A little lower than the angels

Today, and last week, and a few other times in recent memory, I’ve been dazzled by bright glimpses of God’s love for me. I see it in this: God really wants me to do what it is I most deeply desire. He’s given me this thing that satisfies me deeply to do, and He guides me in its unfolding. I’m not on my own, and it’s not impossible. It’s not daunting, not something I might wish for but never be able to obtain. He gives me both the drive and the satisfaction, and He will give me the fruition as well.

It’s hard to describe how exciting this is, how it feels like flying, how it fills in every ancient anxiety with the ease of water shifting wet sand to fill a hole dug at the beach. All those years of feeling I just didn’t have motivation to do the things I thought I should be doing, and secretly fearing I didn’t have the foundational knowledge to make good on things I believed I had talent in, simply answered by this: a thing I’ve always loved to do, now with all the caveats erased, so I can experience the pure joy of striving to perfect it.

A little lower than the angels - I often wondered at this. Why is this said, what does it mean?
(“When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.” Ps 8:2-5)

In the context of these new glimpses I think I have an idea about it. Angels, I suppose, in their totally un-selfed identity, don’t have a need for any particular personal fulfillment. Their office is to bless, and any blessing will do - will give them the satisfaction they need to continue to thrive. I, though I may have deluded myself otherwise, am not like that. I have a particular identity which includes a set of custom-made loves - patterns that must be met for my fulfillment. They include the need to love particular people and to do particular things. I needed to be married and to have children. Now I need to write.

Thinking back on my life (rising at 2:30 AM to write, finding myself unable to sleep) I find other imperative needs that drove me with similar joy: the need to teach; the desire, in its time, to work at Antioch University; the impulsion, in high school and college, to draw, and to learn languages. Even these drives, though I have mourned those which, like lost children, never matured to mastery, were gifts to me. Gifts from the Father, who created me with these nodes of need wherein I could experience a deep and very individualized love. God’s love for me is not just a general one, poured indifferently like rain or sunshine. It is precise and infinitely tailored, with utmost care, for me specifically.

Which leads me to understand the nature of love, that it is like that for every person, every bird, every being. I used to wonder what was the advantage of being made lower than something else. Now I’m beginning to learn. Humility allows me to accept this great gift of love. Awe floods In as I begin to understand it.

Divine Love

“Divine Love always has met, and always will meet, every human need.”
-Mary Baker Eddy

I learned to recite this as a childhood table grace, in sing-song voice, with no thought of meaning. Later I tried to put more understanding into my thought of the sentence. I knew divine Love was a name for God. “God always has met, and always will meet, every human need.” Really? I hadn’t seen it yet. I tried to conjure faith to understand, sought miracles as proof. But it was hard to keep the sing-song out of the sentence, and God, though I knew the seven synonyms, one of which is “Love,” seemed like a name for someone I didn’t know very well.

Then I came to know more of love. How love fills me, sounds me, makes me ring like crystal, sea-changes me. All previous substances removed, replaced by the substance of love. How love is the fulfillment of all my desire, the sure source of boundless joy, my full sense of purpose, my sufficient reward. Everything. Through the experience of love, I came to know more of Love. Love as the only cause of all being. Love as Life itself. Love as the only reason anything would ever have for springing into existence and continuing to be.

So it came to make more sense. Of course divine Love meets my needs: it is what I need. If I have it, I have everything. There’s nothing I crave besides it. And if it is also the causative law of being, it will be sure, because it loves me, to see that I feel the meeting of every perceived need - that I have ample sustenance and shelter and purpose and fulfillment. That I get to give what my heart knows I need to give in this world, and that it will be received and valued. The only way for me to understand the sentence is to feel the present touch of divine Love. Then it’s obvious. Divine Love does meet every human need.

Desire is Prayer

“Desire is prayer, . . “
-Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p.1.

