And a highway will be there; it will be called the Way of Holiness. ... it will be for those who walk in that Way. Isaiah 35:8
Now the eyes of my eyes are opened. -- ee cummings
I have been thinking about the significance of pin holes lately. One might think of them as the tiniest of openings through which the whole universe has an opportunity to crash. My spiritual director, at the end of an extended solitude retreat, applied the description to an experience I had related to him early in the week. I had told him of singing together during the first Eucharist service, the refrain “Remember me Lord when you come into your kingdom.” I was unconsciously still singing the refrain when I sat down. Suddenly, I was overcome with emotion, connecting with a plea or call or recognition deep within me of which I was unaware. I wept.
Following that brief encounter in the service, I began to have each day of the retreat amazing encounters in the Spirit which prompted me to pick up this book and then that one, out of hundreds in the library, there were four in all. Over the course, I realized that there was a unity in each one of language and clarity concerning at its core what one author described as the “ground or depth of the soul where the Mystery of Being is experienced.” It all beautifully tied in with a prayer I had received a few weeks before. There was this genuine outpouring revelation, realization and wisdom that I could not absorb fast enough, pray hard enough or write completely enough to take in fully. I am still working on it.
In our last meeting, having processed throughout the week the interaction I was having with this unifying theme and directing me in prayer, my director connected it up this way: “Possibly the surprise of the ‘Remember me’, its penetration, may have been the pin hole from the very first Mass, opening all of this up more and more.” For me, then, a pin hole may emerge as a surprise of tears. For you it may be something else so that you do not miss the occasion of the pin hole of opening up the kingdom of heaven to you, through it.
As I close out this year, I am aware of a transition going on in my spirit, vision, circumstances and relationships with a proliferation of pin holes. Some are painful but designed to separate me unto new wine skins. Others are deep places of revelation, unity and confirmation, including the ones previously mentioned, that evoke great promise, freedom and impact. It gets harder to accept change and re-creation as one gets older, unless one is willing to listen and receive the various messages as one, even though they appear to be in conflict and bring up conflicting emotional responses. Richard Rohr describes it this way in his book, FALLING UPWARD:
Spiritual maturity is largely a growth in seeing; and full seeing seems to take most of our lifetime, with a huge leap in the final years, months, weeks and days of our life, as any hospice volunteer will tell you. There seems to be a cumulative and exponential growth in seeing in people's last years, for those who do the inner work. Pg. 130
This process is what, in part, creates elders worth listening to. Cutting that wisdom off, even if it comes in strange or unwelcome packages, is a great danger to any country, institution, organization or association, as Rohr powerfully warns. The task of the elder is to stay with the inner work relentlessly and to trust the pin holes to open the Eyes of the eyes.
In closing, Laurie and I would invite the consideration of these possibilities as we all continue to move through advent together and focus our gaze in stillness: Really, isn't the stable a pin hole through which the whole revelation of Jesus comes? Isn't a flower, Verbena for instance, a pin hole through which a revelation of beauty and transformation may come? Isn't a poem a pin hole which opens and arrests time at the same moment and, thus, fixes that moment in time? Isn't every holy symbol a pin hole through which pours the larger and sacramental meaning of the unseen? Isn't impending death a pin hole through which we can at once see and celebrate life to be called forth in the midst of great suffering, pain and loss? Isn't deep hurt a pin hole opened up for healing, and a wound, bleeding, open, but not ours, to consume all shame, hatred, evil in love? Might we be a pin hole for one another in unrestrained encouragement, taken unawares and surprised by kindness, generosity, clarity, honesty, celebration, wisdom, affection and love. Inspiration giving birth, womb like, to all that could be, that will be, that is; more and more and more, not less and less and less; the already but not yet; the “Yes”, the “I AM”; the eternal now in the “are”, the “is”, the “today” of Jesus.
A poet well communicates our prayer for you and for us as we close one year and open another through the birth of a baby.
We must be still and still moving Into another intensity For a further union, a deeper communion. -- TS Eliot, “Four Quartets”
Christmas blessings to each of you and those you love.
The Sizemores