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Primitive religion is not believed, it is danced!

Arthur Darby Nock

Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
And only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

Elizabeth Browning



Thursday, March 6, 2014

Lent 2 - In between


“We cannot arrive at the perfect possession of God in this life, and that is why we are travelling and in darkness. But we already possess Him by grace, and therefore in that sense we have arrived and are dwelling in the light.  But oh! How far have I to go to find You in Whom I have already arrived!”
― Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain
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Lent Day 2

Sometimes I feel like I spend my life
living “in between”

between two worlds?
between “heaven” and “hell”?
Between ignorance and understanding?
between the beginning and the end?

there is always this tension
between what I know to be true
and what I feel to be true
between promise
and actuality

I am both/and
I am a child of heaven and have feet mired in the earth
I am loved by the Sacred, and yet often feel so unlovable
I participate in the sacred, God dwells in me
and yet God often feels so distant

In grace I have already “arrived”
And yet the destination seems so far away

Perhaps the real spiritual task
Is to realize
Become awake to
that which we already have

we don’t do that by “trying harder”
we do that by (as Isaiah would put it)
“waiting”

What does it mean to “wait upon the Lord”?

To hope, to trust, to listen, to hear
to reach up, in the midst of our stumbling journey
and find that the hand we sought
childlike
to lead us on
was there, all along

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