I see it - all these people, here at Matthews Beach, are full of prayer. That very large man with the very large sandwich, opening his mouth wide to receive - in prayer. That woman stretching herself out in the sun. The little girl, running down to the beach with every step pushing more upward than forward, a clear desire to fly - in prayer. The young men posturing, playing frisbee and talking in tones designed to carry to nearby females; the young families shepherding their children; the girls on the swimming platform - all full of desire, all in prayer.

Desire is prayer, and prayer is the soul’s flight toward goodness, the homing urge that draws us through our days. Desire is the engine of our motion, what gets us up in the morning and makes us keep doing our daily tasks. Or sends us off in a new direction. All of us are full of desire, and so, full of prayer.

Divine Life answers prayers. Everything we most deeply wish for is just our longing for what we know we are - beloved, accepted, perfect children of our creator. Reflections of Love. We may chase after our desire with a hamburger, or mark it with a cigarette, or pine for it as a love of our own. In the end the place we’re trying to satisfy is the same for all of us. We all deserve it, and we all will find it.

The First Commandment

The first commandment is:

Love Life with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.

I know what this looks like, and what it feels like. I know how it feels to love life, and to be around people who love life.

It doesn’t have anything to do with their belief systems, or their occupations, or their circumstances, or their activities. It is a saying-yes, open-hearted embrace of everything that’s here. It’s a habit of paying attention to the needs of the moment, of taking the time to care.

There may be many directions on how to live a good life, many different interpretations of what that means. But they shouldn’t even be looked at first.

The first commandment comes from Life itself, not from anyone else’s instructions. So I have resolved to not ask any other source about it first. I might ask second, to hone and clarify my loving of Life. But first I will pay attention to Life, and to keeping the first commandment.

The Hand of Love II

It’s very important to me to feel the dimension in which Love holds everything. Holds it in precise harmony of time and space, moves it in ways which would seem impossible in fewer dimensions - so that everything moves freely and nothing collides. I know that the lines I have always drawn on things - my estimations of where things have been and where they are going, and why, and what should be done about it - are in fewer dimensions than the things exist in. Thus my estimations have always been wrong. They’ve seemed compelling and true, but they’ve led to conclusions short of the ones Love would make. They’ve led me to accept the inevitability of discord, the necessity of clashes over time, resources, and attention. I find great relief in letting Love do the defining.

Love makes room for everything, everyone. Love has time to hear every story. Love knows how to release every thought from the worry that says there is no way out of this one. Love gives us each our custom-made reassurance that we are what we’re supposed to be, and we can always have what we need.

In the dawning of the morning
Rays of light stream like combs through the trees
Freeing each branch from its background
Lifting sight
Inspiring the chorus of the birds

In the dawning of the morning
The fingers of Love reach every dreaming thought
Warming each molecule
Enlivening joy
Tuning the chorus of the Word

Musical Waves

Eric and I were sitting at Matthew’s Beach and I said to him, listen to the waves lapping on the beach and against the wall - try to hear what music you can from them. Then I listened myself, and I found that they sounded musical, instead of random, as I laid their sounds on a rhythm that depicted the grid of waves out on the water. It was a 12-8 rhythm - or a pair of six-beat measures.

I’d tried before to hear music in the waves, and was brought up short because the waves didn’t break rhythmically - the pause between the breakings would always be unpredictable. My attempts to find melody would lurch and fall back like the waves, and slap against each other. Now with a rhythmic background underlying them, the waves brought interesting highlights of melody and rhythm - often coming in on the two- or three-count of the beat. And different waves could finish their pattern while others joined in, overlapping - I could imagine setting up an orchestration on Eric’s music composition software, where different instruments would follow the tune of different waves, and others would hold the grid pattern that I could see spreading out across the water.

I noticed again the next time that the fast cycle of threes - two or four three-beat pulses - was a pervasive part of the wave’s rhythm. I wondered if it was just me imposing that on them, so I tried to think of them in 4-4 time. They would accept a four pulse, but within each pulse there was still a three-pulse. I wondered if it was related to waves being made from circles, and circles being associated with the number six.

