Well I am sitting here in the early morning waiting and it looks like I am going to be sitting here for quite a while as my dog is having pups at the moment and I'm trying to help her along. Mostly by just keeping her company. It's unusual for me to be sitting at the key board wodering what to write about as I am usually full of ideas about what to what about. Chock full. But now my mind is blank. (I glanced over at the dog ..she has just had a pup and it is starting to cry. My heart is in my mouth) Someone wrote a few weeks back about feelings of sadness and feeling down in the spiritual life. I distinguish here between periods that tend to be long and rooted in the Spirit such as the Night of the Senses..the transition for meditative to contemplative prayer and the Night of the Soul..as compared as compared to more passing trials.
The pup seems well. It is raising a fuss. I will be late for work this morning. There is a lovely story about St Teresa of Avila. One day a sister came to her down in the dumps and told St Teresa she was thought she was in the Night of the Soul . Teresa say her down and might her a big steak and kept her company whilst she ate it. Lo and behold no more Dark Night of the Soul. (I supect it was more St Teresa's company that pulled her out of the glooms , she seems to have been great company.
There can be a danger of dramatising our spiritual life to some extent. We get a few weeks or months of bad weather when we feel down and we can think we have entered full on winter. I remember my brother in law Brian dying when he was just 32 years old. Curiously just before he died he told his own brother Joe that he had always know he was going to die at a young age and had done the best he could to preprare for leaving a young wife and four small children behind. After his death my sister Eithne turned up at at my mothers crying and saying that hse did not how to cope. My mother told her, 'Well you will just have to! You have no choice'. This sounds like a very hard thing to say but my own mother had had hard times in her own life with her husand imprisoned without trial, several of her children imprisoned and loosing three of her children, her daughter in law and a grandchild at a very young age. So what my mother was saying was that she should turn her gaze outwards , from her won grief and needs towards her duties, the needs of others . ..and in doing so to find healing.
Well one pup sucessfully nestled down. I wonder how many more... But I think this is one of the dangers of the spiritual /mystical life especially I think for Relgious, priests and unmarried people. That we divorce the inner prayer life, the life of the soul from a more holistic approach to what we experiencing in our , 'Ordinary ', life generally. That our gaze can be in danger of turning too much inwards for understanding than outwards. The other danger of course is that we should look at ourselves as creatures without a Spirit or a Spiritual Life and that danger is even worse. An instance of this come from Sigmund Freud who one time was asked what the end point or aim of the Psychoanalysis was? To which the eminent gentleman replied, 'To shre in the generalised unhappiness of the rest of mankind'. Not the most pleasant of outcomes, but Freud was of course quite right. To put God and the richness of the the spiritual out of the equation can only lead to unhappiness. The problem was, for Freud there was no God, so there could never be any happniess.
All Things Pass - Lao-Tzu All things pass A sunrise does not last all morning All things pass A cloudburst does not last all day All things pass Nor a sunset all night All things pass What always changes? Earth...sky...thunder... mountain...water... wind...fire...lake... These change And if these do not last Do man's visions last? Do man's illusions? Take things as they come All things pass
But of course Lao-Tzu was both right and wrong. All things pass. True. But only God is Eternal . God is Love and those who enter into Love enter into Eternal Life. This is the true striving of the Soul, that it enters into Love, into Eternal Life.
I shall pass this way but once; any good that I can do or any kindness I can show to any human being; let me do it now. Let me not defer nor neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again. Etienne de Grellet Quaker Missionary
I shall pass this way but once; any good that I can do or any kindness I can show to any human being; let me do it now! Let me not defer nor neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again. Etienne de Grellet Quaker Missionary
It is a bot dark here before work and afte for photos maybe on Wednesday. She had four pups. But it was her first litter and she lay on top of two and they died. Sigh . It is only animals, but there is something about animals getting hurt that makes me want to howl. Still there are 30, ooo refugees from Aleppo on the Turkish Srian border most of them chidlren in the freezing cold and rain , that is something to cry about. But still I can't see them I can only see the pups. Sad.
