Meditations on the Beatitudes

~BLESSINGS~

            On a delicate green day in early February

John and I wandered from the path in Brione’s park

and found an ancient oak had fallen, torn apart

at its core. Enormous, tangled branches reached out

along the ground, half toward the east, half toward

the west. John took one root and I took the other—

scrambling up to a curved branch twice my height from

the ground. Sitting there I took in the warmth of

the sun and the vision of the mountains on the

horizon. John stood for a while on an upward-leaning

branch, and then came down to examine the radical

wound that scarred this magnificent tree creature.

            “It must have been a great wind.”

            He reverently touched and traced the

tree’s silvered age lines. Then he bent to where the

centermost root of the tree had been anchored into

the ground and smoothed the earth with his hand.

            “No one has touched this earth for

hundreds of years. When a giant tree like this

splits it must make a terrible tearing sound.”

            Then, touching more closely into the

oak’s core, formed those many hundreds of years

ago, he mused, “Carbon. There must have been a fire

when she was very young. The new growth

encased the wound until she grew too

large, or until the wind blew too strong…

Even though she’s torn in two, she has some

connection with her roots. Maybe there’s enough

so she’ll have leaves in the spring.”

            He lifted me down from my perch.

We stood a few more moments in the presence of

the torn oak, and then left her. . . .

            The living heart of creation tears apart

at its core as a result of our pitiful misunderstanding.

We are torn even at the center of ourselves. We live,

but without the power of life, for that power arises from

intercourse with what we have come to experience

as the “other,” the “opposite.”

            When we believe that opposites stand

against each other, we create a dangerous illusion.

From such an illusion comes limited vision, cutthroat

competition, discrimination against those we believe are

different, and war of all kinds—within ourselves,

within the family, between communities of nations.

            If we believed instead that opposites exist

within each other as catalysts for the release of creative

power, we could change our whole outlook on reality.

We would enlarge our souls. What we presently exclude to

keep ourselves safe…, we would begin to include in a

daring acceptance of possibilities. We would expand

our world. We would finally be able to love. And that

is the point: to love everything, and to love it

into total being.

            …in the Gospel of John we discover that

the source of this…world’s hatred was its emptiness of

“truth” and the consequent failure to comprehend the

essential oneness of reality: the divine with the human

in the wholeness of creation brought to fullness in the

Incarnation of the Christ. The division characteristic

of “the world” resulted in a hatred so strong that

Jesus warns his friends, “The time is coming when

anyone who kills you will think he is doing a holy

duty for God.” (John 16:2).

            The sign of God is oneness, a reweaving

of the fabric of creation, a universalization of Incarnation.

The “truth” is that we are one. Truth, consequently, results

in love and compassion for all that is.…

            Where can we find this Christ-vision now,

I wonder as I hurry through the rain down the hill

from the torn oak. Where can we find it lived? I

know this: I often feel lonely for One I have sought

in every community to which I have belonged. I often

feel lonely for One whom I only glimpse through

the tears of our fragmented human efforts toward a

reconciled community of compassion.

We who stand at the threshold

Peering into the dark,

Offering the shell, the rock, the flower, and the song,

We who suffer the persecutions of the centuries,

            to remember,

            to transform

            to learn compassion,

            to give birth,

We bear Justice like a silver bird in our wombs;

And she will be born.

And she will fly before us as blessing

Into the unknown.

And we will follow

Seeing.