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Last night at 10:30, coughing interrupted this dream:
I’m inside an antiquity museum in a Middle Eastern country. A native guide points out the features of the Tree of Jesse, a ceiling-to-floor hand-woven wall hanging, striking for its varied colors of blue. No other tourists are around.
At 7:15 this morning, I made myself open my eyes, despite being deliciously swaddled in effervescent-love. I tingled all over, yet had no recall of the supporting story. From the kitchen came the aroma of simmering quinoa, my breakfast, in the works by my helper. Also astounding was the night of uninterrupted sleep that did nothing for my chronic exhaustion that hangs like widow’s weeds around my psyche.
Yet, the first dream filled me with awe: it felt like I was standing on holy ground, supported by pregnant silence rejoicing in unseen harmonies. The blues of the wall hanging soothed me. At the same time, the guide’s identification of Jesus’s forebears perched upon limbs of the Tree of Jesse quickened me. It felt like I had entered the O Antiphon, Root of Jesse, and again heard its plea:
Come and deliver us, and delay no longer.
And the memory of this morning’s experience still lingers in my psyche: no unmet needs, communion with HP, joy beyond telling—perhaps a foretaste of eternal life; perhaps also an assuagement of recent grief as well as a reminder that suffering is the usual precedent before transition. There are few exceptions.
So again grounded in the present, I wait and pray with everyone else …
From the depths of Silence stream compassion, forgiveness, and love. Merry Christmas!
Upon the plank fence in my back yard, a solitary cardinal alighted, the morning sun brilliancing its redness. Motionless, it peered in my direction as if wanting to communicate. Breathing slowed—I waited, steeped within stillness. Such authority the cardinal manifested, such power it exuded. I was in the presence of what I knew not.
Then it was gone. I had been visited and knew it in the marrow of my bones. Rather than resume my work in the kitchen, I savored this intrusion.
Immediately, the Eastern Orthodox icon of Christ Pantocrator, the All Powerful, came to mind, often depicted wearing a red tunic; His eyes often outlined in black. In his left hand, the jeweled book of the gospels; his right, raised in teaching or blessing.
This image, rendered in mosaics or frescoes or board paintings, still adorns domes, apses, and walls of ancient Eastern Orthodox churches; it afforded critical protection to worshipers huddled below in the naves, imploring deliverance from wars and pestilence and so much more—Such was the demonstrable power this icon exerted upon their imaginations.
So has the cardinal/Christ Pantocrator something to tell us, today, given our diseased planet? I think so. Seems to me it’s about reopening the gospels, embracing its disciplines, and undergoing conversion of heart: essential for developing fresh authority to reanimate our social institutions and thrive. Such, alone, has power over the allure of darkness in any of its manifestations.
So simple, it sounds, that many turn away—precisely the response Jesus experienced in first-century Palestine. But fortunately for us, a remnant did not. There are still some of them among us. Such have been my teachers…
Heart Whisperings 