You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star.
Nietzsche
…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 us.
Rowan Williams
In the beginning when God created the heaven and the earth,
the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep,
while a wind from God swept over the face of the water.
Genesis 1:1-2
Image: Natalya Rusetska, First Day of Creation
To be salvific, the experience of chaos, that is the radical breakdown of the predictable, must be openly acknowledged; we cannot learn from the ordeal if we deny it is happening to us. That is what we mean by conversion in gospel life.
Gerald Arbuckle
This journey ‘will always be accompanied by some measure of uncertainty, pain and confusion. Those negative feelings are the nudgings of God’.
Gerard Hughes
In a manner of speaking, the soul has a principle of chaos and a principle of order within it and its health depends upon giving each its due. Too much order and you die of suffocation; too much chaos and you die of dissipation.
Ronald Rolheiser
Image: Natalya Rusetska, Creation of the World
Chaos challenges our need for order and control. Instead of fighting your inner chaos- out of fear- try and notice it, name it and befriend it as a source of creative energy. As you identify the chaos in your life/world imagine Holy Spirit hovering over this chaos – promising life, order and purpose.
Living systems, when confronted with change have the capacity to fall apart and reorganize themselves- adapting in response to what is called a ‘strange attractor’. We must be willing to move into the place of confusion and ‘not knowing’ – trusting in the Spirit’s capacity to constantly renew all things.
St. Augustine said that God is always wanting to give us good things, but our hands are too full to receive them. And our hands are too full because we cannot bear such emptiness. For deep within us there is a fearful anxiety – that we are not good enough, that we will be ‘found wanting’, that we have to ‘make’ something of ourselves. If only we could see that our reality – our poverty and vulnerability and emptiness – is the place where God meets us. ‘Pray as you can….’ and in doing so meet the real God.
The images in this post are contemporary painting by Ukrainian iconographer Natalya Rusetska.
My art is about the eternal, the timeless, the extraterrestrial, the hidden. One of the inherent features of sacred art is symbolism. This is a figurative creation that reveals the inner essence of the depicted. Sacred art affects and changes the spiritual state of human. Source: Natalya Rusetska
Text by Charles Anthony Silvestri
Whenever there is birth or death,
The sacred veil between the worlds grows thin and opens slightly up,
Just long enough for Love to slip,
Silent, either in or out of this, our fragile, fleeting world,
Whence or whither a new home waits.
And our beloved ones draw near,
In rapt anticipation, or in weary gratitude, they stand
Our loved ones stand so close, right here,
Just on the other side Of Eternity.
For a printable PDF of the text of this meditation please click on the link below.
