Bidden or unbidden, God is present

Readings from our recent gathering in Contemplative Chapel (with a couple of pictures of Cooper)

Grandson Cooper Thomas Jones, with his Aunt Caroline and me

We’ve just been dipping our toes into silence, in our first two Wednesday gatherings of Contemplative Chapel, while we ponder the ground of our gatherings: We are not trying to bring God closer to us. Rather, we are practicing silence and stillness in hopes of opening ourselves to the One who is always present to us. Most of us go about our daily lives completely ignorant or unaware of this life-giving reality.

“Bidden or unbidden, God is present” — Popularized by Carl Jung, this quotation is from an ancient Latin text. Jung had it inscribed above his doorway and on his tomb. In our tense and contentious society, with devastating wars raging around the world, recalling this truth might be the centering and grounding foundation for any hope we have of returning to our own souls.

If “God is Love” (1 Jn 4:8) and “Love is patient; love is kind,” (I Cor. 13:4), we might also say that in any situation of our daily lives or around the world, no matter how violent or contentious,

“Bidden or unbidden,

Love is present…

Patience is present…

Kindness is present….”

And the possibility always exists that we might open to this deeper Reality, so that we can be instruments of this healing and abiding Presence that never forces itself on us but that always waits for us.

This is the background that set the stage for our practice of silence together recently, our practice of Lectio Divina, and our quiet pondering of some beautiful insights in poetry and prose:

From Letters to a Young Poet, (translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy), pp. 27-28 and 33-34:

From Letter Three, April 23, 1903:

Works of art arise from an infinite aloneness and cannot be reached by criticism. Only love can touch them and do them justice. In every exchange, discussion, or commentary, stay true to your own feelings. If you should be mistaken, the natural maturing of your inner life will slowly, with time, lead you to other understandings. Leave your judgments to their own quiet, undisturbed development, which, like every forward step, must come from deep within and cannot be forced or hurried. Everything is gestation and giving birth.

Let every impression and every kernel of a feeling complete itself in the dark, in the unsayable, unconscious, unreachable by the daylight mind. With utter humility and patience, await the hour when a new clarity is delivered. That is what it means to be an artist, in your understanding, as well as in your creating.

Time eludes measurement. What is a year? And ten years are nothing. To be an artist means not to count or reckon but to ripen like the tree that does not force its sap and, trustingly, stands through the storms of spring without fear that summer will not come. It will come. But it comes only to the patient ones, who stand there with eternity stretching around them, quiet, vast, and free of worry. I learn this every day, learn it amid struggle, for which I am thankful. Patience is all!

And from Letter Four, July 16, 1903:

About ten days ago, I left Paris, ailing and tired, and I’ve come to a broad northern place whose quiet should retore my health. … Here, surrounded by the quiet of this immense land, where sea winds blow—here I feel that no person has an answer for the questions and feelings arising from deep within you. …

But I believe nevertheless that you need not remain without help. Everything will become easier once you hold to nature, to the simple and insignificant, truly seen by so few. When you love the small and unpretentiously serve it and win its trust, then everything will become more coherent and clearer to you. …

I ask you to have patience with all that is unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves. Don’t try to find answers now. They cannot be given anyway, because you would not be able to live them. For everything is to be lived.

Live the questions now. Perhaps you then may gradually, without noticing, one day in the future, live into the answers. Perhaps you bear within yourself the capacity to imagine and shape a sacred way of life. Prepare yourself for that. Trust what comes to you.

____________________

A beautiful poem by Annie Lighthart concluded our meeting:

Lantern

Some evening, almost accidentally, you might yet understand
that you belong, are meant to be, are sheltered—

still foolish, but looking out the door with a contented heart.
This is what the king wants and the old man and woman

and even the busy young if they knew, and you have it
by no grace of your own, standing in the doorway

with loose empty hands. Now your heart lights your mind,
a little lantern bobbing within you,

giving out not thought or feeling but confluence,
something else. On what do you pour out this light?

The wet street is empty, one wren in the yard. Let us
redefine love and wreckage, time and weeds.

Pour out your lantern light on the grass, on the bird, 
great and small worlds. Don’t go inside for a long, long time.

from Annie’s most recent collection of poems, Pax

____________________

And a concluding blessing from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ:

Patient Trust

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you.

Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.

excerpted from Hearts on Fire

Cooper Thomas Jones, born August 7, 2024