I am the Lord's, as a reality

​After nearly a week of fasting from the internet, I have a new chant for you that came to me today. 


I have spent the afternoon chanting in the round to offer you not a balm, but a Reality. 


Richard Rohr often says that "Paul was a mystic". Most of his language is heard at the wrong level, and therefore misused by some, and passed over too quickly by others. But there are some nuggets there to be sure. (He met the mystical Christ on the road to Damascus, for starters).


Whether I live or die, I am the Lord's. 
Whether we live or die, we are the Lord's.
​

This message from Romans isn't about the promise of heaven.
It is about a living reality. 


When I hear this line, I think of James Finley's wonderful words from our Point Vierge album, (Thomas Merton's Journey in Song), when he says,


"As intimacy deepens between two people, it can deepen to a point, at which they mutually disappear as dualistically other than each other. Neither one can find the place where one stops and the other begins, and they're not inclined to try. So, that point, that Zero Variance, or that point of the overcoming of otherness, is a point of solitude, because there's no observer there, to take notes on it. In a way, Merton is talking about this "transubjective communion", in which we, and God, and we and others, and we and the earth, all start disappearing, and otherness is overcome. This is why, when people die, they don't go anywhere. When we die, we disappear. We don't see the dead, for the same reason we don't see God. There's no more otherness, between themselves and this Infinity. And since they don't go anywhere, we're all right here.
Thomas Merton once wrote: "where do candles go, when they go out? If the question fills me with an alien chill, it gives witness to my heart, that I have not begun to understand the resurrection."


Use these lines if they are helpful, as you navigate how to be in these strange times. I don't send this line "whether I live or die, I am the Lord's"  to you as a "promise of heaven" in the strict sense of escapism, nor even a way to calm ourselves about our own mortality... but more as an incarnate reality that can shine out quietly,  like "the music of the spheres", into the disquieting "quiet" of these times. What if we were to use this chant to weather this storm, this Great Turning, this Ordeal, with total, deep down, presence, when all too often, spiritual people have been notorious for being the great escape artists.


I am seeing less airplanes in the sky, but around Christmas time, we were doing a night walk as a family, and I saw about 60 perfectly spaced, recently launched satellites polluting my vision, as I tried to exercise my God-given right to see the stars in all their glory. 


I am glad I get to send you songs, but I wonder what price we will pay for tech connection, that seems to have come with the loss of the deep, lateral connection, our ancestors had with this earth. My personal prayer is that somehow the Mystery of Where We are Going is going to include a Second Naiveté with the lateral powers of the "Christ-soaked" natural world (including ourselves). 


We are in deep preparation for spring, here in the north, so of course, as the tree's sap warms, and the buds show signs of waking, and our cow gives more milk, and I say hello and tend to nearly 500 plants every morning, I get (perhaps too) preachy about how often we forget this greening beauty, Earth, even as we claim we want her to live, or want to "save" her. 


I just finished a novel where a Palagian was drowned by other Christian monks, for heresy. And I wondered if the Palagian found God in the water, even as those who would separate God from all this wonder, used that water only as a useful object, to violently silence him with.


Well, drown me as a heretic, but I'm in love with what God has made for us to be in love with, and in love with God, who is inseparably interwoven with all of this. I don't fall too far from the tree... my dear grandmother's favourite hymn was I Come to the Garden Alone... and I'm pretty sure, deep down, she sometimes wished she could be tarrying in her garden, sharing the joy of it with God, on Sunday mornings.


Lastly, more context for this chant can be understood in the words of Simeon the New Theologian,


We awaken in Christ’s body,
As Christ awakens our bodies
There I look down and my poor hand is Christ,
He enters my foot and is infinitely me.
I move my hand and wonderfully
My hand becomes Christ,
Becomes all of Him.
I move my foot and at once
He appears in a flash of lightning.
Do my words seem blasphemous to you?
–Then open your heart to Him.
And let yourself receive the one
Who is opening to you so deeply.
For if we genuinely love Him,
We wake up inside Christ’s body
Where all our body all over,
Every most hidden part of it,
Is realized in joy as Him,
And He makes us utterly real.
And everything that is hurt, everything
That seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful,
Maimed, ugly, irreparably damaged
Is in Him transformed.
And in Him, recognized as whole, as lovely,
And radiant in His light,
We awaken as the beloved
In every last part of our body.