visionprimordial

The wound of our fallenness

I should back up here and say that a friend found a book for me at the thrift shop where I do some volunteer marketing; it's called The Best American Spiritual Writing of 2005, and it's edited by Philip Zaleski. Bamford's Parabola article is the first article in the book, and it continues to capture my interest, as I spent most of Lent exploring the concept of call and response.

Today's reading... well. I'll just quote it for you:

At first people are like angels, bathed in light and goodness. We move without separation, as if all beings participated in a unique identity, a communion of perfect understanding. Somewhere, neither within us nor without us, we still hear the echo of the single name we all share. Echoing in the depths, it calls us to the common task of playfully, joyfully cocreating the world. We are busy with it. We understand the mutuality of being, of our interdependence. The world is a marvelous piece of music, and like an angelic choir we busy ourselves with performing the heavenly composition, knowing that everyone is playing the same score.

Then comes the fall, which, like the call itself, appears gradually yet in fact, paradoxically, has always been there....It seems that we are not only always called, but also always fallen. We know this because though each of us experiences the fall subjectively, we also know that we are not alone in our pain. We are hurt, but as we turn our attention from our own pain, we recognize that the world is in pain, and that fallenness is a universal condition. Individually we may feel violated or betrayed in different ways, but whatever the circumstances of our falling, we recognize the bitter teaching that the world is riven by violence and deception and that we are all complicit in it.

Fall and call belong together. As the web of deception and death appears and the golden world fades, the memory of that world, which seemed once so safe and whole, continues to call. Nature remains beautiful. Though we no longer see its invisible source, we still intuit it at the edge of our perception... The wonder and reverence that surrounded us, haloing parents and playmates alike, does not disappear. Transformed into curiosity, it becomes interest. People call us. They draw us. A glance, a smile, a touch, are now redolent of the mystery the greater world once held.

The wound of our fallenness becomes a school of empathy. We learn sympathy and compassion... Art, literature, and music become messengers, intermediaries of the call.... Meaning still occasionally pierces the clouds of fragmentation, drawing us on. The call, which seemed perhaps to echo from the past, now sounds from the future.... The unity experienced in that first love of beauty seems now to foreshadow the unity we could achieve by realizing God's identity with creation through the work of conscious human love and suffering.

The call to Beauty

Again -- the beauty of this natural stone formation astounds me. And calls to me in a way that Christopher Bamford (in the Parabola article I cited yesterday) explains:

"Often the call sounds first in childhood, through nature and the senses, when the world is new, shining with the glory and the freshness of a dream...

First memories are frequently of light and color, or darkness and light, shadows, moving on the wall, or of pastel silks swaying in the breeze. The world seems luminous... Experience is unified...there is already a sense of a numinous other, though the ineffability is only intuited, not yet known.

Beauty lies at the edge of consciousness, in the warm, dark, mothering embrace of a world in which we are one with all there is. Only later, when we have fallen into separateness, does beauty begin to draw us consciously from our isolation into the light...

The call of beauty is always intimate, one on one. She is our mother; she raises us to our feet, so that we may see her face to face. She gives us language and thought, whose first form is imagination, so that we may praise her in our hearts and proclaim what we have found."

Is that the nature of the call -- to proclaim what we have found? And if that's true, then how we are called -- whether to sing or play, write or paint -- may well be less important than the proclamation itself; the goal is simply to communicate in whatever way best expresses the magnitude of our response. And that is something we can only know if we are fully present, awake to the pull without and the drive within to give voice to that pull.

The invitation to respond

It's spring, and like many people I tend to go into cleanup mode. So last night I thought I'd walk through some of my images, tossing stuff I'm unlikely to use.

Easier said than done, of course.

I started at the bottom of the alphabet, a file labeled "wood, stone, rust and sand." This was in the stone folder.

Looking at it, I wonder why I would ever bother to paint when the created world is this beautiful -- but of course, we don't create because we're trying to make a more beautiful world; we create to express our response to this beautiful world -- or this ugly world, or this tortured world... what's important is the response.

Facing beauty of this magnitude, I confess I am struck dumb. It's a bit like those times as a child when I would struggle through my piano lessons and then my mother would sit down and breeze through some Rachmaninoff Concerto. Very discouraging.

