."I belonged...within something greater than my own life, to Life itself! To God, if you want to put it that way."

(Eugene O'Neill, Long Day's Journey Into Night)

 

"On this earth the experience of great beauty always remains mysteriously linked with the experience of great loneliness. This reminds me again that there still is a beauty I have not seen yet: the beauty that does not create loneliness but unity." (Henri Nouwen)

 

Slowly, reluctantly, we're putting away the things of summer, and getting ready for another unexpected

shortening of our time on the Island. My Mom is ill, in the hospital, and all of the factors of love and separation and concern and care arise, inviting the soul to an anxious state.  My sisters and nieces are doing a remarkable job of care-taking and double-checking and correcting the doctor and her staff, while loving my Mom and teaching the next generation, in Grace and my nephew Michael, what this God-thing is really all about. For right here and now, it is about returning to just this moment, pausing with love, and in that pause, returning to a sense of peace.

 

We find ourselves saying the same thing every year as we pack to leave: time has flown by; seems we just got here; all those plans we had at the beginning are now a memory.  I wondered if my Mom was thinking the same thoughts. The events of our lives become the microcosm, a gift or hint if we are paying attention, of the larger event of living and leaving.

 

This past weekend, we took advantage of the end-of-season special at the Tsa-Kwa-Luten Lodge on Quadra Island. Our room faced Vancouver Island, with views of the mountains and boat traffic on the sparkling waters of the Strait, and the town of Campbell River a short distance across the channel.  After a visit to the First Nation Museum, and a brief walk along the water to the lighthouse, we settled in to watch the colors of day change and shift to the twinkling lights both in the night sky, and along the banks and hills on the opposite shore, homes lit up by people we would never meet or see, but who added warmth and wonder to our evening.

 

The next day, we drove to the other side of Quadra and walked a beautiful peninsula facing Cortes Island - place of the wonderful time with Brother David last year - and the multiple islands between us and the coastal mountains of the mainland. In the far-off distance, behind the layers of tree tops and island outlines, was a snow-capped peak that was likely visible only on clear days. It predominated the skyline. Mikie found a log of driftwood that had his name on it, and promptly laid down, saying the only other walking he would do was back to the car.

 

But I wanted to get to the end of the trail, to the tip of the peninsula, through the canopy of forest and along the drift-wood littered shore. It was the best of the Pacific Northwest Island experience: the quiet of the day, the peace in this outdoor shrine, the primal wilderness of uninhabited islands that dotted the waterscape, the hum of the Cortes Island ferry, the murmur of its wake; the expansiveness of the vista. I found myself repeating with each step the lesson of the morning's reading: "I belong within Something greater; I belong within Something greater."

 

And suddenly my Mom's experience, what my sisters and nieces and brother were doing for her, what all of us do for each other every day, from turning on a light at night that someone else might see to giving or receiving a simple smile, to offering a cup of coffee to a friend: everything fit into that mysterious Something greater, whether we know it or not. Brother David talks about the individual bucket being placed into the ocean in explaining our submersion from individuals into the Divine. We belong, as much to each other as to any Other.

 

When we got home, I looked at a map and discovered that the snow-capped mountain I was seeing on that walk was Mount Alice - my mother's name. Who can explain these minor miracles, except to say that All Is Well?  There are moments when it all seems so vast; there are moments when it all seems so intimate. But in these moments, we return to O'Neill's "veil of things as they seem, drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see, and seeing the secret, you ARE the secret."

 

It is in those moments we are recharged to face what comes next. Except for the Saints and mystics, most of us don't stay in that place. Perhaps we recognize it more quickly when it comes again, though, or see it in others, even when they don't.  We are called to hold that place for those most in need when they are ill or hurting. We see the Secret within them, and hold up a mirror to their own great beauty, creating unity out of loneliness.

 

Einstein asked once "If you are not a holy questioner, who are you?" These islands, these moments in space and time, don't give answers.  But they lead into the questions that create awe and wonder and ultimately, silence. We don't know what the year will bring, how much longer we'll be able to come up here, or how things will change, only that they will. We move within Something greater, in a world filled with water chickens and grace, mountains and love, and holy questions.

