Peace and love are always in us, living and working, but we are not always in peace and love.
Julian of Norwich
In God’s sight we do not fall: in our own sight we do not stand. And both of these are true, as I see it. But the way God sees is the higher truth.
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During our lifetime here we have in us a marvellous mixture of both well-being and woe.
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Peace and love are always in us, living and working, but we are not always in peace and love.
Julian of Norwich
Julian wrestled for years over her lived experience, and she came to see that the issue was not a question of either/or, but both/and. This paradox or tension, she saw, is never resolved by ignoring or denying either of the poles between which our lives are stretched. Rather we must embrace this tension as the very ground for our growing understanding of the truth, and the very reality where we will encounter God. Here is nothing less than the paradox of the Cross of Jesus: in its vulnerability and weakness we can meet the power and strength of God.
…behind and beneath the smooth wheels of the socially constructed world are two abiding facts: unreconciled pain and unexhausted compassion, the history of men and women and the history of God with them (with us).
Rowan Williams
There are only two feelings.
Love and fear.
Michael Leunig
Image: John Coburn, Four seasons of spirituality, death and transfiguration
There are only two realities: Dread and the surviving sense of a possible happiness.
Adrienne Rich
If we want God to be real, then we must be real ourselves. We deal with reality, not fantasy: we find hope in the way things are, not how we would like them to be. This means facing ourselves as we are: facing our fears, anxieties and doubts: facing our illusions, even our delusions, and our projections, and how we so readily blame others. Telling and facing our truth sets us free.
There is another world, and it is in this one.
Paul Eluard
Image: John Coburn, Four spiritual seasons, the tree of life
All the time something is happening, something else is happening as well. The spiritual life is simply paying attention to what is, to everything that is, not only within us, but outside of us- and opening ourselves up to the possibility that that in and through everything that is, in the reality we find ourselves in, we are being addressed.
Instead of knowing ourselves solely in the reality of being chosen and loved by God, we must now know ourselves in the possibility of choosing.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Though we live in a world that dreams of ending
that always seems about to give in
something that will not acknowledge conclusion
insists that we forever begin.
Brendan Kennelly
Image: John Coburn, Paradise Garden
[Hope] is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless how it turns out.
Vaclav Haval
God’s first gift to us is to be able to say “I am”- to discover our treasure, that we are loved and accepted as we are. This then becomes the ground for our hope, where we find, often in seemingly impossible circumstances, the courage to choose to become fully alive and fully human.
The images in this post are of tapestries by the Australian artist, John Coburn. The image at the top of the post is Four spiritual seasons, Resurrection.
‘In this tapestry, “Paradise Garden”, is a traditional subject for art. There are paradise gardens in Persian art and in Egyptian art. Some of the early Christian art in some of the churches are like beautiful gardens and there were paradise gardens in medieval art. All my conceptions of heaven are somehow like Australia and I think Australia in the summer is like a paradise garden. But, then again, when you think of the Italian Renaissance artists, their conceptions of heaven were like the hills of Tuscany, weren’t they? So, I just tried to make my paradise garden as beautiful as I possibly could.’ (John Coburn, 1988)
Before the fruit is ripened by the sun,
Before the petals or the leaves uncoil,
Before the first fine silken root is spun,
A seed is dropped and buried in the soil.
Before the Easter alleluias ring,
Before the massive rock is rolled aside,
Before the fear of death has lost its sting,
A just and loving man is crucified.
Before we gain the grace that comes through loss,
Before we live by more than bread and breath,
Before we lift in joy an empty cross,
We face with Christ the seed’s renewing death.
Text and tune © 1986 Oxford University Press
For a printable PDF of the text of this meditation please click on the link below.
