I have been thinking about the Perfect Prayer, Brother Patrick, and it rings familiar with me. I believe there was something similar to this idea in
Beauty, the Invisible Embrace. Let me see if I can find it.
To participate in beauty is to come into the presence of the Holy. It is we who exile ourselves from God. Everything we feel, think and do is already happening within the divine shelter. To know this is to know one's real beauty.
Though the human mind is intense with difference and variety it is shadowed by divisions and imbalance. God is pure verb, a permanent event, an eternal surge, a total quickening. Beauty's diversity only deepens the flow of God's presence; nothing is held back. This sense of lyrical presence is expressed vividly by the sixteenth-century mystical poet Angelus Silesius. He put many of Meister Eckhart's insights into poetic form. His little poem 'The Rose' captures the grace and simplicity of pure presence and integrity.
The Rose is without why
She blooms because she blooms
She does not care for herself
Asks not if she is seen.
The poem is also a huge vindication of identity, the freedom and clarity of simply being yourself. Nothing else is needed. It is a poem of profound trust in the act of being. This makes for a pure clearance. There is no outside intrusion, no pressure to measure up to outside expectations. Nor is there any sense of inner division. The rose is content to be a rose: she is what she is. At another level the poem can be read as a hymn to the freedom of nature, how it avoids the oppresive clutter of intentionality and concept. And the rose is flourishing; she is at one with herself in the grace of growth. Nature as a whole performs for no man. How vastly different this is to the way we live our lives.
Sometimes the urgency of our hunger blinds us to the fact that we are already at the feast. To accept this can change everything: we are always home, never exiled. Although our minds constantly insist on seeing walls of separation, in reality most of the walls are mere veils. In every moment, everywhere, we are not even inches away from the divine presence.
Spirituality has to do with the transfiguration at distance, to come near to ourselves, to beauty and to God. At the heart of spirituality is the awakening of real presence. You cannot produce or force presence. When you are truly present, you are there as you are: image and pretension are left aside. Real presence is natural. Perhaps the secret of spiritual integrity has to do with an act of acceptance, namely, a recognition that you are always already within the divine embrace.
Rather than trying to set out like some isolated cosmonaut in search of God, maybe the secret is to let God find you. Instead of endeavouring to reach out in order to first find God, you realize you are now within the matrix and the adventure is the discovering of utterly new and unspoken dimensions of the inexhaustible divine; this brings with it a new sense of ease with your self and your solitude.*** John Keats wrote rapturously about this: 'Though the most beautiful Creature were waiting for me at the end of a Journey or Walk, though the carpet were of Silk, the Curtains of the morning clouds; the chairs and Sofa stuffed with Cygnet's down, I should not feel - or rather Happiness would not be so fine as my Solitude is sublime. Then instead of what I have described, there is sublimity to welcome me home' (Letter to G. and G. Keats, Oct 1818).
*** I thought I would point out that this is a very similar experience to finally accepting your own personal diversity; your differences from others. When you can accept that you are not exactly like other human beings, and that it is not only alright but wonderful, then you do acquire this sense of ease with self and solitude.
Now I realize that most of this is in fact more philosophical, in the conception of beauty and life and the divine; but is it not the same principles as made clear in the Perfect Prayer?
Engineer my circumstances, Lord, according to your will.
Does this prayer not suggest that we live in an infinite beingness that is defined by divinely engineered circumstances, and that it is ultimately our own will, our decision to remain independent and outside the divine force, that prevents this great and noble divinity to take place. Also, I think some who would be eager to reject a God-hallucination out of hand as a religion-sponsored myth might have great difficulty with allowing a personal deity to command their lives. They would fear allowing another to engineer their own lives, in preference of maintaining their own securities. When we can embrace the fact that the One That Is is the penultimate experience of life, thought, feeling, and emotion, when we can acknowledge that body, mind, heart, soul, and spirit are transient and intransient shadows of the One That Is, it is as though a fleece were being pulled from our eyes. The great experiences of life are tied up into one being, and that being is the One That Is. When we can yield our cognitive illusions and eager separations, and simply allow this great experience to take over us and direct our being, we are in fact embracing the Immensity that is ourselves, but more than ourselves.