Redemption: Be Astonished

the Shawshank Redemption

I have decided to try a theme on for the next few weeks! I have tried this before but God has steered me elsewhere and yet I have some accumulated thoughts which need to be placed in a stream of living water. Perhaps that is true of all of these musings but these hopefully are a little tighter?!

The theme is redemptive landscapes or what is saving us now? So much has been written about death and disaster, injustice and systemic oppression, hate and tragedy. In trying to rebel against my dualistic tendencies which put bad things in one column and good things in another, I am coming to understand a little better how non-dualism and contemplation assist not only in revealing the good but also the divine. And the divine or holy exists within and alongside the bad and the ugly. 

Before going to the obvious quote: the good the bad and the ugly, I want to use another, and to me more redemptive, one. As the great mystic Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said: "As a tree torn from the soil, as a river separated from its source, the human soul wanes when detached from what is greater than itself." 

While the thought may not be a prescriptive one, it has launched my contemplation.

Are we not all feeling like whatever tether to something greater we had is frayed?

When I gaze into the vastness of God after praying this quote, I am surprised and delighted with the plethora of images, the greenness of them, the multidimensionality of them, the sacred quality of them. In God’s time there is fullness and abundance of opportunity for wholeness. Even battered as we are by injustice and disease/dis-ease, there is a Beauty which penetrates and radiates.

So I leave you with just one of these glimpses by Mary Oliver: “Pay attention, be astonished, tell about it.” This is how to live a life in the midst of whatever comes our way. 

Wonder Love and Praise, a trinity of astonishment.