerable as a babe in arms.
What if our hearts,
in alignment with his,
burn within us,
like Mary’s awareness
of the Light held in her womb.
What if the Light that Mary bore
into the world
is now the glow that our hearts contain,
and emit through the sacrificial
tasks of living.
What if the fire inside is the truth
which refines,
and leaves us,
as Christ’s body on the cross,
with the flesh and the temporal shed.
TO DO
Do what you can do,
or don’t do at all.
When you are at the crossroads
laid low with sorrow,
weary or ill,
know,
that he who is at the crossroads,
the bedside,
or by the chair where you sit unseeing,
whose name is Love in any language,
every faith,
or lack of it,
sits with you,
so still.
Yes, what you can see or do
may be minimal,
but the cross roads,
the sick bed,
the place of vigil,
or grief’s reminiscing,
its remembrances,
unraveling,
is the very place in which you
will find your meaning,
your comfort and restoration.
Someone holds a mirror quietly for you
amongst the rubble of yourself,
that the eyes you soon see
are your own, longing and open,
mapping a future,
re-imagining what’s been altered.
No strident advice given
to hurting ears,
instead
this presence of Love is rather like,
the Balm of Gilead,
the spark that rebuilds a fire,
the foundation stone
upon which the author of your days sits,
handing you a pen.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
‘We’re all golden sunflowers inside.”
– Allen Ginsberg
UNFOLDMENT
We must unfold it,
to see what is written.
Life’s pages are not foreseen,
except in dreams,
and hopes and plans,
which in the unfolding
we must marry with what is.
Life’s pages are always surprising,
unnerving,
in how they ask more of us
than imagined.
And yet,
in the very living and unfolding
we become equipped,
a muscle strengthened by the climbing.
Life’s pages are written in linked cursive,
a building upon themselves
like stones in mortar,
and yet flexible and responsive
to movement,
as rooted trees
with their wind-blown foliage.
We must unfold it
with hope and courage – Life –
which is always a fusion of what we bring
and what is awaiting us.
For in the marrying of ourselves
to tomorrow,
we take all that is best in ourselves,
all that is developed,
and mix it
with the wonder of Life’s newness,
tasting and adjusting for sweetness,
and with the aid of new revelations,
until Life in her fruiting and blooming
then starts again,
all decay and leaf-fall
to burgeoning spring.