Ordinary Mysticism, Extraordinary Love

Beauty, the capacity to seek it and know it, to breathe it in, has never been more important. And by that, I mean the capacity to be struck by the beauty of the absolutely ordinary, and to be rooted in the sacredness of each day, and each night. My own hope lies not in government, or institutions, the academy, or even the church. My hope lies in our innate capacity to experience what Father Pedro Arrupe called a mysticism of open eyes to see more, not less. See the burning in all of creation and engage while fully saturated with life. This sort of mysticism is a call to be utterly present to the moment, and it is in this ordinary mysticism where we find extraordinary love.

Authoritarianism may well grind you into a shade of your God-created self, and it will show you the world through a glass darkly. The triumph of the totalitarian will is dependent upon the crushing of hope and the seeding of bitterness and fear. The successful implementation of a totalitarian state is contingent upon convincing the population that we “can’t tell what’s real anymore.” Do not let such things take root in your soil. A constant biblical message is to reject fear, and yet it is impossible to not experience fear; indeed it would be foolish and even deadly to proceed as if nothing were amiss in our world. God’s call to ‘fear not’ isn’t that. It is an invitation to acknowledge all of the good reasons to fear, and step forward deeply into life anyway. It is an invitation to have the courage to build community, to show compassion, to live fully into your existence right in this moment, and choose to love. Love wildly and without domestication until that love calls you to resistance, a resistance that will overcome your fears.

I write this a day after the President of the United States and the Secretary of War called 800 generals to Quantico, Virginia to tell them that the rules of engagement no longer exist, and American cities should now be their battle training grounds. The unabashed madness and absurdity of the country we find ourselves living in could so easily pull us into a state of anxiety, distraction, and fear every single day. This hungry ghost rises again and again throughout history, and its insatiable appetite for power and control is dependent upon a diet of fear and cynicism. Don’t feed it.

Look to the sky. It is October, and it is glorious, and by that I literally mean that it should be glorified. What magnificent beauty. My breath catches, and this is what I really want to write about.

The abbey and farm where I live was built upon earth that shimmers. When we moved here the crows and ravens had all but abandoned the land, chased away by birdshot and arrows. Trust takes time to build, and it can only move at the pace of the wound healing. The early morning is cold and there is frost on the rake handle when we clean the sheepfold. The calls of both ravens and crows echo clearly now, they have been re-membered to this community and work in concert with the life of this farm. The guinea hens alert to a hawk, a hawk that I hear before it is seen, and then the ravens and crows join the concert. This is a communion that leaves me speechless as it delivers me to full participation in the dance of creation and life. I know the hawk will eventually take a chicken; it has before. Feeding the hawk is feeding the land. There is no power or control in this symmetry of life and death, it is undistorted creation seen through no glass at all. And it is this that I will not let be taken from me through bitterness and fear. God invites us to cultivate a way of seeing and being in the world. It is a way worth following, it is the way through fear.

Originally published in the Bennington Banner