Affections of the Soul...

 Trust... it must guide our every thought and action and breath, our very life. It must not be us working for ourselves, but God working through us.  We are his instruments. Can a cello or piano play itself? How glorious a melody our lives could be if only we would put it in the hands of the Musician and Composer of the universe.

"For I know the plans I have for you, says, the Lord... to give you a future and a hope." (Jeremiah 29:11)

Affections of the Soul...

This is a short one for today, but it is something that I need to be constantly asking in order to renew my determination to groggily force my tired self out of bed at 6:15 every morning, bury myself in a million layers and stumble out into 10 degree frostiness... to participate in one of the most incredible and yet profoundly overlooked things that man could ever do... to go to Mass.

“God gave you a gift of 86,400 seconds today. Have you used one to say “thank you?” (William A. Ward)

 

 

Affections of the Soul...

 "The word is a sign or symbol of the impressions or affections of the soul." ~Aristotle

 As each day and week goes by, I read things that touch, thought provoke, inspire or encourage me, and I realized that since "The words that enlighten the soul are more precious than jewels. ~Hazrat Inayat Khan", I ought to share them with others. After all, what good is something valuable with no one else to share it with? So at the end of every week, on Fridays, I will post my "affections of the soul," and share a quote, poem, part of a book... any words that I have read that have inspired me.

So I will start it off with a favorite poem. I have had a lot of time to contemplate it, as I have been playing and singing it over and over each day in a song that I composed on the piano. And I found that it beautifully relates to my last post, "For these seemingly common things are reflections of what is eternal, they are the mirrors in which we can see God in this earthly life."

	I See His Blood Upon the Rose:
	I see his blood upon the rose And in the stars the glory of his eyes, His body gleams amid eternal snows, His tears fall from the skies.
	I see his face in every flower; The thunder and the singing of the birds Are but his voice—and carven by his power Rocks are his written words.
	All pathways by his feet are worn, His strong heart stirs the ever-beating sea, His crown of thorns is twined with every thorn, His cross is every tree.

Gratitude for the Ordinary

As I have been thinking about life over the past few days, the words that keep coming to me are: there is so much to be thankful for. But I realized that it is not so much the fancy turkeys and pies or the extraordinary celebrations that engenders my gratitude, but the ordinary, the "stuff of life." For true happiness comes from finding the significance in the common experiences of life: cooking, washing dishes, getting from place to place, waking, sleeping. And from witnessing the miracle of life: the rising and setting of the sun, the changing of the seasons, the growing and dying of living things. For these seemingly common things are reflections of what is eternal, they are the mirrors in which we can see God in this earthly life. That is why they are a gift from God to man, (just as I said in my previous post on work,) and ought to be received as such, with profound gratitude.

And now I must go to one who will say things infinitely better than I ever could: Thomas Howard, in Chance or the Dance. This is truly one of the best books ever written, and I could quote the entire book. But as difficult as it is, I will try and give just a few excerpts that capture this concept.

"There were some ages in Western History that have occasionally been called Dark. They were dark, it is said, because learning in them declined, and progress paused, and men labored under the pall of belief...Then the light came, It was the light that has lighted us men into a new age. Charms and devils, plagues and parthenogenesis have fled from the glare into the crannies of memory. In their place have come coal mining and E = mc2 and plastic and group dynamics and napalm and urban renewal and rapid transit. Men were freed from the fear of the Last Judgment; it was felt to be more bracing to face Nothing than to face the Tribunal. They were freed from the worry about getting their souls into God's heaven by the discovery that they had no souls and that God had no heaven... Altogether, life became much more livable since it was clear that nothing in fact lay behind things. The age was called enlightened. The myth sovereign in the old age was that everything means everything. The myth sovereign in the new is that nothing means anything. That is to the darkened mind it did not mean nothing that the sun went down and night came and the moon and the stars appeared and the dawn and the sun and morning again and another day, which would itself wax and then wane into twilight and dusk and night. It did not mean nothing to them that the time of work was under the aegis of the bright sun and that it was the sun that poured life into the seeds that they were planting, and that brought out the sweat on their foreheads, and that the time of rest was under the scepter of the silver moon. This was the diurnal exhibition of what was True-- that there was a panoply and a rhythm and a cycle, a waxing and a waning, a rising and a setting and a rising again.

The old myth would have seen the given (the humdrum, in most cases) as, on the other hand precisely the agent and mediator of something substantial- of the way things are in a word. This is not to say that everyone up to the Enlightenment went whistling about the kitchen and farmyard, merry and content in the knowledge that his broomstick or shovel was the summum bonum. It is simply to say that the old myth sanctioned the humdrum by seeing it, along with everything else in the world, as image. That is the commonplaces of life, the given rhythms of experience in which every human being is involved whether he is king or serf, jet set or typist (things like birth, growth, learning, work, marriage, and friendship), are themselves the occasions in which we may enact what is real, what lies at the root of things. In this view, there is no hiatus between what we are given to do by life, and what life is really about. There is on the contrary a synonymity. All this commonplace stuff is what life is really about. Three cheers for travel and theater and parties and fashions, but they aren't at the center. What is at the center is the given, the obvious things- like birth and growth and learning and marriage.
Whatever else a man may be doing, there are various things, which mark his experience, and the viewpoint being put here is that it is those universals, which lie at the center of significance... And it is the supposition here that these commonplaces- these given rhythms of experience- constitute the imagery under which we may all participate in the way things are. And, the corollary to this, that the failure to seize the humdrum commonplaces as vitally significant, or the effort to fly from them and seek fulfillment in various forms of substitution or diversion, represents a misapprehension of what it means to be authentically human.
This view, carried to the nth place, would go like this, then: things are not random; they are, finally, glorious, and the the diagram of this glory appears everywhere and on all levels- in astronomy, zoology and botany and anatomy and oceanography- and is enacted by man in his politics and institutions, and acknowledged and celebrated in his rituals and his art.  And it is configured not immediately and obviously for him in the commonplaces of his life. So that, working from the bottom up he might see those commonplaces as the images of ultimate glory, and find in them clues as to the nature of that glory. But he might note, because he has looked around him at a thousand images, that it is not unobserved that life issues from death- that spring rises from winter, and the oak from the dead acorn, and dawn from night, and Phoenix from the ashes. And the rest of us may see it all either as a pointless jumble of phenomena, or as the diagram of glory- as grinding tediously toward entropy, or as dancing toward the Dance."

Or in the words of Albert Einstein, "There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”