returning

In the weeks since I returned from New Mexico and my immersion in the Living School, I’ve experienced the mystery of transformation.

Change has been swift — at times so fast, it feels motionless.  I am here one minute doing this, thinking that —

And the next —

I am elsewhere.

Elsewhere — though not listed on any itinerary I made or received — is surprisingly familiar.  It’s abrupt and wonderful —

A happy hijacking of sorts —

Returning me to a place I know.

The place I come from.

I feel like this is what Bonaventure — whose 13th century “circular theology” is being channeled to me today by Richard Rohr on Vimeo —  refers to as “consummation.”  We are all in a process of returning to where we came from — and the contemplative life makes one more and more aware and available to this process.

This contemplative process of returning to God is not without its pain points, but the frame that suffering lives within is more beautiful than anything I’ve experienced or imagined.  My notes from one of Richard’s Vimeo lectures compare it to a bottomless body of water —

“…a super luminous darkness, the silence in which God can teach the soul secretly…”

And so, this is the beginning of a painting I call “consummation.”

This, my friends, is but the first layer.