Sorrento Retreat Day 4: The joy and light of the last two days offers a fruit-bearing branch. It seems the time of travail is ended and I have come home to myself in some regard – the separation, mindfulness and determination now a deliberate choice. The unexpected shift that was due has occurred – unexpected as expected; now I can freely receive God’s blessings, whether they be material, emotional or lightness of heart. Understanding is transmuted from knowledge. Depth and openness from what lies unrooted on the surface. The knowledge itself was a necessary but not sufficient condition; now I rejoice, having been carried across the gap by grace; having surrendered wilfulness to willingness and humilitas.
A sober joyousness accompanies new energy, energy blocked before now. The Light within pierces the clouds and touches the waters just as something lovely emerges from the depths: the soul is illuminated from within, at the meeting place of Heaven and Earth, the meeting of the waters, where the crow stands at the gateway.
This new clarity calls to renounce existing ego driven plans, ambitions, goals. It is proper and timely to do so, for this is a time of restoration, of the self properly aligned with the Self. And oh how I have longed to be restored.
“Love is not a matter of looking at each other, but of looking together in the same direction.” Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Evening: Again for the sixth time in two days I am brought to this place of joy and light, and this despite the dejection of the little horse whose way is to collapse within, rearing in his inevitability. I am led to perceive that the shift is not as I had expected, is not what I anticipated, anticipated that is at a more instinctive than rational level. Again I can say understanding is transmuted from knowledge. Depth and openness from what lies unrooted on the surface. I have been carried by grace through a threshold I barely intuited as present.
And now I perceive such strangeness within. The one from whom I determined to separate, the interior little one aged with childhood’s matrix of survival, is the alienated, broken, homeless Christ. In this lies a deep sadness, yet paradoxically a great joy. With this afternoon’s invitation to hold the homeless with compassion, I discovered the alienated self crying out for nurturance, “will you not offer me the same hospitality?” And then came the epiphany, to see him my Beloved in the little ones, the anawim, the dejected, the broken, the lost, the unprotected. This is the most unexpected direction. I pray for further enlightenment.