Our reading of the gospel story can and should be an act of personal communion with the living God
William Temple
William Temple, one of the great Archbishops of Canterbury in the 20th century said once that though the story of Jesus happened long ago, in it “we apprehend present fact”. This is because the story is the expression of the One in whom we live and move and have our being, so that whatever finds expression there is true now. “Our reading of the gospel story can and should be an act of personal communion with the living God”. We are not looking for insights so much as a lived and living encounter with God.
In Jesus, we are offered not so much a message, or a doctrine we need to believe, but a living encounter with a reality that is at the very heart of everything that is.
We all fear our symptoms and want to heal them. We go to all kinds of healers, not realizing that our worst problem is not the sickness, but that we are hypnotized by a culture into believing that what we experience is bad and has to be repressed and healed instead of lived and loved.
Arnold and Amy Mindell
We fear pain or biological death so much that we de-value life itself and make the cure of disease a supreme value. We rightly rejoice in and co-operate with everything in medical science and research which works towards healing. Yet healing is not an end in itself – nor is death. What is on offer is a deeper and closer relationship with the One Who is – which will always spell freedom and life and hope….
What do I want?
What do I value most deeply?
Meaning, security, freedom,
relationships, happiness, love, health….?
So I saw and understood
that our faith is our light in
our night;
which light is God, our
endless day.
Julian of Norwich
The images in this post are of the work of Nancy Holt. She created Sun Tunnels in the Great Basin Desert in Utah in 1977.
“By marking the yearly extreme positions of the sun, Sun Tunnels indicates the “cyclical time” of the solar year. The center of the work becomes the center of the world. The changing pattern of light from our “sun-star” marks the days and hours as it passes through the tunnel’s “star-holes.”
I wanted to bring the vast space of the desert back to human scale. I had no desire to make a megalithic monument. The panoramic view of the landscape is too overwhelming to take in without visual reference points. The view blurs out rather than sharpens. Through the tunnels, parts of the landscape are framed and come into focus.”
From Sun Tunnels, Nancy Holt, 1977
For more information on Sun Tunnels visit the Smithson Foundation
i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
E. E. Cummings
For a printable PDF of the text of this meditation please click on the following link.
1 Comment
Thank you for your insights and wisdom, Philip.