Sometimes, when we’re on a long drive,
and we’ve talked enough and listened
to enough music and stopped twice,
once to eat, once to see the view,
we fall into this rhythm of silence.
It swings back and forth between us
like a rope over a lake.
Maybe it’s what we don’t say
that saves us.
‘Enough Music’
Dorianne Laux
When I have asked a question, I have to be prepared to wait for the answer. Moreover, I have to be prepared to listen for the answer – which may, or may not, come in a recognisable, expected form. There can be too many answers, too many revelations, each of which has to be sifted through carefully. There can be too many experts – too many chief priests and scribes all eager to answer the Wise-Ones question.
Or a voice can be unspoken. Answers can sometimes come through silence.
Learning to pay attention to what is heard, in a way that pierces through what might be said, to what is unsaid is, says theologian Anna Blaedel, a spiritual practice:
Spiritual practices deepen our attentiveness to moments of wonder, encounters with truth, invitations into awe. Spiritual practices draw our attention to thin spaces where holiness and ordinariness mingle, inseparable, entangled. In the daily moments and real encounters of our ordinary lives, the Divine draws near and comes to dwell. Right in the midst and mess of it all. Deep calls to deep, and Word becomes flesh and flesh invites Spirit and Spirit spits truth and truth reveals the tender ache of enfleshed life. Incarnation. God incarnate. Love incarnate. Divinity enfleshed.
‘Right in the midst and mess of it all’. From within the political and cultural complexities of King Herod’s court, at the heart of an occupied land on the edge of an Empire, the Wise-Ones are trying to listen for answers. They have arrived to worship a king who it seems is absent, who is at best a silent presence, whose entry into the world has made no significant impact. And yet they believed enough in the certainties of their own predictions and readings of the prophecies to journey hundreds of miles. They knew they were following the ChristStar. How can this be for nothing? How can there be no answer?
What does divinity born on earth, entering into the heart of life, look like then, if it cannot be seen or heard or perceived?
I listen. And listen. And listen again. Learning to breathe through the listening. Learning to make the decision to listen with every breath. Again and again and again.
The feminist physicist, theologian and science philosopher Karen Barad talks about paying attention, paying loving attention, as being part of the entangled, complex making of Justice, which ‘is not a state that can be achieved once and for all’:
There are no solutions; there is only the ongoing practice of being open and alive to each meeting, each intra-action, so that we might use our ability to respond, our responsibility, to help awaken, to breathe life into ever new possibilities of living justly. The world and its possibilities for becoming are remade in each meeting.
The possibility of receiving an answer is made over and again, in the midst of every decision I make to recommit myself to the act of listening. The listening for ways the divine breaks in. For the bodies in which the divine is enfleshed in my here and my now. For the way the Spirit sings through my every breath.
I respond with respons-ability and respons-ibility for my part in Kingdom becoming.
Rabbi Abraham Heschel wrote that prayer begins at the edge of emptiness. At the edge of emptiness, a felt need, a yearning, a hope, a possibility, a longing. For something more, something different, something deeper, something real, something transformative. The healing salve of salvation. Common nourishment. We are in urgent need of collective conversion, a turning toward more convivial, caring tenderness. Tender love. Fierce love.
So, dear one: Take a breath. A deep breath. And, another. Remember the word for Spirit is breath. Ruach. Pneuma. In the rhythms of our breath, we remember and return and reconnect to Divine rhythms of rest, revival, resistance. Taking in. Holding. Letting go. Sighs too deep for words. With each breath, we invite and participate in Spirit. Love, in the flesh.
“To love,” writes theologian Catherine Keller, “is to bear with the chaos.” If we are paying attention at all, we are no strangers to chaos.
…Paying attention requires courage. Remember, courage comes from coeur, heart. If it is hard work, it is heart work… In the chaos of our current common life, there are no easy answers but there are simple truths that can guide us: seek justice; practice kindness; journey together, open and attentive to each other and the Divine. Togetherness. Tenderness. Justice-love. The Divine, drawing near and coming to dwell, in the chaos. The Divine, intimately entangled with all aspects of our interconnected life. The pain and the possibility, the beauty and the brokenness, the glory and the grief. In our shared vulnerability, in turning our soft flesh toward one another, in meeting the soft flesh of an/other with tender care, we find God, we encounter Divinity, we build Beloved Community, we enflesh ecclesia.
…
So breathe deep, beloved. Pay attention. Stay open. Turn in. Reach out. Together, we breathe and bleed and bless and birth the world alive, in enfleshed love. May it be so.
‘Enfleshed’
Anna Blaedel
an entangled divine. (iPhone image)
image into ikon 