YAY GOD

Canada Saga 2012 - September 4

"The place you are right now, God circled on a map for you." (Hafiz)

"Where mystery is absent, there can be no wonder." (Neil deGrasse Tyson)

Last week, Michael and I sat outside for lunch on the deck of one of the local waterfront restaurants.

There was a bit of a chill in the air, so we chose a spot in the sun, near the railing closest to the water, now at its low ebb with noisy gulls floating in the tidal pools. A young family sat at a table near us, and the

3 year old wandered over, peering through the railing out at the world. She quickly spied the gulls, and said excitedly, "CHICKENS!" Her Mom called, "No, those are seagulls." Since she was looking at me, I added "Yes, baby, those are seagulls." She looked unsure, and said again, more quietly this time, but with determination "chickens."

Thinking it might help, I said, "Chickens live on the farm, on the ground. Seagulls love the water. Those are seagulls." She looked at her Mom, looked at me, looked down at the seagulls now strangely quiet, as if they, too, were waiting for their fate to be decided. We could almost see her little brain gears at play. She said, very softly but quite surely, "water chickens." The gulls came back to life, flapping and boisterous, sending her joyfully, the dilemma now solved, back to her mom. We marveled at her process, smiled at her cleverness, and joined that adult conspiracy that realizes the brevity and innocence of our children's true knowing.

Many of us walk through life this way, misnaming or renaming in our own limited awareness, the gifts that

flow to us, as Rilke indicated when he wrote that love and death are great gifts, mostly passed on unopened. Or we're like the early Spaniards who sailed from the ocean into the headwaters of the Amazon, thinking it, too, was salt-water and thus perished from thirst surrounded by the world's largest source of fresh water. After a long and beautiful hike on Saturday, saturated with the wonder and mystery all around us, Michael and I encountered a family near the parking lot.  The two young boys were pouting, kicking rocks and ready for their electronics. "You can only watch Nature so much," the youngest told his parents. The adults shared a smile, and a long sigh.

How do we plant in the young seeds of awe for the Love all around them, manifest in such simplicity and beauty? How do we stay grounded in our capacity for good and the truth of our original blessing in the midst of hurricane warnings, evacuations, illness, contention, aging and, in my family's case, coping with the ever-increasing neediness of our elderly mother where there are no easy answers. How do we nurture in our own souls a wonder rooted in mystery when there is so much distraction clamoring for our attention in the trivialities of news, politics, gossip and 'entertainment?'

In just such a thicket of mindlessness, I walked out towards the water one morning, facing east in a daily ritual of prayer, an acknowledgment of the Light after darkness. In an intuitive gesture, I found myself turning around just in time to catch a waterfall of rainbow dropping out of a large grey cloud, all reflected in the tidal pool below a nearby sandbar.

The mental fog slowly lifted as the gentle morning surf came into focus, along with the touch of soft cool morning air. For ten minutes I stood with nothing on my mind except the vibrancy of the colors, wondering which would linger and be the last to go. The rainbow turned into a warm peach/coral brush-stroke, and I was suddenly in my mother-in-law's room standing at the window just after she drew her last breath, stunned that a soul in grief could still be touched so deeply by the colors of dawn.

In that moment, as on this beach 3000 miles and eight years away, time became the mystery, the gift, the wonder, the portal through which the Divine beckons us, through a death, or a rainbow or a memory. Standing on a beach, sitting by the bed of a dying loved one or on a deck with a precocious three year old, wandering on a mountain trail or evacuating to a hotel in a storm: wherever we are is our circle on the map.

For my family last week in the throes of Hurricane Isaac, their circle on the map was the hotel a hundred miles away from evacuated homes, ministering to each other and to strangers through kindness. In a grey lobby, they were rainbow colors of music and song, growing in love and recognition of the gifts each had to offer.

We do our best and struggle to pass the sense of mystery on to those we love, using inadequate words and offering experiences that we hope will break open their own sense of gratitude for the gifts that surround us.  "Oh God, what have I seen?" Emily Carr cried, in the midst of Pacific Northwest beauty. "Where have I been? Something has spoken to the very soul of me - wonderful, mighty, not of this world." Perhaps that's why we struggle with words and names in these experiences of mystery and wonder. They touch those places in us that are "not of this world." Then, like the three year old on the deck with her water chickens, by any other name we recognize the grace of God that floats in the tidal pools of Presence.

YAY GOD