“As we live into God’s dream, we will rediscover who we truly are and all of creation will be singing.” Richard Rohr daily meditations from CAC 8-26-20
At the end of August, I have already made two quarts and a half of tomato sauce from my garden tomatoes. They are doing very well. What I didn’t expect was the tomato plants that started growing up along with my beans. I certainly did not plant them there. Star calls them volunteers. Little seeds that over wintered in my compost pile, which were spread over the soil and decided that, hey, we’re not dead after all. Those plants are now loaded with plum tomatoes and cherry tomatoes! I can’t imagine that they’ll be ripe before the first frost, but you never know. What we can’t imagine often does not happen, but what we can imagine - well those are our dreams and who can say that a dream won’t become a reality.
I’m reading the reissue of John Philip Newell’s book, A New Ancient Harmony. which came out last year, but has originally been published in 2011. In this wonderful book (I know you’re saying she thinks everything John Philip writes is wonderful) he talks about dreams and about harmony. The dreams he has help him to integrate the western thought in which he was educated with eastern thought as he visited India in the 1990s and met Bebe Griffen. The meeting itself was not momentous, but the after effects were. Seeds were planted, seeds that volunteered in the soil of openness into new ideas created a whole new reordering of his spiritual path. He was already seeing that the way Christianity was focusing, on fall/redemption, was not in line with Celtic Spirituality he loved. There was a disharmony, a disconnect.
For the past three weeks, in his daily meditations, Richard Rohr has been talking about order, disorder, reorder. The steps our consciousness goes through when it runs up against something that is different, that doesn’t fit our usual way of being or thinking. Often a crisis in life will cause chaos and lead us to rethink our lifestyle, our faith, our whole way of being in the world. We all go through these times of change because as we learned from Einstein “we can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
There is so much chaos going on around us. Americans can’t seem to disagree civilly anymore, some of us are seeing for the first time what white supremacy has caused, the virus continues to be in the news, deaths in nursing homes keep rising, some are in despair over the fate of the earth, the change in weather, the destruction of homes by fire or flood, the children being held in captivity by our own government because they are fleeing another country with their parents…the list goes on and on, enough to make us succumb to the chaos and give up.
John Philip reminds us of this ancient harmony, of the Jungian concept of sun- consciousness and moon-consciousness. Moon-consciousness teaches “life’s edges are not so sharply defined, the boundaries are less distinct.” This way of seeing is more about oneness than differentiation. A soft feminine light that teaches us gentleness and tolerance. In sun-like consciousness we are able to see more details, we are able to analyze things and distinguish one thing from the other. What is important is that we walk in harmony. That we intertwine the harmony that exists between these ways of seeing. The moon invites us to remember that our “human journey began as one and that the birth of the earth and its unfolding life are one,” The sun-light consciousness reminds us to revere our ancient traditions, to celebrate what makes us distinct. Being aware of our uniqueness and also aware of our oneness and unity opens us to reorder. When both are united a beautiful song of harmony will begin to heal the land and our hearts. Vegetables will grow in places we think we didn’t plant, and yield more life than we ever imagined.