Tag: mystery

Maybe

Sweet Jesus, talking
his melancholy madness,
stood up in the boat
and the sea lay down,
silky and sorry.
So everybody was saved
that night.
But you know how it is

when something
different crosses
the threshold — the uncles
mutter together,

the women walk away,
the young brother begins
to sharpen his knife.
Nobody knows what the soul is.

It comes and goes
like the wind over the water —
sometimes, for days,
you don’t think of it.

Maybe, after the sermon,
after the multitude was fed,
one or two of them felt
the soul slip forth
like a tremor of pure sunlight
before exhaustion,
that wants to swallow everything,
gripped their bones and left them

miserable and sleepy,
as they are now, forgetting
how the wind tore at the sails
before he rose and talked to it —

tender and luminous and demanding
as he always was —
a thousand times more frightening
than the killer storm.

By Mary Oliver

Many Ways, Many Truths, Many Lights…

“I use metaphors.

… One way is just to think, for instance, of biodiversity. The extraordinary thing we now know thanks to [the] discovery of DNA and the decoding of the human and other genomes, is that all life… you know, all the 3 million species of life and plant life – all have the same source.

We all come from a single source.

Everything that lives has its genetic code written in the same alphabet.

Unity creates diversity.

So don’t think of One God, One Truth, One Way. Think of One God creating this extraordinary number of ways. The 6,800 languages that are actually spoken – don’t think there’s one language within which we can speak to God.

The Bible is saying to us – the whole time – ‘Don’t think that God is as simple as you are’.

… God is bigger than religion”.

— Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, Former Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, from Enriched By Difference on Becoming Wise.

 

Holy Spirit

Jesus said,

But I tell you the truth, it is to your advantage that I go away; for if I do not go away, the Helper (Comforter, Advocate, Intercessor—Counselor, Strengthener, Standby) will not come to you; but if I go, I will send the Holy Spirit to you.  — John 16:7

After nearly a decade of psychological study, I read this and hear a man saying, “Let me leave this earthy realm so that I might give back to you your own projections of divinity.”

Being God, I believe that Jesus came all this way, entering into the experience of being fully human – loving and grieving and rejoicing and suffering alongside us, that we might be able to see ‘how it’s done’. In other words, how it’s possible to be fully entrenched in this human form, and yet experience the presence of God within us.

Indeed, I am quite convinced that believing in a God who is also alive inside us will ‘help’ each of us much more surely than a belief that God is still exclusively ‘out there'”.