Uradiance

  A moment ago  in the sweet sad seeming of April, this fat plum  was a tiny white un-bud. Now the hummingbird’s persistent tick scolds you to attention. The perishing golden catastrophe  of a late  August dahlia means something  that you cannot look up in a book. Children play on earth while grown-ups  gaze through thingness into quieter worlds. But perhaps it's the other way round. Children cross over and return like ravens,  mushrooms, mountains in mist, while the old ones remain here , too gray to remember that this is a land  of sacraments, things pointing beyond  themselves , toward some ineffable beauty  deeper inside them  than they are. The bones of heaven are the bones of earth,   and you are a garden of doorways. Colors augur more than umber, green, carnelian. Bodies are portals to the formless. All I can tell you is, your soil is silence, your root is breath, your blossom is wonder. Death will ravish and ...

     August 15, Feast of the Assumption of Mary, the Mother of God. Here in the fullness of Lion’s Gate and Lughnasadh, the summer harvest festival, the Church places the glorious celebration of the Mother’s body, assumed into Paradise. Not just her soul, but every jot and tittle of her flesh. This is her banquet of organic delights, Earth garlanded with dahlia bling in Pagan fullness, each pollen mote, each ear of wheat or aster grail, brimful with the Christall sun. The art of the Church, like the art of Buddhist and Tantric mandalas, is a symbolic language. Lush paintings of Mary’s Assumption remind us that divine love transfigures not just soul but flesh into the fire of God. Mary’s bodily assumption into “heaven” foreshadows what Teilhard called “the divinization of matter.” Yet her bodily assumption is just the first fruit of humanity, for our own bodies, unto the least twirling chromosome, must ascend as well. How? By descending into Matter....