Friday, 3 August 2007

Here's the last suggestion on how to realize our capacity to discover the holy in contemplation - by Walter Burghardt.

...make friends with remarkable men and women who have themselves looked long and lovingly at the real. I mean biblical figures like Abraham and Mary; martyrs like Ignatius of Antioch and Martin Luther King, Jr.; uncanonized women of vision like Dorothy Day, Mother Teresa and Ann Morrow Lingbergh. I mean Lao Tzu doing everything through being, and Abraham Joshua Heschel doing everything through worship; philosophers like Jacques Maritain, insisting that the culmination of knowledge is not conceptual put experimental: man/woman "feels" God. I mean Mr. Blue, Myles Connolly's New York "mystic" who flew kites and exulted in brass bands; short story writer Flannery O'Connor, dead of lupus at 39, with her mature acceptance of limitation, with so much Christlife in her frail frame - grace on crutches. I mean Thomas Merton, always the contemplative but moving from renunciation to involvement, making contact with Hindu and Buddist and Sufi, protesting Vietnam and violence, racial injustice and nuclear war. Touch men and women like those, and you will touch the stars, will touch God.

I'm sure his list could go on and on. I'm sure we all have people around us that we would add to this list. People who help us look again at our own lives and the world around through a lens that may not come to us so readily. These people are all saint/sinners like the rest of us. And yet, they often help to lead the way so that others can follow and see the vision of the Reign of God through different eyes that then become a part of our seeing. Once we have been opened up to view life through different lenses, it is not as frightening as it may have once appeared when all we could do is see things from our own self-centered perspective. We need to remember that this kind of making friends with remarkable people who help us to look at the real takes place in different ways for each of us. Sometimes it may be in reading. In others it may be in watching how others live and how they appear to move through the day. In others in may be by engaging in conversation that will allow us to question and ask for more. There are so many friends out there that we can slip next to and greet this day...this life...with a new sense of life and being.

Connection: Why not begin by finding out who it may be that is one of these friends for you. That is what really counts. Does it connect for you...are you helped to look again at life?

O God, you bring into our lives the many saints who come around us like gifts filled with new experience and new ways to walk into this day. We give you thanks that we are so rich with the friends of faith that reach back through time like a grand parade of visionaries and people of rich experience and hope. Amen.