BLESSINGS of the Autumn season, dear friends, as we ponder the Great Mystery. All is Mystery. Every individual is a mystery never to be fully known or understood. Enter, then, the Silence with open heart and recognize the wondrous mystery that is uniquely yours to live ... yours to share in loving service.
I no longer feel that life is ordinary. Everyday life is filled with mystery. The things we know are only a small part of the things we cannot know but can only glimpse. Yet even the smallest of glimpses can sustain us. Mystery seems to have the power to comfort, to offer hope, and to lend meaning in times of loss and pain. In surprising ways it is the mysterious that strengthens us at such times... What I have found in the end was that the life I had defended as a doctor as precious was also Holy.
God – and humankind too – is a mystery, a living paradox of opposites:
"Most deeply hidden and most nearly present, always acting and always at rest, still gathering and never wanting, seeking although in need of nothing!"
I dive down deep as I can and I find no end.
It is not outer reality that silence reveals, but our own innerness. Silence is essentially a surrender to the holiness of the divine mystery – whether we use these words or not. An atheist, calming his or her spirit in the peace of silence, is irradiated by the same mystery, anonymous but transforming. We are to listen. To what? To silence.
Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.
Taking on the mystery is yielding to grace, letting go of all analyses, explanations, ideologies, self-images, images of God, agendas, and expectations. Taking on the mystery is undergoing the finitude of years, hallowing diminishments, and living into the solitude of our own integrity. Taking on the mystery is undergoing the pain of learning that there re no empires favored by the Holy One ... the grief of understanding that there are not theologies favored by the Holy One. Taking on the mystery is acknowledging that we cannot name the mystery, though we try, we cannot claim the mystery, though we do. The mystery names and claims us ...
The sacred is plainly a mystery of consciousness – using the word MYSTERY to signify not a problem that can be intellectually solved, but a process of awakening and transformation that must be acted out in order to be experienced, and experienced if one is to make it one's own.
We are a unity in our diversity
Jewels in a very large web
connected by "Mystery"
But "Mystery" the same for all
but called by different names
The name may be the limit
that tears the strands apart
of the web
connecting us in it.
Spiritual disciplines are being renewed throughout the world. For some, the ultimate mystery of things is experienced in the depth of the inner self, for others in the human community, for still others in the earth process itself. Yet in each instance, the full sense of communion seems to be present.
O Great Mystery
We give thanks for the natural world we see:
All the Creatures, Stones and Plants
Who show us how to be.
We learn their lessos seek their truths,
Return our loving praise,
We honor the peace they show us,
Which guides our human ways.
We ask that we may become like them,
Living in harmony,
And deep within our heart of hearts,
Know the Sacred Mystery.
Dance was my way of praying, of listening, of celebrating, it wasmy way of being as beautiful as the life around me. Now I feel hideous, unloved, abandoned. I lie down and sob and I feel a screeching hunger for mil, for some essence to flow from the sky and reach down through my shattered mind and reconnect me to warmth and calm. And very gradually it happens. The life in the trees and grass and the warm rocks enters my body and joins me to them. One morning, I sit up and see the incandescent trees in silent communion with each other, immersed in love. This is the world, I think, the real world. Whatever happens to me, the world is still this luminous mystery.
If only we refuse to take our world for granted, we can detect something artful lurking at the heart of life, inviting us deeper into the world, allowing us to penetrate further and further into the Mystery of its creation, perhaps even promising us a new relation to everything we know.
And take upon 's the mystery of things,
As if we were God's spies.
The revealed mystery of God is fathomless.
Anyone who has probed the inner life, who has sat in silence long enough to experience the stillness of the mind behind its apparent noise is faced with a mystery. Apart from all the outer attractions of life in the world, there exists at the center of human consciousness something quite satisfying and beautiful in itself, a beauty without features. The mystery is not so much that these two dimensions exist – an outer world and the mystery of the inner world – but that we are suspended between them, as a space in which both worlds meet ... as if the human being is the meeting point, the threshold between two worlds.