Synopsis
Book by Burnham Sophy
Extrait
CHAPTER 1
Wouldst thou know my meaning? Lie down in the Fire.
See and taste the flowing godhead through thy being.
--MECHTILD OF MAGDEBURG
Who is there to sing the music of my songs to men, express the joys of my passion ...?
--RICHARD ROLLE
To the extent that my hands grew accustomed to labor, that my eyes and ears learned to see and hear and my heart to understand what is in it, my soul too learned to skip upon the hills, to rise, to soar ... to embrace all the land round about, the world and all that is in it, and to see itself embraced in the arms of the whole universe.
--AARON DAVID GORDON
When I was a child of three or four I ran outside with my sister into the arms of a summer storm. Two naked little girls. The trees raked and swayed with the wind that stripped the green leaves and sent them tumbling over the grass. We danced in the wind. We flung out our arms and whirled with the electric leaves, and I knew that if I lifted my arms, my wings, I would rise up and soar like the hawks on the wind. I would sail across the skies, for nothing separated me from the elements. I was the wind, the blowing, bending trees, the green wild grass. I was the storm, the earth, the acorns that bruised my tiny bare feet. I was my sister and my own naked little body leaping and turning round and round in the summer storm.
Then my mother called us indoors. I don't remember anything else, but probably she toweled us dry while we pranced laughing around the kitchen, and then she gave us some dinner and read us to sleep.
Connectedness. All my life I have been trying to return to that innocent state of the child of three. . .
I had two children and was living in New York, writing articles. I published a bestselling book. I loved my family and garden and friends, was having a wonderful time, when suddenly, in 1973, we were moved back to Washington, D.C.
And all the while I did not know that I was "rowing toward God," as the poet Anne Sexton put it.
I am rowing, I am rowing
though the oarlocks stick and are rusty
and the sea blinks and rolls
like a worried eyeball,
but I am rowing, I am rowing,
though the wind pushes me back
and I know that that island will not be perfect,
but there will be a door
and I will open it....1
Once, a few years earlier, I'd had a kind of vision. I was working at my desk. I sat at my rickety manual typewriter, utterly absorbed in the article I was writing. At a certain moment I lifted my eyes from the page, glanced out the window at a maple tree--and for an instant I became the tree. No separation. I was the bark, the wood, the fleshy summer leaves. Time stopped.
Satori, came the ponderous thought, and with that word, arriving like an endless, slow, wavelike movement of my mind, with the naming of the moment, everything fragmented again back into its different parts--myself, the typewriter, the tree now safely separated from me by the windowpane.
Satori, the thought repeated. But I was back in my isolated body. That's how holy people see, I marveled, though I had only the dimmest idea of the meaning of the word I'd used, or of its sister word, nirvana.
The experience lasted hardly a second. But I have never forgotten that restful state of perfect peace. Time stopped, all feeling, analysis, all consciousness of self, all sense of being "I."
I knew that something precious had been given me. I didn't know it was a state that you could cultivate, or that it had anything to do with this word called "God."
I did not want to return to Washington. I loved New York, our life, our friends. For four years I had opposed my husband's wish to move, until one day a knowledge fell across my skin, like the shudder of a horse's skin when brushing off a fly: the move was decreed, inevitable. I remember I was walking from one room to another when this understanding hit. I stopped dead in my tracks. Later I came to trust these intuitions, but at the time the strength of this "knowing" frightened me. It was one of the first times I recognized an inner, silent voice and knew I was powerless to fight it.
Moreover, the move made sense. My father in Baltimore had had a stroke, my family needed me, and Washington was less expensive to live in, a more benevolent climate for children than New York. Finally, my journalist husband wanted with all his heart to be at the nerve center of politics, covering a particular beat, and of course I wanted his happiness.
We moved.
Yet something in me died.
I missed my friends, my work, my sense of place. Every morning the sun came up, a ball of fire flinging itself out of the tangle of tree limbs and up into the sky. I watched, surprised that it could dawn each day when my heart felt so heavy.
I cried. I felt abandoned.
