The universe is deathless,
Is deathless because, having no finite self,
It stays infinite.
A sound man by not advancing himself
Stays the further ahead of himself,
By not confining himself to himself
Sustains himself outside himself:
By never being an end in himself
He endlessly becomes himself. (#7, The Way of Life, tr. Witter Bynner)
Today I invite you to relax in moments that scramble your sense of order. We've had almost two years of life being scrambled by Covid-19 and information, breakthroughs, misinformation, things opening, things closing, receding, re-surging, and in the midst of it all, having to find solid ground here and now. It's time to consider your ability to let the "irrational" move through you and pass on. That ability is dependent on where and how you discover solid ground. What grounds you? The skill is to relax, not resist, and let your ground of being re-emerge. Faith means you let it find you; faith is a quiet confidence in yourself and in Life. Order does re-emerge, when you relax. Consider a bigger spiritual picture at work.
The "ground of being" of our life doesn't change, but our understanding of it does. This brings to mind the author Thomas Merton (1915-1986). Born in Prades, France, the child of an American mother and a New Zealander father, he spent his early years in America, France, Bermuda, and England. At the age of 26, he withdrew from the world to enter a Catholic ascetic order of Trappist monks in Kentucky, the Abbey of Gethsemani. During his lifetime, he wrote over sixty books and hundreds of poems and articles, probing the depths of monastic spirituality, his growing grasp and respect of Eastern religions, and the painful political issues of his times, including the nuclear arms race, the civil rights movement, and nonviolence. Throughout these works, he wrestled with a tremendous inward pull to disengage from the outer world and an emerging push to publicly express his own deepening understanding of social forces and their moral consequences to that larger world.
What seems like extreme contradictions in a brilliant mind, is a powerful picture of the kind of contradictions that sooner or later become evident in any spiritual path taken seriously. Creation itself is sustained on one level by apparent polarity or dualism. One the other hand, spiritual "awakening" brings awareness of the unity of all life. We are separate individuals, yet we can intuit or directly experience the shattering of all boundaries and separation. Spiritual awareness opens further contradictions in our own identities and sense of purpose. Life is no longer solely about our individual development, comforts, success, needs. We are larger than our personal lives. We are larger than the wants, stereotypes and "shoulds" of the marketplace. And yet, if we neglect ourselves as individuals, we give up our capacity to give our uniqueness to the whole, to contribute what we alone have to contribute in the unfolding of this mystery of life. What now feels as the pull to remain in Pandemic mode as we are pushed into rejoining the outer world of work, socializing and community participation, is a manifestation of this larger spiritual contradiction. This is the paradox of Lao Tzu's passage above, resolved in the mystical experience of sweet irrational worship in Merton's poem ink below. (Susan Nettleton)