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[Back to index of June articles] BEARINGS: By Martin L. Smith I was feeling low the other day, the kind of time when one needs a surprise call from a friend; the phone didn't ring, though. Yet, after a while, I got the befriending visit I needed in my soul. Into my reverie of self-pity and confusion, a poem came back to me unannounced. In this poem David Whyte evokes a scene from his days of trekking in the Himalayas. On the way to rejoin his companions, he arrives alone at a ravine where there was supposed to be a simple suspension bridge. To his horror he finds it in ruins: just a few cables with some fragments of planking "in a crazy jumble over the drop." However "young, male and immortal" he feels, he cannot risk the crossing. But just as he is about to turn back and retrace his steps, a little old woman bent under the weight of a basket full of dung arrives and greets him with the traditional salute namaste - 'I greet the God in you.' Almost before he can reply, she swiftly passes on her way, "and went straight across/the shivering chaos/of wood and broken steel/in one movement." The old woman represents that inner presence "with her no-nonsense compassion/and her old secret" who is able to press on where heroes' courage falters. The poem ends with the poet able to make the crossing after all: "'Namaste' you say/and follow." The poem takes us instantly into the paradox of the gospel, the conundrum of the Beatitudes of Jesus. What is the secret of the crossing that the strong balk at, but the poor in spirit can traverse in a single movement? What is this 'kingdom of God' that the rich cannot enter, but the humble can? I feel must wrestle more deeply with this question than I have ever done before. There is a crossing to make which privilege, education, property, talent, influence, insight, success, all those things so valued in our society, not least in Washington, do not necessarily empower us to make. Far from it. Instead all these forms of wealth can have the effect of freezing those who prize them at the brink, so that they -we? - are inevitably 'sent empty away,' as Jesus' mother Mary asserts with penetrating frankness in her Gospel song. It will be a long time before I really make progress in grasping the paradox of the Beatitudes, but I feel that adoration is one of the clues. In my experience, it is the poor who know best how to adore God. And in my experience, it is the entitled and privileged who are most knotted up with inhibitions to adoration. So much so, that many have absolutely no idea what it would be like. There are those who think about God, have feelings about God, occasionally address God. But there is a barrier. A holding back. A reserve. Just as surely as if separated by a ravine, adoration is an unknown territory on the other side, and the secure and privileged feel they just "can't go there." As if to adore God were to mean entering some dangerous emotional territory of spiritual fanaticism or abandon or vulnerability. I suppose it really is all about loss of control. Wealth not only makes you feel in control, it makes you feel you only exist if you stay in control. And adoration is the antithesis of control. It is loving the Mystery we very inadequately call God with the brakes off. It is letting go of self, enjoying the Beloved for the Beloved's sake. "Loving without why" as the mystics call it. If the poor have less to lose in their everyday lives, they are more practiced in having nothing to lose in their loving worship of God, letting go, admiring and reveling in God's Godness. I have seen adoration clearly revealed in the faces of the poor. On the face of Norah, our Irish housekeeper, saying the rosary. I have seen it in the faces of office workers in Paris spending half their lunch break in church. I have seen it on faces radiant with song in backstreet parish churches in Wales. In Sri Lanka at wayside shrines. (And, of course, I have seen it among middle class Episcopalians who have learned at no small cost to connect with their own inner human poverty, usually through meditation and the experience of suffering.) Loving the Holy One without why. Just because the Divine is absolutely to be loved with all one's heart. If it were not, it couldn't be God. Ask yourself: when I hear in church, "O come let us adore him" do I honestly know from experience what that means? (And I recommend David Whyte's poems. The one I quoted, called “The Old Interior Angel” is found in his collection Fire in the Earth, published by Many Rivers Press.) Martin L. Smith is a well-known spiritual writer and priest. He serves on the staff of St.Columba's, D.C. as theologian-in-residence. [Back to index of June articles]
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