It swells like a bubble blown by breathing time: You are stroking the cat on your lap and suddenly know that this is Love and together you are in a boundless world the confines of the clock had kept you from. The cat gets up and stretches. You eat your breakfast.
Or you are on your morning walk, and Eddie’s dark face illuminates your route with “good morning” from his wheelchair where he sits cheering on the accelerating sun. You say good morning back, and check the heart rate on your watch.
Or you see the image of Our Lady on the wall, standing on a crescent moon with stars around her head. She becomes a doorway that opens just a crack to flash the glint of God. Then a draft of time slams it shut, leaving longing to stand eloquent as an angel with a flaming sword barring the entrance to Eden.
The decision now is yours: Believe each moment is a hiccup, hallucination, or errant imagining that has nothing to do with the redundant daily? Or maybe it is the Life living in life: an invitation to Truth that you never but always knew.
Hagia Sophia is often seen as the feminine of God; Lady Wisdom is how I’ve come to know her in my own spiritual path, a friend who has stuck by me whether I wanted her to or not in the moment. In this painting she invites us to tea and has included hazelnuts; I am often overwhelmed by the immensity of God in this incomprehensible universe. Julian of Norwich in her mystical text speaks to this. She reminds me in my hazelnut smallness that Love in its hugeness has a place for me as well:
“And in this he showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazel nut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed. And it was as round as any ball. I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding, and thought, ‘What may this be?’ And it was answered generally thus, ‘It is all that is made.’ I marveled how it might last, for I thought it might suddenly have fallen to nothing for littleness.
“And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it. And so have all things their beginning by the love of God. In this little thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it. The second that God loves it. And the third, that God keeps it.
“But what is this to me? Truly, the Creator, the Keeper, the Lover. For until I am substantially “oned” to him, I may never have full rest nor true bliss. That is to say, until I be so fastened to him that there is nothing that is made between my God and me. This little thing which is created seemed to me as if it could have fallen into nothing because of its littleness. We need to have knowledge of this, so that we may delight in despising as nothing everything created, so as to love and have uncreated God. For this is the reason why our hearts and souls are not in perfect ease, because here we seek rest in this thing which is so little, in which there is no rest, and we do not know our God who is almighty, all wise and all good, for he is true rest. God wishes to be known, and it pleases him that we should rest in him; for everything which is beneath him is not sufficient for us. And this is the reason why no soul is at rest until it has despised as nothing all things which are created. When it by its will has become nothing for love, to have him who is everything, then is it able to receive spiritual rest.” (1st Revelation)
Sometimes doing art is a kind of healing. This painting, in particular, began with a memory of a moment many, many years ago, my earliest memory, I think. My not-yet-huge family was standing on a hill watching an itinerant carnival spinning a ferris wheel and merry-go-round on a lot in Northwood. A very small me, little more than a toddler, was circling my father, round and round, my hand self-tethered to his knees. But when I looked up, my father’s face wasn’t there. A strange man stared down at me. Of course, I was terrified by my father’s seeming disappearance. It was a momentary separation, but one that carved a missingness that has lived all these years in me.
During my meditation practice recently, I saw the idea of this painting: What if I sat with God on that hill of my imagination looking at horses freed from the merry-go-round and a ferris wheel turning in the stars? What if we looked together at the missingness that lives in the center of all relationships to see there the longing for completeness as a holy quest. I think that my own father, now in heaven living in perfect love, understands this now. I feel him scooping me up to look at the stars he loved so much. “Look, Kitty, that is Orion the Hunter and that bright one in his belt is Betelgeuse, one of the great navigational stars.” It brought him home when he flew rescue missions in the South Pacific during World War II. It guides me home today.
There is a big God out there counting the stars as they pass through the gate to universal pastures, feeding each its eon-ration of cloudy nebulae.
I am, I am told, a distant relative of stars, a supernova memory in its death-belch of hydrogen and dust, heaven’s indigestion hardened into clay.
I am a quantum in creation, a second in divine expression, as brief as the urge to blink, wee as a fruit-fly’s toe, smaller than just a thought and justly as large.
There is a little God too (the same one, actually) who dances with mockingbirds on the hot asphalt lots, who summons tiny suns from mosses growing between paving stones, who dares into play the stuttering desires for rebirth and destruction.
This little God has a big job too shepherding stars and children, small in stature, large in being, across the quadrants of our park constructing the contagion of laughter under our earth-shining moon, to entangle us with hope.
I imagine because you walked in here through this title, because you are reading this, that even though you don’t know me, you know me. We meet in this place of words of shared longing for something we can’t quite name.
Let the finger that touches this pencil touch the eyes that read these words, gently salving your eyelids with their meanings freed and liquid. We’ll crack open the O of wonder and let the air escape for both of us to breathe. I am reaching out to you right now: can you feel me touching the face that no one knows (even you) in this bright right now?
Together we can enter through the door of our yearning the endless room of love that is built by God, the room of humanhood pooled, so frail and so full of might. Here we might embrace the world and together hold it close as one would to calm an agitated child whose limbs thrash out against fear-of-many-names like the sudden arms of lightning in an April storm.
If you do not want this, stop reading now.
But if you do, follow this line of words into silence, into the stillness of the space of our sameness. (Even though I do not know you/I do. And even though you do not know me/you do.) We live in the might of our longing and hang curtains red in open windows to dance like flames in the wind that fills our room with All with flashing wings or fire or in a quiet sun.
Memorizing the Laws of Gravity 