Riding home, the music stayed with me, and I thought about rhythm as the matrix upon which melody is laid out - matrix being the net upon which ideas can be hung, what stretches out the possible, upon which what is can then develop. I thought about how the word matrix comes from the word that means mother. But mostly I listened to the music, the memory of the wave music mixed with the bicycle’s rhythms.

Today when I rode to Matthew’s beach and sat up on the lifeguard’s seat, I heard the waves singing to me. I didn’t need to construct the music or think about its underlying rhythm - they just sang, and I listened and watched the dance of blues and almost-whites and dark green, the interlacing of transparency and sheen, on the water.

Riding home, accompanied by the music, I thought about resonance - how it feels to vibrate with the music - having it awaken places inside of me and define their chambers, feeling alerted from my core up through the place behind the roof of my mouth, feeling harmonized, aligned. And I thought about Love as the matrix - the rhythmic background that arranges everything in its proper place and time, so it can sing.

Changing time

We saw an old star trek episode the other day, in which a star-ship fell through a rift in time and thereby altered the timeline of the Enterprise and everyone in it. Instead of having been at peace, they now had been at war for twenty-two years. One of the crew was able, faintly, to perceive that something had changed and was now not right, and based on her urgings, they sent the other star-ship back through the time rift, and things returned to how they had been.

I found myself thinking about this later. There wasn’t any need, after they returned to the “true” timeline, for them to rehabilitate their thought, to get used to the different way of thinking about things entailed in a peaceful mission. Only the one character, a mystical sort, had any inkling that things had ever been otherwise. I thought, this is often the way it is when healing takes place in human experience. It isn’t just a shift of experience within a timeline to something more favorable. Such a shift might hardly be called healing, since memory of the bad past and fear of its return would be the context of the present. On the other hand, a shift of the whole timeline would remove the bad past, the present flavor of it, and the sense that it is in the realm of proven possibility, and could happen again. I think it’s true that real healing moves not just the bad thing but the whole line of possibility that claimed to justify its presence.

For example, one time when I had an immediate healing of tonsillitis (after quite a time of suffering) it came with the flooding thought: “you can’t be incompetent - you’re a perfect child of Christ!” The healing of the physical condition didn’t involve the diagnosis of the tonsillitis as an outgrowth of feeling incompetent and a regime to try to change that thought and thus relieve the pain. It was much more like a shift in the whole timeline - I couldn’t be incompetent because my source held me in perfection, and I had never been otherwise, either in thought or in body. With that realization the whole condition changed - my body became well and my sense of myself was improved at the same time.

I was recently praying about addiction. I contemplated how all desire belongs to God - that we can’t be made to desire something that’s not good for us, and that our being is perfect, unfallen, innocent. I repudiated the notion of a fallen man, or one whose timeline included, in a past however distant or apocryphal, an ancester tempted to do something that wasn’t good for her. There never was a timeline (or set of conditions) in which anyone could become separated from the pure leadings of what’s good, which are part of our rightful connection with God.

When I woke up the next morning, it felt like the world had shifted a little. The sweet innocence I had perceived in my prayers seemed to have sifted into everything. It was as if, at least a little bit, the timeline had changed. Not that things had become more innocent, but that they were found to have always been so. Even in myself I felt free of the compulsion to grab my computer and check my email first thing. I thought of how the whole notion of addiction, regardless of particular substance, regardless of how pervasive it may seem to be, really didn’t make sense for the possessors of the one Mind.

It occurs to me that many such shifts have happened in my lifetime. I think we parent better - people understand positive discipline more, and the behaviorist, punitive model that I grew up with is not assumed to be the only way of looking at things. I think we work together better - there is an understanding, at least in some places, of the benefits of cooperation and mutual appreciation over competition and jealousy. So I think it’s possible for the world to continue to change in this way - not through revolution but through quiet leavening of thought; not by taking a major turn of behavior but by having the whole timeline - the whole set of assumptions of what always has been - shift underneath us.