Sunday, May 18, 2008

What to do while in between worlds

My friend Carl just posted about being "in-between worlds" because of his love for Christ and the church, and his love for nature and the things of earth as well.

I have a theory that much of the way we each interpret the spiritual world stems from the way we first experienced it: for Carl, his story of his initial spiritual experience as a teen confirms this: he definitely found himself "between worlds" in that original encounter, and indeed for many years afterwards.

My own first encounter with God included the awareness of the calling, "Thou art a priest forever in the order of Melchisedek." From this perspective, if I were to find myself in Carl's place I would have an agenda, an action plan, already in place--one given to me, not of my own design.

The Melchisedek intercessor performs both sides of the priestly function: he takes the needs and pains and "gifts" of the earth and brings them as an offering to God. And he takes the heavenly gifts of grace and sacrifice and redemption and healing and transformation, and presents them to the people as the expression of divine love to them.

So while I am by nature a contemplative, yet the middle ground "between worlds" does not become for me a place of speculation, but of action, being the "bridge of love" that Carl is calling for in his other post for today!

I offer this to Carl in thanks for a challenge he gave me some time back, that is, to include the drive to communicate our "mystical" or spiritual experiences in my definition of "mystical." This is some of the fruit of that: the communication or "bridge work" is inherent in the original spiritual call, and it is functioning at least to the extent that you can see here.

Thanks, Carl!
Peter

Friday, May 16, 2008

a poem written May 10, 2008

Have you seen the glory of God?
The place of Nothingness in the cosmos
from which Everything comes?
The fullness that fills all the Emptiness?
The Oneness beyond the Void
beyond all the Particles?

Have you gone back down through
your weakest weaknesses,
your greatest losses, your
most profound and chronic lacks
down through the bottom and out
the bottomless into the
great empty black hole
where you are alone,
where you are not?

Have you seen from there
as if from afar, and tiny,
coming into the center
and filling all the empty space
the light, the point
that is greater than all it fills
and growing, the light
endlessly exploding beyond
its vast dark house,
endlessly, tirelessly filling all
dark corners and hollows
and racing beyond to create
and fill yet more new spaces?

I have, and I highly recommend it.