Behold the Lilies

"We cannot live in a world that is not our own, in a world that is interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a home. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening, to use our own voice, to see our own light." (Hildegard of Bingen, 11th C.

Take a walk in any field. Go hiking in the deep woods. The world is an unfathomable mystery.

You'll be suddenly awakened by a little flower among the ferns: a trillium. It pulsates into your optic nerve as a stream of photons, a radiance un-mediated, un-translated by thought.

Do not look at this flower through your concept of it. Look at the flower itself, what James Joyce called "the ineluctable modality of the visible." The flower has no name. It is no-thing, unrestricted by its outline, a gush of revelation breaking into three dimensions from beyond time and place. The flower flows from the unfathomable depths of uncreated Silence, through the world, and into your eyes - an offering. In this sacrament of perception, consciousness returns to consciousness through the mystery of matter.

Jesus, the wild poet of the Galilean meadows, pointed to this flower and said, "Behold the lillies of the field!" He wanted his disciples to learn everything they needed to know about God by looking at a flower. Just so, in his final gathering, Buddha held up a little blossom, twirling it in his fingers but saying nothing. Ananda smiled. He understood the complete Dharma through one little flower. Thus the Buddha passed the lineage of wisdom to Ananda. William Blake, the poet of perception, wrote: "See a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower!" The Kingdom of God is not a theological abstraction, but the break-through of this trillium, one white three-petaled explosion nestled in oceanic furrows of green.

Now, if you are like me and other "educated" Westerners, you do something remarkable at this point on your forest walk. You flee from revelation into thinking. Turning to your hiking partner, you ask, "What is that flower's name?" The other replies, "It's a trillium." She may even nail it down with Latin: "trillium grandiflorum."

What has just happened? You have settled for a concept, a verbal description of reality, rather than suffering the nameless onslaught of Radiance. You closed your eyes to the incarnation of the Wordless, the silent offspring of Father Consciousness and Mother Matter. You replaced the living Christ with a ghost of thought. Sometimes names kill. Sometimes we need to un-name things.

The world is a Mystery. According to the Greek fathers of the primitive Church, a Mysterion is a transforming encounter with the divine, beyond names and beyond intellect. Creation ex nihilo, from nothing, is a Mysterion. The incarnation of Christ in a human body is a Mysterion. The Sin of ignorance, our refusal to acknowledge that we live in God's perpetual miracle, is a Mysterion. These first theologians were mystics who refused to define the mysteries, for a Mysterion is experienced, not conceived. In the Middle Ages, however, Christianity lost much of its power and grace when scholastic intellectuals attempted to define as dogma what is intuitive and nameless.

When we define the mysterious suchness of creation through our intellect, we super-impose a gray ashen parallel world upon God's miracle. We impose on nameless radiance an incessant commentary of thoughts. We attempt to keep pace with the fluidity of experience by solidifying it with names, freezing the verb-like essence of the world into nouns. Then we dwell not in the world, but in our description of the world. Thought constructs an asymptotic secondary world of abstractions that never quite touches the flesh.

Here is precisely why, in God's revelation to Moses in Exodus 3, when Moses asks for God's name, the Divine refuses to become a noun, revealing only the verb, I AM. Perhaps this was the lost commandment which God wrote on the tablet of the law that was shattered: "Thou shalt not conceive the world, lest thou cover it with an ash of names."

A stream of Radiance flows toward us through the world, yearning to touch our hearts by the sacramental power of eye, ear, tongue, fingertips and nostrils. A similar stream of Radiance also flows from within us, through these same gateways of sensation, yearning to touch the incarnate world. The Radiance that flows toward us and the Radiance that flow out of us, meeting in moments of perception, are one Radiance, having divided itself into subject-object duality before the creation of the world.

This pulsation of the divine Unity into the play of subject and object is the dance of Shiva and his consort, Shakti. She becomes mother-matter in order to dance with consciousness, to delight Him, to return the offering of his creative fire through form. Therefor, when we reunite the light within us and the light outside us, through any mere sacrament of the commonplace, perceiving the shudder of a leaf or the glimmering of a dragonfly's wing, we allow God and his Spirit to make love, uniting themselves in our act of sensation. This is the bliss which re-unites and heals the world, the dissolution of duality in the One. And it is no more nor less than the simple delight of sensation, merging matter and consciousness.

This reunion of creation and creator, I call Radiance. You may call it what you like. But it is a new kind of substance, the substance of Grace, forming a New Earth, neither matter nor spirit but something sensuously transcendent, divinely sensual. And the quiet, moment-by-moment experience of this unity, through a mindful perception of the ordinary, enacted in our eyes, ears, nostrils, tongue, even the inner fragrance of our gentlest breath, is our true vocation on the earth.

God's ocean of light yearns to wash the shores of our body in its waves. Why then do we create an artificial veil of thought between world and awareness, an ashen layer of names? Some of us spend our whole lives cultivating this ghostly wall of thought. Are we frightened of drowning in the blessed radiance of sensation?

Blake wrote, "We were put here for a little while to learn to bear the beams of love." But humans can't stand such unfiltered beams. We cover our eyes, not with our hands, but with our mind.

Then we need some patient old shamanic farmer to point out what is. We need the artist, perhaps Cat Stevens, to sing us the ancient Celtic spell: "Morning has broken, like the first morning!" We need poets to show us that the world is a dew of Spirit, condensing into matter. In truth, this world is hardly ever one moment old. We try to make it permanent through names, concepts, beliefs. We try to impose the past on this fleeting now. But the past is merely thought. Existence is present, and cannot be known. We must dance it.

When you look at the flower without naming its thing-ness, you engage in the original meditation. You are like Adam before he named the creatures in the Garden. Adam fell into names, but we are still Eden-dwellers. We only need to awaken. Every particle of our being, every cell and photon of this body, is an organ of perception. Through conscious breathing, mindful movement, yoga, dance, and a walk in the forest, our body wakes and our blindness is healed. We see again through trillions of eyes, sparkling in the heaven of flesh. Where were you when you first discovered that your body is made of stars?

Look again at this flower. See the chaos of its edges dissolve into boundless fractals of your own awareness. The luminosity of this little flower is not to be taken for granted. Named, it is Trillium rhomboideum grandiflorum. Un-named it is the portal between heaven and earth.

Now, imagine what you might behold when you muster the courage to look into a human face this way. Can you gaze into those nameless eyes without saying, "This is a black child, this an Arab child, this child is wealthy, this child is poor?" Courage means that when we look into the eyes of another, we settle for nothing less than the face of God.