Dear All,
When someone says “you” to you, it calls you into being.
To be addressed is the essential form of existence in the logos world, the world of the Word.
So on Tuesday, for our central meditation, we each allowed ourselves to be addressed by a non-carnate individual, such as a divinity, a “dead” person, a nature spirit.
This practice comes from a meditation shared by Georg Kuehlewind in the last year of his life, when he described the non-verbal result of a meditation as,
Christ is always in my heart, whispering, ‘You are.’
(We considered what is meant by “heart” in this context: not, or not only, the physical heart.)
To address another being, and to allow oneself to be addressed, is to hallow or consecrate the name of God, since it calls us into relational existence, and the name of God is being in just this sense of reality-in-relationship. Virginia Woolf:
What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with this extraordinary excitement?
It is Clarissa, he said.
For there she was.
If we turn toward God, and sense God turned toward us, such that the moment is heightened, intensified, then we hallow the name.
We feel this when we are distracted or confused and someone calls us by name and it wakes us up a bit, it renders the moment more real. It might wake us up a little, or a little more, or even a lot. There is no upper limit, as far as I can tell, to how awake and real things can get -- to how alive the world can be, sharing its gaze with us. Here’s Rilke again:
When are we? And when does He turn the earth and the stars toward our existence?
All blessings to all,
Michael