Each morning, out of sheer willpower, I got out of bed to care for my house and children or try--without heart--to write. One morning, after the children had left for school, I found the opening lines of Dante's Inferno running through my mind. I had studied the poem in college. I went to the bookcase, pulled down my dog-eared copy, and read aloud to the empty room.
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi retrovai per una selva oscura
chè la diritta via era smarrita.
In the middle of the journey of our life
I found myself in a dark wood
for the straight path had been lost.
The words struck me to the core.
Ah quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura
esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte
che nel pensier rinova la poura!
Ah, how to describe how hard it was,
this savage bitter wilderness,
even to think of which strikes fear in me again!
I fell to my knees, the tears streaming down my cheeks. "Help me, help me, help!"
The fit passed. After a few moments I dried my tears and rose to my feet and went on about my day. It did not occur to me that my cry constituted a prayer or that my prayer had instantly been answered--my pain washed mercifully away--for this was long before I noticed such events. I only knew my deplorable weakness had passed. I'd regained control. But in that moment of surrender I shifted from agnostic--not knowing--to some flimsy acceptance that something spiritual existed beyond myself. It was not done, however, without a quiver of shame at having failed once more, this time the test of self-reliance. I respected my husband all the more, for he had no trouble with his disbelief.
They say that when the student is ready the teacher appears. They say that it is not the soul that struggles first toward God, but this Universe of Love which is fishing for us. God puts the longing in our hearts so that we will leap upstream, like a spawning salmon that throws itself against the river current, leaping up waterfalls in its passionate urge to reach the source, its birthplace, spawning ground, and death.
Just before leaving New York I had met, by the most striking accident, the first American woman to study in a Buddhist wat, or monastery, in Thailand. (Who was it who said coincidence is God's way of performing a miracle anonymously?) She taught me how to meditate, using the vipassana method of Theravada Buddhism--the Southern school, as practiced in Burma, Thailand, and Sri Lanka.
I loved it. For the next three years I practiced this form of meditation for twenty or thirty minutes every day. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, changes occurred. Later I would meet a Hindu guru (more about that later) who gave me a mantra (somewhat easier perhaps) and afterward I practiced that.
We should digress at this point to talk a little about meditation, though I'd suggest that anyone who knows these basics should skip ahead. There are many saints and holy masters, more learned than I, and they have written so gracefully about God and about meditation, which is the path to the spiritual dimension, that to read their works is to touch a point of peace. Go to these. There are Tibetan Buddhists like the Dalai Lama or Sogyal Rinpoche or the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh. There are the Japanese Zen masters, like Shunryu Suzuki, and the Americans, such as Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield, or, in the Christian tradition, Thomas Merton and Father Thomas Keating. There are the medieval mystics such as Julian of Norwich or Mechtild of Magdeburg, or, in Spain, Saint John of the Cross, Saint Ignatius, Saint Teresa of Avila. There are hundreds of wiser and more learned works than mine. But if you are reading about transcendent moments for the first time and know nothing of meditation, then perhaps this section may be of use.
Today, Christian meditation is having a rebirth; but in the 1970s, when I was beginning my search, that art had been lost since medieval times. Certainly it was not taught to ordinary people. In the tradition of seekers from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Aldous Huxley, I took a long journey through Buddhism, then Hinduism, before returning with new insights to my Christian roots. Therefore I describe the Eastern methods of meditation, with their long, unbroken history. In an appendix you will find a Christian path toward meditation; but keep in mind that all types of meditation are similar and all lead to the same golden center, for at the mystical level all religions have more in common than they differ, and all derive from the same source and long for the same goal.
Something happens in meditation, something so subtle and elegant that the great teachers and Zen masters and rabbis, the true Masters, are too clever to try to describe it. Was it this that Christ was teaching to his twelve?
Plato called the mystery of meditation theoria. Early Christians called it contemplatio.
Once the Buddha was asked, "Is there God?"
"I will not tell you," he answered. "But, if you wish, I can show you how to find out for yourself." Then he taught the gift of meditation.
The Buddha, the Compassionate One, understood how easily we become dependent on others, asking th...
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