If a meditation/polemic on Mother God interests you, here’s a link to an article I had published in yesterday’s Edmonton Journal.
(Photo: Cover art for Lost in Wonder -Esther DeWall)
And Happy Mother’s Day!
Pain
Pain conspires to separate out our constituent parts and experience them as unassociated. Pain proposes a symptomatic view that can lead us away from our holistic memories. And as in the bodily organism so in the communal organism. Pain will plot to part us. But it will fail. The anonymity that pain desires, that would also lead to its intensification, will be overcome by the interconnection of compassion. The suffering of one will be borne by others, and the healing of the others will be transferred back to the sufferer. Just as a touch, a slight loving pressure, an acupuncturist’s needle in an extremity, will free an endocrine gland for proper secretion, or move the liver to synthesize, or strengthen a heart. Truth is found in the interconnected whole.
A Hiss and a Moan
Regrettably, the posts have been sparse…I have been travelling and, not so regrettably, I’ve been at the cabin watching….
Blithe seagulls ride thermal drafts and sing in their coarse-throated way. They are high into the blue. High enough to blend in, appearing like micro-clots of cloud. Hairy woodpeckers, dizzy from pounding away at a young poplar beside the cabin, take a break in the sun, re-reddening their tiny crowns. Squirrels scold and tease and robins pull worms out from under a mat of leaves, like perfect quilters pulling fat bits of thread through cloth.
In the mean time I’m obsessing about ways to move a mother skunk along. She’s taken a home under the shed and I fear she may have young. It’s May so the possibility is there. I’ve considered marking my territory with my own urine, not knowing if this is an offence for her, or if it’s of no consequence, or inviting. Who knows, really, the way of skunks.
I’ve also thrown the rest of the mothballs as far as I could under the shed where her run is. I know about mothballs. They worked a couple of years ago when we had a skunk, perhaps the same one, under the cabin. She moved out in a couple days.
I check back occasionally, rattle some wood planks that rest there, and listen for a response. She’s still there. I hear her grunting. It’s a guttural spastic-larynx effort. Something between a cough a hiss and a moan. I try imitating it but it’s beyond me. I haven’t the cords or the chords, for it.
I envy the skunk. A thoroughly humble and innocent creature, that at the same time understands the world begins and ends with her. And who am I to her? A passing annoyance. Perhaps she pities me. Pities my consciousness, my future and pastness. She has no quarrel with me, it is I who am dictated to, she controls the game. And it’s me who’s reduced to hissing and moaning.
Art of Communion
May dawns gray. My screen dawns a dull white. I yearn for the sun and long for words transcendent. Words that commune as much as communicate.
I have most of the tools of communication at my disposal but what I need most is communion. I’m not alone.
We are blessed with a broad spectrum of mediums. But we’re neophytes when it comes to recognizing and understanding this blessing. It almost seems that there is an inverse relationship between the number of methods of communication and true communion. We live in this place, over-turned, unaware, missing the forest for the trees, where communication either obscures or masquerades as communion.
Yesterday, a friend pointed out the difference between communion and communication, and how we often confuse the two. As a father, he had believed that when in conversation with his children he needed an outcome, and that without one there was a failure of communication, an opportunity was missed, a point of intimacy lost. He desired and aimed for communion, but got stuck at communication. A deep desire for communion’s intimacy was lost in a kind of forced communication. When we shine a light on the two, the difference between communication and communion becomes obvious enough. But in practice, we muddy them up. We fall prey to the illusion of utility. That is, we trust communication technique over the art of communion.
Perhaps it’s our culture, perhaps it’s our insecurities, our fear, our impatience. Perhaps we are bewitched by management and order. Communication is hailed as generative of outcomes and so we construct and manipulate and are left without that special kind of energy that enables us to release and wait–waiting being a particular kind of trust.
But the good news is that our adolescent infatuation with technique–the same technique that we also use to shield us from communion–can be transformed. We can grow up. We can awaken to the truth that all streams of media are handmaidens of communion. Beguiled no longer we can take back the end from the means. We can call…just to talk. We can try silence in the presence of friends. We can play, walk, breath, break bread, commune.
If we enter the art, we find that life has its own order. Ours is to trust life to lead us into communion. Ours is to listen to life, as St. Benedict exhorts, “with the ear of the heart.” And it’s here we find communion within time and play. Just so–in the middle of a spontaneous egg fight in the backyard with his son, my friend found communion.