“Life is this simple. We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the divine is shining through us all the time. This is not just a nice story or fable. This is true.” Thomas Merton
He was a remarkably unattractive man, a dirty, dusty and rumpled beggar, seated at the doorway to Saint Sernin, the magnificent Toulouse Basilica. I had skirted widely past him on my busy way to hear the Sunday music and to light holy candles. Once inside, I was enchanted by the smell of incense, the majesty of light, and the power of the organ as it echoed through the building’s high arches and deep into my body. My heart was full of gratitude and mystery.
As I settled – and despite my earlier reluctance – I couldn’t forget him. I saw how I had
turned away. There emerged an opening, a new willingness in my mind and heart to see and to share. I thought of old stories of pilgrims who offered alms to beggars only to realize that they were in the presence of Jesus. “Maybe,” I thought, “he is the Buddha in disguise, waiting patiently for me to show up.” I decided to follow the inspiration and to return. Once outside, I moved close, offering my full presence and the largest bill I carried.
That small intention opened mysteriously and deeply to the sacred. He, too, quietly paused. He turned. Now fully present himself, he looked directly at and into me. He received my gift. We quietly rested together in seeing and, indeed, in knowing one other. He pierced my heart as, for just that moment, all barriers dissolved and we truly were one. All barriers. Dissolved. We each knew that we saw. It was a magical dip into the infinite, all the more exquisite because it was so clearly not about the details of the moment or our personal selves. It was a sweet moment of grace, in which we touched – together – into a simple and pure awareness. There were no separate selves to explain or defend. Words and thought blew away; there was only being. My heart sang with the seeing and the knowing of it. My heart sings in the telling, even now.
I think of Thomas Merton’s story of his experience on an ordinary day at an ordinary crosswalk in ordinary downtown St Louis. “I was suddenly overwhelmed,” he said, “with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness… This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud.”
Yes.
It makes me consider: how very, very many of these magical and sacred awarenesses I miss because I think I know what I’m doing: times when my body or my mind is so busy and preoccupied with getting from a place where I used to be to a place where I (think I) will be next. I can so easily forget to be.. simply…. Here. I can so easily get caught up in superficial details and I can so easily miss the gifts of seeing clearly, if only for a moment, what is most deeply real.
Without that presence – here, now, I mistakenly believe that my mind’s constructions are real, that division is real. I’m told that all separation, all division is a mental illusion, a trick played by my mind: that we are one is the heart of my spiritual practice. It is, indeed, the fundamental insight of all of the great spiritual traditions: that the ordinary way that I perceive the “reality” of things is useful and functional, but it is not the end of the story. Deeper levels of awareness are available. I am reminded that these depths are not somewhere else; they are not in some other “better” world or in a “better” person. There is just this moment; full and loving presence. Here, now: this is my path.
Any moment – every moment – offers me a gift: “Here,” it says, “look here; there is liberation available here.” I am invited again and again to remember, to wake up, to look… and look again… more deeply, into and through the darkness, opening to receive goodness and light My first impulse to turn away on that ordinary Sunday morning, my struggle against the call of generosity was a signal, a blessing in disguise. Once known by me, it was an invitation to open, to be…simply… present… available. All of my experience, really, is like that: invitation to explore and discover how a wise and kind presence will allow these deeper levels of awareness to unfold into seeming miracles of mystery guided by a grace that is indeed beyond measure.
“It seems to me that angels and bodhisattvas are everywhere available for consultation if only we can see them clear; they are unadorned, and joyous, and patient, and radiant, and luminous, and not disguised or hidden or filtered in any way whatsoever…and that simply to perceive them is to be blessed beyond the reach of language…is to be graced beyond measure or understanding…” Brian Doyle