May you have joy and peace in the temple of your senses.
May you receive great encouragement when new frontiers beckon.
May you respond to the call of your gift and find the courage to follow its path.
May the flame of anger free you from falsity.
May warmth of heart keep your presence aflame and may anxiety never linger about you.
May your outer dignity mirror an inner dignity of soul.
May you take time to celebrate the quiet miracles that seek no attention.
May you be consoled in the secret symmetry of your soul.
May you experience each day as a sacred gift woven around the heart of wonder.
3 Prisons We Choose to Live In
The Beauty of Wild Distance
Outside there is great distance. When you walk out into the landscape the fields stretch away towards the horizon. At dawn, the light unveils the vast spread of nature. Gnarled stones hold nests of fossils from a time so distant we cannot even imagine it. At night, the stars reflect light from the infinite distance of the cosmos. When you experience this distance stretching away from the shore of your body, it can make you feel minuscule. Pascal said, “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.” There is a magnificent freedom in Nature; no frontier could ever frame her infinity. There is a natural wildness in the earth. You sense this particularly in wild places that have never been tamed by human domestication. There are places where the ocean praises the steady shore in a continual hymn of wave. There are fresh, cold streams pouring through mountain corners in a rhythm that never anticipated the gaze of a human eye. Animals never interfere with the wildness of the earth. They attune themselves to the longing of the earth and move within it as if it were a home rhythm. Animals have no distance from the earth. They have no plan or programme in relation to it. They live naturally in its landscapes, always present completely to where they are. There is an apt way in which the animal who always lives in the “now” of time can fit so perfectly into the “where” of landscape. The time and mind of the animal rest wherever it is. The poet Wendell Berry says, “I come into the peace of wild things…. /…For a time / I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”
The House Keeps the Universe Out
The human person is the creature that changes the wildness of the earth to suit the intentions of his own agenda. Gerard Manley Hopkins argues against disturbing Nature: “Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.” Homo sapiens is the one species that has deliberately altered the earth. One of the first ways this happened was by clearing trees and land to build homes. Humans wanted to come in from the great immensities of Nature and the heavens. Homes provided shelter against marauding animals. They also provided shelters of belonging. Perhaps the awakening of infinity in the mind demanded relief from the cosmos in the refuge of simple belonging. At another level, the home represents a certain limitation. It frames off the privacy of your life from the outside world. As cities expand octopus-like into the countryside, it is sad to see beautiful fields serrated with replica housing developments. An old neighbour of mine who rarely visited the city until recently was heard to remark as he looked at all the housing developments, “The houses are all the same. How would a person find his way home in the evening?” A few minutes later the logic of his own musing had the solution: “I bet you they are all numbered.”
A house can become a little self-enclosed world. Sheltered there, we learn to forget the wild, magnificent universe in which we live. When we domesticate our minds and hearts, we reduce our lives. We disinherit ourselves as children of the universe. Almost without knowing it, we slip inside ready-made roles and routines which then set the frames of our possibilities and permissions. Our longing becomes streamlined. We acquire sets of convictions in relation to politics, religion, and work. We parrot these back and forth at each other, as if they were absolute insights. Yet for the most part these frames of belief function as self-constructed barriers, fragile clichés pulled around our lives to keep out the mystery. The game of society helps us to forget the unknown and subversive presence of the human person. The control and ordering of society is amazing: we comply so totally with its unwritten rules. In a city at morning, you see the lines of traffic and the rows of faces all on their way to work. We show up. We behave ourselves. We obey fashion and taste. Meanwhile, almost unknown to ourselves, we are standing on wild earth at a crossroads in time where anything can come towards us. Yet we behave as if we carry the world and were the executives of a great plan. Everywhere around us mystery never sleeps. The same deep nature is within us. Each person is an incredibly sophisticated, subtle, and open-ended work of art. We live at the heart of our own intimacy, yet we are strangers to its endless nature.
Our Fear of Freedom: The Refuge of False Belonging
On the outside a person may seem contented and free, but the inner landscape may be a secret prison. Why do so many of us reduce and domesticate our one journey through this universe? Why do we long for the invisible walls to keep us in and keep mystery out? We have a real fear of freedom. In general, everyone is apparently in favour of freedom. We fight for it and we praise it. In the practice of our lives, however, we usually keep back from freedom. We find it awkward and disturbing. Freedom challenges us to awaken and realize all the possibilities that sleep in the clay of our hearts. Dostoyevsky’s legend of the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov is a haunting reflection on the idea of freedom. In the story Jesus comes back to sixteenth-century Seville during the Spanish Inquisition. He is put in prison, and the Cardinal Inquisitor comes to interview Jesus, but he remains silent. The Cardinal complains to Jesus in a fascinating monologue: “Why did you have to come back and interfere with our work?” He suggests that Jesus made a fatal mistake in overestimating humans. We are not capable of using the freedom that he attributed to and expected of us. The Cardinal says that the Church “corrected” his work. Instead of the invitation to liberation and creativity, the Church chooses to offer the people “miracle, mystery and authority.” This is what people like and need. People are not capable of freedom.
The Cage of Frightened Identity
In the inner landscape of the soul is a nourishing and melodious voice of freedom always calling you. It encourages you to enlarge your frames of belonging—not to settle for a false shelter that does not serve your potential. There is no cage for the soul. Each of us should travel inwards from the surface constraints and visit the wild places within us. There are no small rooms there. Each of us needs the nourishment and healing of these inner clearances. One of the most crippling prisons is the prison of reduced identity. The way we treat our own identity is often Procrustean. In Greek legend, Procrustes was a robber who stretched his victims until they fitted the length of his bed. Each one of us is inevitably involved in deciphering who we actually are. No other can answer that question for you. “Who are you?” is a surface question which has a vast, intricate rootage. Who are you behind your mask, your role? Who are you behind your words? Who are you when you are alone with yourself? In the middle of the night, when you awake, who are you then? When dawn rescues you from the rainforest of the night, who are you before you slip back safely beneath the mask and the name by which you are known during the day? It is one of the unnoticed achievements of daily life to keep the wild complexity of your real identity so well hidden that most people never suspect the worlds that collide in your heart. Friendship and love should be the safe regions where your unknown selves can come out to play. Instead of holding your friend or beloved limited within the neat cage of frightened identity, love should liberate both of you to celebrate the festival of complexity within you. We remain so hesitant and frightened to enjoy the beauty of our own divinity.