[This is a first attempt to articulate experiences in Ceremony and how they have opened me to more of God.]
Thursday 17 March 2022
Gorecki: Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, I
I am sitting cross-legged on a meditation cushion. My eyes are closed as I listen to the music. I am grounded on the cushion. I have rarely been this focused, centred, present, and free from distractions. When something does divert my attention, I gently wave it away with an imagined hand. Occasionally I look around the meditation hall looking at the other people, keeping an eye, before closing my eyes and going within again.
And then this music starts; the quiet, ominous, insistent rumble of the double bases. I know this music. I know what it is about. I feel angry. This music is not part of the holding atmosphere. It is leading me somewhere. I am being manipulated. Behind my eyelids, images of castle battlements and citadels pile on top of each other, tessellated.
My son, my chosen and beloved
Share your wounds with your mother
And because, dear son, I have always carried you in my heart,
And always served you faithfully
Speak to your mother, to make her happy,
Although you are already leaving me, my cherished hope.~ Lamentation of the Holy Cross Monastery from the “Lysagóra Songs” collection. Second half of the 15th century
I feel the weight of the music. It is the weight of suffering – the suffering inherent in life. Not the suffering we humans inflict upon each other. Not the suffering of intentional harm, dysregulated desire, lack of care, or thoughtlessness. It is the inescapable suffering intrinsic to creatures – which is the entire Cosmos. To make anything is to make its demise.
In my beginning is my end…
The weight of suffering bears down on me. My head bows. My torso is pressed down. I am pushed toward the floor.
Other voices of the orchestra join section by section: cellos; violas; violins. It is hard to bear. The canon builds; a circling, spiralling, relentless threnody.
At the everywhere-and-nowhere axis of the Cosmos, God is creating. Creation is suffering. Exploding stars; colliding galaxies; tectonic plates, volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis; birth, ageing, illness, death: destruction is the bed-fellow of creativity. Every birth comes with pain. It is the way of things. This is not a fallen world. This is the world. This is the way the world is. This is the way the world is Created. This is the very possibility of Creation. This is the vision Siddhartha gives Govinda at the end of Herman Hesse’s novel.
It is only as stars burn and explode that the necessary elements are made from which life could evolve: we are made of stardust and only great violence can forge the atoms that comprise our bodies.
Huge forces move the tectonic plates of the Earth’s crust resulting in volcanos, earthquakes, and tsunamis. A planet without tectonic plates is a world without change – a world without life.
Making creatures is risky; sometimes the chromosomes don’t align properly.
My body’s continued existence in its current form depends upon eating. And so it is with every creature. Life is sustained by consuming life.
Without exploding stars, tectonic plates, change, and death, there would be no life. Everything suffers.
I say, “Why would You do this!?” How can Creation be worth this suffering? Of course, there is no answer – only Your answer to Job. I know I can never understand. This is no more than a disclosure of the reality of things. God is doing what God does – eternally creating the Cosmos – unceasingly – inexorable, unrelenting, and impassive. “Is it worth it?”, I ask.
Impassive: I don’t know how to convey the correct sense that God does not care. It flies in the face of everything I thought I knew. God cares with the same care that is shown to Job.
“Where were you…?”
The Act of Creation brooks no restraint. I am dismantled.
Teach us to care and not to care.
Teach us to sit still.
And now I have a choice – although I know there is no choice. I could stay bowed down – a posture tending toward resignation, retreat, and resentment. Or…
“Gird up your loins like a man…”
I unclose. I straighten up. I ground and centre myself again. I open my shoulders, my chest, my heart. I choose love. I understand that I do not understand love. I am dismantled.
I find tears on my cheeks. Something or someone is crying. It is not me. And it is not grief. It is the beauty and the pain all wrapped up together. It is unbearable though, thank God, it is not mine to bear.
Take Lord and receive…
God is love; God is impassive. How do I reconcile these two radically different experiences of God?
As I write this now, I am reminded of something Jim Finley says:
Finley describes God as “the infinity of the unforeseeable; so we know that [the unforeseeable] is trustworthy, because in everything, God is trying to move us into Christ consciousness. If we are absolutely grounded in the absolute love of God that protects us from nothing even as it sustains us in all things, then we can face all things with courage and tenderness and touch the hurting places in others and in ourselves with love.” Perhaps this explains the mysterious coexistence of deep suffering and intense joy in saints like John of the Cross. Otherwise, he and Teresa and most other mystics would just seem like impossible oddities.
I cannot explain to you why I feel such profound gratitude.
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