Relearning what your soul already knows

"The glory and freshness of a dream"

One of my favorite poems is William Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” which speaks of our Divine origins, God as our Source and our Homeland. The poet recalls that in his infancy, the whole world, “meadow, grove, and stream, / The earth and every common sight, / To me did seem / Apparell’d in celestial light / The glory and the freshness of a dream.”  

The sense is of a beauty, holiness, and wonder all around us in our infancy — the sacred within us responding to the sacred around us.  Each of us comes into the world “trailing clouds of glory,” the poet writes. The child is “Nature’s priest,” one who exhibits uninhibited, unaffected, and spontaneous joy in the wonder of creation.

But something happens as we get older, as we journey to find our way in the world. Our spontaneous wonder fades, as we struggle to understand and meet the expectations of family, school, society, and even church. The glorious vision which is natural at the beginning of life, when a child feels so intimately connected to all people and creation, begins to diminish in the adult. Although “Heaven lies about us in our infancy,” as the poet says, “Shades of the prison-house begin to close / Upon the growing Boy.”

Even so, the “intimations of immortality” remain, and one might say that the spiritual life is all about unlearning much of what we have been taught, so that we can return to what our souls have always known.

At a church party recently, I was getting to know an older parishioner who told me about his interest in the night sky. I wanted to know more, and before my eyes, he became a child. His face brightened. And as he quickly reached for his cell phone to show me pictures, he told me about his new astrophotography camera that was capturing wonders.

I didn’t dare interrupt his delight, as this wonder-full parishioner showed me a few of his amazing photos, but I suddenly remembered a passage from John Philip Newell’s new book (to be published soon) that I had read only that morning:

“We need to open our eyes again to the child’s way of seeing, remembering what we knew in our infancy, a light-filled universe, a physical world flooded with the radiance of spirit. … To not be able to see the stars is a deprivation of our inner world, a loss of wonder, and thus a diminishing of our imagination and the ability to remember our origins in the heavens and to dream our way forward into new beginnings on Earth.” (John Philip Newell, The Great Search, p. 17)

Jesus said, “I am in you” (Jn 14). The church’s mission is not to teach you something that you do not already know; nor is it to give you something that you do not already have. The mission of the church is to remind you of something that your soul has known all along.  Psalm 46:11 gives the best advice: “Be still, and know that I am God.” 

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
        Hath had elsewhere its setting,
          And cometh from afar:
        Not in entire forgetfulness,
        And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
        From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!"

(from "Ode: Intimations of Immortality")

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Be still, and know.
Be still.  
Be.