But here's the good news: I don't have to be divinely creative. I don't have to be God. I am, however, invited to respond to Creation's glory. We all are -- and we can do it with a shout, with a dance, with a hug, or a photo, with a painting, or a speech, with a well-cooked dinner or with time spent on our knees (whether praying or scrubbing) or even with a crusade for justice...

It's really about call and response. According to Christopher Bamford, writing about "The Gift of the Call" in Parabola, one of the meanings of anthropos, or human being, is "to look up," as one looks up when one hears one's name called.

Think about it.

Have you looked up lately?

Open to everything

My husband brought home tulips for Easter; I've been enjoying watching them open their sweet faces to the spring sun. Makes me think of the opening verse of that wonderful song by the Wailin' Jennys, Bird Song:

I hear a bird chirping up in the sky,
I'd like to be free like that, spread my wings so high.
I see the river flowing, water running by,
I'd like to be that river, see what I might find.
I feel the wind a-blowing, slowly changing time,
I'd like to be that wind, I'd swirl and shape the sky.
I smell the flowers blooming, opening for spring,
I'd like to be those flowers, open to everything.

You can watch and hear them sing this here:

Still smiling

Our older daughter came home for Easter, and called in advance to see if she and I might attend an Easter service together. This was QUITE amazing, as the two of us hadn't really attended church together since we moved to Shaw Island in 1996 (the community church on Shaw had no child care program, and she had no patience for sitting).

I hadn't actually been planning to attend an Easter service: I generally have the same prejudice about Christmas and Easter services that I had about best-sellers when I worked as a librarian: if everyone else is doing/reading this, I'm not really interested!
But we discovered that the older Episcopal church on the island was planning to hold a Great Vigil service on Saturday night, complete with bells and incense. It didn't seem likely that it would be very crowded -- the Great Vigil is a LONG service with lots of long Bible readings and hymns -- so we decided to check it out.

The Great Vigil (I should add) was at one point in my life my very favorite church service: back when I was in my early 30's and living in a college town, it included a bonfire, a procession, a very dramatic shift from light to dark (always timed to coincide with midnight) and then some liturgical dancing and a dessert feast afterward. So it was truly a magical experience; sadly, no GV services I'd attended since that time ever really measured up.

... but this service tried, using many of the same elements, and we were both pleasantly surprised to find ourselves experiencing a significant uplifting of spirit as the evening wore on: by the time we were belting out "He is Risen, He is Risen" we were pretty much beaming at each other.

Yes, we were outsiders; we didn't know a soul at the service, and clearly didn't know "the right way" to do stuff. Yes, though we are both VERY knowledgeable about Christianity we are wary of its mythological components and the ways they have been used over the centuries to separate and exclude. But there was this joyful sense of participating in a sort of universal Rite of Spring; a feeling of connectedness that continued to sparkle long after we had left the parking lot.

So, yes -- it was worth the trip! ... and I'm still smiling.

Moving on...

Part of the reason I embarked on the Praying Through Lent series was because I had an experience just prior to Ash Wednesday of feeling totally blocked. So I thought it might be good to undertake a shift; to try creating multi-layered abstract/formless images (because photography tends to be so form-based), and to try keeping my words to a minimum (personally, I think my columns tend to ramble on a bit, and I wanted to pare that down.)

So -- now that's over -- what am I left with? Well, eventually the frustrated artist in me decided to try painting. Results are mixed, but show some promise. It's surprisingly stressful -- rather like singing a solo; painting makes me feel very exposed and vulnerable. But it's good for me, I think. I promise not to subject you to too much of this stuff...

The frustrated Buddhist in me was frequently uncomfortable with the unabashedly Christian nature of this adventure -- not unlike one of my readers, who wrote me a note saying, "I can't say I've been a big fan of your Praying Through Lent series as I just don't seem to fit into the Christian mold; but your words and images have touched me nonetheless." It was easy, on some levels, to fall back into "the Christian mold," but I did find myself chafing a bit; the mold seems too small to contain the faith that has evolved over the years.

But the best part of Lent this year was sort of the flip side of that; re-connecting with people and beliefs and faith experiences from my past. It's been good to see that parts of my life that are no longer living at the surface of awareness are also not lost, but continue to serve as grounding elements for whoever it is I am becoming. And how fun is that, to understand -- at the ripe old age of 62 -- that I am still becoming! I don't know WHAT I'm becoming, but I have to say I'm enjoying the journey.

And it's all good...