"The eye is the body’s lamp. If your eyes are good, your body will be filled with light: if your eyes are bad, your body will be in darkness. And, if your light is darkness, how deep will the darkness be?" Matthew 6:22:23.
"Beginning in the eye, when it opens, is like the dawn breaking in the night. When it opens, and new world is there....yet, in a wonderful way, the eye makes us wonder at the mystery and otherness of everything outside us. When you really gaze at something, you bring it inside of you...when you look deeply at something, it becomes part of you...to look at something that can gaze back at you, or that has a reserve and depth, can heal your eyes and deepen your sense of vision...An interesting question you ask yourself at night is, ‘What did I really see today?’ You could be surprised at what you did not see...The human eye is always selecting what it wants to see and also evading what it does not want to see...It is a startling truth that how you see and what you see determines how and who you will be...To recognize how you see things can bring you self-knowledge and enable you to glimpse the wonderful treasures your life secretly holds." Anam Cara
Why have I selected the above quotations? It is to emphasize the fact that our whole life is sacred, our whole life is mysterious. That is why the last writing effort ended with a prayer which asks for the gift of sight. We need these x-ray eyes of faith to see what is hidden and revealed in all we see, hear and do.
"All of creation is charged with the wonder of God," according to Hopkins. All is mystery, all is Holy, that is what we must be reminded of, otherwise our lives will be dull, lifeless, death-dealing and boring.
I love the following story which I first heard on a Richard Rohr tape. "There was a researcher who placed a walleyed pike into a fake glass tank. He then placed minnows into the tank. The pike gobbled up the little minnows. After a time, the researcher changed the configuration of the tank. He placed the glass wall in the tank. He then placed the minnows behind the glass wall. The pike made effort after effort to get at the fish. Each time, all he was able to do was bump up against the wall. That went on for some time. Eventually, the researcher removed the glass wall, the minnow swam all around the pike. It starved to death with food all around it."
This is a heart-wrenching story. This is the life story of more people than we can ever imagine. We must be reminded that "our daily bread" -- like the minnows -- is always around us, surrounding us. Whether the food is claimed or not, is our decision made one moment at a time. Our daily bread is always around us, but is not there something of that defeated pike in each one of us? We have been disappointed, rejected, betrayed, as we reached to what we thought was food. We were deprived of life-giving sustenance for our bodies, souls, spirit. This is where a radical change has to take place within each one of us, or else, the quotation from the Irish poet Yeats becomes true, "A heart too long neglected a stone becomes." This is victim language and needs a radical change into a survival mentality. This is difficult to achieve, but this radical change can come about one moment at a time. This change comes about as we open our eyes to each moment as a nourishing moment for ourselves and consequently those who share our lives.
Our journey continues…
No comments:
Post a Comment