Mysterium Inhabitum

My friend Dave shares about his life with a voice that quivers easily.  He’s so aware of the holiness of everything and especially everyone that he often has to hesitate in speaking to let the wave of emotion to wash over his heart so his tongue will speak clearly.  He’s in a holy place all the time when he considers his life.

With a recent experience, I was reminded of times when I felt this experience of being in a holy place, at times when holiness flared up, like the Aurora Borealis, bright enough for me to see it even amid the bright distractions of my life.  These were time when I was inclined to recline, to stop everything and allow my body to be weak and still, to be absent from everything else to respond to the presence of the moment.

When my brother Dan died I was visiting my son in Spain.  I’d known that he would die, lost as he was in a self-destructive lifestyle from which I was forbidden by him to meddle.  I was not tough enough to intervene, to try to use force on him, my older brother who had force on his side even in the way he loved me.  I knew that my time with Chris was the present calling to my mind and heart,

and that one of my brothers and sisters would be there with his uselessly resuscitated body while it was allowed to join his brain in death.  But in those next days in Chris’s ancient neighborhood on the Avenida del Born, I find myself again and again walking down the street from his apartment to the cool, dim, quiet of the church to fall into a pew, let my face fall into my hands, and just be numb.   Exhaustion forced me to let down my guard and allow the gravity and holiness of the experience to inhabit me.  This went on for days, during which Chris accepted the company of a companion who was mostly absent-minded.

When knowing or understanding fail us, we make a choice between polar opposites.  We escape into cynicism and doubt or, contrastingly, enter into the not known, allowing our emptiness to expand within us.  The natural, logical, explainable is pushed to our margins, and we are filled with mystery.

So it is perhaps the commonly guarded and often cynical society that people like Dave disturb, with his speaking from the mystery that fills him, inhabits him, holds him by the hand, lifts and embraces and calls to him.  I am challenged and blessed to sit regularly in his company, to allow the Mystery that modulates and vivifies his words to enter me, to disarm me, to displace my cynicism, to find in me hearth in which It can burn, a home in which it can sleep, and waken, and grow, from which it may depart from time to time to spread its Mysterious essence in the world.