Posts Tagged ‘becoming’

I hadn’t expected it and maybe it was the change from the slate blue lake to the closeness of the green of the island, but once I set foot upon Innisfallen, I knew it was a special place. I wonder if, as I suspect,  it is inherently spiritual or if the centuries of learning, contemplative practice and service make it a place more spiritual than most.

I wonder if that is possible, that any one place can be more alive than others. I doubt it.

I suspect very strongly that Innisfallen is inherently spiritual, but I also suspect very strongly that the years of work that happened there make that spirituality more available to the dull senses of the all-too-common and limited human.

At any rate, as soon as I set foot upon the island, I knew. It was like seeing a lovers face after a long absence, but it was also the thrill of new love; the excitement of seeing new life and knowing that that life is surfacing from somewhere deep within the cosmos, emerging here for whatever reason. I knew it, and I was thankful for knowing it.

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It was a grey and windy day, and only the first memory is a memory.

The sound of layers of jackets smacking in the wind, the moisture of wind-torn eyes on my cheek – or was it sideways rain? No, the sideways rain was with the Cailleach. She and the red haired kid in shorts looking sideways at the fekkin toorists were a day still far away, yet to come.

Another time, maybe. Here it was only me and the wind. And the tears that were not tears.

A grey and windy day, and I’d already waited five minutes.

Will this be the last time for me at the Hill of Tara? The last time I will stand upon the Mound of Hostages?

Only the first memory is a memory, all subsequent memories are memories of the memory, and now I am not standing upon the mound, I am cowering within it.

Cowering within it, with only the shaft of the sunrise once a year to tease me with thoughts of freedom and of me.

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Lately, I’ve been thinking of the boldness of it all, and I have a sneaking suspicion that the Morrigan wanted, desperately wanted Cuchulainn to reject her offer.

I wonder if it would be possible, in this late hour, to redefine the word religion. There are those who would say it is not necessary, that religion is in the proper box, where it belongs and needs no new definition, but I think it does.

Caging them in threats of eternal damnation or salvation, religion has stolen the story of mythology, the story of science, our human freedom. I think we need a new definition of religion that includes the mysticism of mythology and the understanding of science; one that embraces them within the arms of the natural process of becoming. This, rather than painting it as do or die and decorating it with sin and dogma and stiff ceremony, will be my definition of religion divorced from any denomination or dogma.

Or perhaps rather than a new definition of religion, it would be more appropriate to say that we need a better way of describing and engaging the process of maturation from a guided childish religion into a responsible and natural human way of being in the world.

That is where I take issue with the stigmatisms of religion. It doesn’t allow us to grow out of the spoon fed way of being a child religious and in to the spiritual responsibility and obligation of adulthood. Religion may well be in the proper pedantic box, but it is a box that few ever can break out of.

So let us now reject that form of being of religious and open the door to becoming Human.

Lately, I’ve been thinking of the boldness of it all. The boldness of deconstruction. The boldness of the void. The boldness of reconstruction. The boldness of healing of our enemy, religion.

It starts when we are born into this age, into the inherited ways of being, the historically determined meaning of religion.
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But for now we are in trouble. We have been raided. We are dead. We find ourselves in the paradoxical moment that is both death and birth.

Do we need a book of the dead?
Do we need a book of the living?
Could the book of the dead also be the book of the living?

This great book could show us the way into life within death, death within life. What wonders await us?

What perils?

Is there such a book? Is there a book of the living and of the dead, or should we leave the dead to the dead and seek a new way of living? A way of living that arises out of the death. Where is the way to move from this terrible moment where we are not dead yet we do not live, where we have perished, and have been birthed? Is there such a book to show us the way out of this terrible moment?

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It happens, doesn’t it?
The day comes when the world pushes open the door we have closed against the world.
-John Moriarty, What the Curlew Said

It does happen, doesn’t it?

That fateful day of the door crashing in on us, pushed open by the world, different levels of the world, that in one way or the other, we have been avoiding.

The fateful splintering of the door of denial, escapism and addiction. The door shattered by a reality that is larger than we imagined, larger even than we can imagine.

Thus shattered, the floodwaters of Reality come rushing in. A Reality made not of reality that we might know something of, but a Reality that is far beyond anything that even reality knows anything of. A Reality that includes, transcends and integrates. A Reality that has suffered long enough in its exclusion, an impatient Reality, a Reality needing to be on with its work of transformation, its task of becoming, its labor of emerging through us, into us. A Reality that, in actuality, amounts to little more than boundless Potentiality.

A Reality brimming with Potentiality already crashing over the edges of our perception, already straining the hinges of the soul.

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