Somewhere in the Middle

 October 16, 2020 

Little enough in my active intelligence sees how I am and where I am. 

What is in me and of me is small and unaware. It is generally attached to outer life and my imagination of it.

Yet there are other forces at work within Being. There is a part that is in me but not of me; it flows in from the place where the soul brushes up against God. And from this place God flows in; and to the extent that God flows in, there God is, and that part is in relationship with me but not of me. I become subservient to it. I see that I am a servant; and it highlights how worthless I am in relationship to the force of God’s Grace and God’s Being.

How did this come about? I don’t know. I don’t actually know anything; I don’t even know what the question is. All knowing arrives in the act of unknowing; and all unknowing is invested in and wears the cloth of God as its arrival. 

This is the wedding gown. It is what unites me with God. If I put this robe on, I am prepared to receive God and receive life in equal measure, because they are not different. God is in life and life is in God. This does not mean that life is God; that would be the error of naturalism. Rather, God is in all things, and in life by greater measure than in that which, although also of God and in God, is still.

Yet life affects my vision of God, it prejudices me; and in the case of a man or a woman, like myself, it becomes so prejudiced that it mistakes itself for God. This is so commonplace it gets labeled ego and cast aside; I know what that is, no need to contemplate it.

Yet there is a need.

Affecting a stillness within brings one closer to that quiet affirmation available to those things which are not alive and yet also equally of God. This is the foundation of Being and of life; and it is not inanimate. Its animation, rather, is in rest itself. And perhaps I can discover a portion of that in myself, since even though I am of life, life begins in those materials and their own stillness.

As I rest and receive, I realize that life is a great bounty, a single note of vibration that is struck within every creature in its own harmonic. I am offered the objects, events, circumstances, and conditions of today as a blessing where I begin, a blessing I receive within this moment even as I write. All of the potential to Be and to live is embodied in this beginning. I am always at the beginning here, receiving life.

I have heard others this week speak of how things have a beginning, a middle, and an end. From the perspective of the conceptual mind, this is true; and yet these are arbitrary things, markers that do not actually mean what they appear to. 

For example, yesterday I was walking in Chelsea. It was a beautiful afternoon, mild and balmy, with very few clouds in the sky. The city streets were largely emptied, as they have been since the coronavirus epidemic seized us. An extended line of children threaded past me with their physical education instructor, wearing masks, on their way to the playground.

As I ambled along, I encountered patches of fairy light: beautiful emerald green fragments of glass from a beer bottle scattered on the pavement, in an oddly repeating pattern. I saw one small patch of these; then, one yard further, another one. And again.Even on the lowly concrete sidewalks of the city, God's gentle fairies were here; but they were hidden in the glass. They are great masters of concealment, after all. The smallest angels are forever sent to all the smallest places. We never notice them; our very size is blindness.

Each one of these small collections of glassy fragments had a perfection to it; as the sun shone through their resurrection into beauty, a blessed, luminescent green emerged. No real emerald ever gifted more.  

From one point of view, this is a story that began with silica, had a middle where there was a beer bottle, and ended in fragments. Yet for me it was the beginning of a great beauty of emerald light reflected up from the pavement, a pattern that spoke of joy and purity and growth and life. From one perspective it was litter, trash, and garbage; from another, it was enlightenment and hope. 

So what had its own story in one way had a different story in another one; and I see that there was no middle, beginning, or end, except as seen from one perspective. In reality, all objects, events, circumstances, and conditions are seen from every perspective by God, not just one; and so the linear inflection of reason has nothing absolute to do with how things actually are. 

This is one of the aspects of what the Masters called eternity. Eternity does not have a beginning, a middle, and an end; and God lives in eternity, in all the perspectives, outside of time and outside of the imposition of a storyline.

My Being in itself is of the same nature. Yet my awareness at once shrinks it down to a storyline; and then I believe the story line. It closes off all the other perspectives. The doors are shut. I am in this one room. 

Yet I could live in all the rooms; there is a big house here.

Perhaps this little essay serves as an illustration of how the mind can be useful in acquiring a different understanding of things. I am made of attitudes. Things are either broken glass or experiences of beauty. But they are actually both things, not one. In fact, they are many things. If my attitude tells me this or that is garbage, that is an end. 

Yet even garbage is the beginning of something as well.

How much does each of my attitudes weigh in Being? There is a gravity within. It is said that imagination fills the void of self; yet sensation establishes self. In establishing, it rests in stillness; in stillness it already fills.

When stillness is full, imagination completes itself without artifice. 

It is not the imagination that distracts us; it is the artifice attached to it.

It’s commonplace for me to write essays that seem to have some kind of a point and a direction. Yet these are just personal notes; and I suppose there is no great lesson in them. Just an attempt to be within life, to receive God’s blessing, and to contemplate the great glory that flows into us every day, which we are slow to recognize and even slower to give thanks for.

So this morning I give thanks for this day. I hope to meet it with the honor it deserves.

May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.