The In-Breaking of Light--Part 1

 

Two weeks ago, in my first posting since July, I shared with you the despondency that had come upon and over me due to an inability to find an entryway into a second memoir. 

 

That posting was, perhaps, too personal, too revealing. It reveals the “inner skin” of my thoughts, not just the outer.

 

However, I always tend to write the words that come to me in the flow of inspiration that passes from head to heart as I sit here at the computer. For several days, the words for this posting have been bounding forth like a river bursting its dam. Today will be background for one or two more postings. (Such is the baptism of graciousness that has been given to me in the past two weeks.)

 

So let us begin.

 

I’ve reread the December 7^th posting several times and been somewhat dismayed. Why? Because the temperament of the Dee Ready displayed in much of that post was from the first ten years after I left the convent. 

 

In the depths of that Dee was an insecure, somewhat narcissistic, self-absorbed, self-centered, immature young woman—a consummate actor—who fled the life she’d been living as a Benedictine and continued to flee—from Missouri to Ohio to New Hampshire to Minnesota—for ten years. Never looking back, seldom keeping in touch with those she met, she fled like an immigrant from the rubble of the war waging within her troubled mind and bewildered heart. 

 

In the months that I’ve struggled to write another memoir, I’ve come to cherish and, yes, understand that young woman. Within that deep center of myself where Oneness dwells, I’ve sobbed for her pain and her despair as she fled the three presences/entities/hallucinations that accompanied her from the convent. I’ve come to admire her strength and her bravery.

 

When I reread that last posting, I wondered if that strength had deserted me. In the ten years of my flight, I'd found my strength in meditating—in the Jesuit style—on the four faith testaments of the early Christian churches in and around the Mediterranean. 

 

I did not see those four “Gospels,” or proclamations of good news, as exact accounts of the life of Yeshua. They were not memoirs, biographies, or autobiographies. Yeshua never read those words written about himself. He planned no Church; he dictated no unambiguous letters to be left to posterity. 

 

I suspected then, as I do now, that were he to read the faith testaments, he’d be somewhat surprised by them. Surprised by the stories, the beautiful myths, that the authors used to convey the wonder of his birth and childhood.

 

The four faith testaments, written by four early Christians, represent the beliefs of four communities—for instance, the Church at Antioch. These communities (first of Jews and then of Gentiles) found in the man they called Yeshua the answer to their questions about the meaning and purpose of living and dying. Of loving and forgiving. Of embracing and accepting. Of letting go and holding on. Of reaching out to others and even loving those who might act as enemies.

 

These four, plus others, both men and women, wrote down what they had seen for themselves or heard from others about an itinerant Jew who had assiduously and prayerfully studied the Hebrew Scriptures and found there a God who called on all humans to seek out the poor, the outcast, the homeless, the sick, the refugee, “the other.” 

 

To seek with the belief that in the Holy Oneness of All Creation we find the answers to our deepest heart-wishes and we embrace kindness, mercy, and generosity with open hearts made lovingly compassionate by an acceptance of our own weakness and vulnerability.

 

That’s all for today. I’ll continue this tomorrow with a quotation and the great grace—the inbreaking of light—given to me this past week.

 

Peace.

 

Photo from Wikipedia.