time for enchantment

[We] disenchant the universe.  We no longer expect miracles. We no longer expect the transcendent to shine through the tree and leaf with “every common bush afire with God.” This is our modern state of alienation and anxiety, what the French call ressentiment.  One aspect of ressentiment describes a world that is no longer safe, no longer sacred, no longer home.

                               Richard Rohr (the wisdom pattern p. 20)

 

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

                               Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

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I met a woman once, an energy healer

She was totally outside my comfort zone

 

She took a picture of your "aura"

and then offered to tell you about yourself

 

It turns out that my profile could be summed up in one word

homesick

or to put it another way,

 

I feel like I am never "at home"

 

what an awkward place to be

since i have always believed that the goal of any sacred story

is to come back home

 

often people talk of home

of their ultimate destination

as being something that is somehow out of this world

call it heaven, call it what you will

 

home is not here

“this world is not my home, I’m just a passing though”

 

And yet Jesus tells us that the kingdom of God is here

Here, in this reality, the concrete orb we call spaceship earth

Here in the midst of Covid-19

Racial unrest

 

Here I the midst of all the mess

 

Which means of course that God is here too

for an absent God cannot truly reign

 

so it occurs to me that I am missing something

if I cannot see the sacred for the sin

if I cannot see the mystery in the gritty reality of each day

if I cannot find the Sacred Love, woven into the fabric of my being

 

without a sense of Sacred

I am just an organism, living in the middle of a mess

I am alone, fighting against forces that will slowly erode me

Until I am gone

One way of another

Gone

 

Perhaps the most important thing I can do each day

is to take some time to become

enchanted again

 

to look for miracles

to look for God in the mountains and the rivers

in the sky and in the trees

to see love on the wing

and catch it as if flies (Blake)

 

Perhaps the most important thing I can do

Is make myself at home

In this world

In this life

In this body

 

to find my way home

as I move deeply into the center of my being

down into that deep place

where God lurks, waiting to welcome me home