Kneeling, a human being wraps her or his arms around a tree, and ponders life’s tribulations and its joys. It is difficult to accept how hard life is, how hard it is to love, how inevitably we must each confront doubt and struggles, suffering, misfortunes, disappointments. We seek ease in life. We yearn after happiness and freedom; we crave blossoms and sunshine…
And even though all this can be found in abundance in our lives, nonetheless we find ourselves, some nights, gripped by fear and tormented by the thought: “It was all pointless, useless, after all; a waste; and now it’s too late…”
Sometimes, when we least expect it, we awaken to a shattering feeling of loneliness, anguish, chaos and death, terrified by the senselessness and empty vanity of existence. We feel dissatisfied. We cannot accept what we perceive: How could the One we believe to be perfect and pure have created, entered and become this world, in which there is so much deception and suffering? If this is all merely illusion, who needs this game? And if it is just a mask, then why is it necessary?
And yet, for all our objections, the fact that He did not create this world to correspond to our own conceptions of perfection is healthy, is health-full, and is sound. For, were it otherwise, we would reject out of hand any parts that we find inconvenient, that do not align with our own wishes, desires, delusions and illusions… And we would then be left with nothing… As it is, we struggle under the burden of all our own ideas about what He is supposed to be like, to suit us, and especially with notions about what He may not under any circumstances be… We generate a God of kindness and mercy, of love and justice as we understand these ideas to be, in accordance with our notions of what is virtuous, righteous and fair – and to anything that does not, in our viewpoint, match that formula, conform to our wishes, we proclaim: this is not His, not of Him, not part of Him. He is against this. Who is He?
To gaze upon the face of God means first and foremost to gaze upon the face of Reality. Nature consuming her own offspring, Time engulfing all the lives of all the living beings – that is also God, in one of God’s highest cosmic hypostases. God who is the magnanimous, benevolent and loving Creator is also God who destroys. The world is an integral whole, a unit. Thus, at a given moment on an occasion when we are traversing a flimsy bridge over a terrifying abyss, on our journey between joy and despair, we encounter both the light and the darkness.
And then we begin to accept that the darkness plays an inalienable and natural role in human existence. We comprehend the day and the night that dwell side by side within our souls. We comprehend the depths of our most embittered feelings, learning to respect the darkness. Without recognition and acceptance, which comes from comprehension, Life’s true profound complexity cannot be experienced, felt, lived – and it is within this complexity and out of it that arises our capacity to love, to create and to know coherence. As we pass through and between the dissonances of the world/God dichotomy, we begin to ascend towards, and ultimately to attain, the great, sublime chords of His uttermost Harmonies.
And then, somewhere within us, morning shall come, and evening shall come, in precisely the same way that they come in nature around us: with those same qualities of gradual, yet radical transformations, amidst the silence and gentlest, subtlest transitions, as one state dissolves and flows gracefully into the next, tinged with wistful, disquieting premonitions or radiant, dawning epiphanies. How are we to keep the keenly palpable tenderness that infuses the atmosphere around us, this succession of small enchanting miracles, from slipping away? How do we enter the healing twilight?
And what if prayer does indeed prove to be our most accessible means of inner peace, of healing and reconciliation – the natural pathway to wholeness for our fractured awareness in a divided and dividing world? What if, in truth, immersion into prayer is that part of the survival instinct that more completely pertains to the dimension of Nature, than to the dimension of the church?
The morning and the evening are the traditional times for prayer and for birdsong, the time when light itself is most steeped in Grace, wherein the heart can most deeply perceive its own unfathomable depths, and express for us that which it feels.
We pray. We go deeply within ourselves and there, through the words of the heart, we speak of our fears and our dreams. We ask for love, and for forgiveness. We give voice and truth to our accountability and our gratitude. The Incarnate Soul, embattled, struggling, surging and engaged, discourses with the Highest Spirit.
A human being embraces a tree, and clings fast. The Tree sends forth its roots deep into the earth, finding the nourishing forces resting within its dense darkness, in the wealth of the decaying matter of life. Stretching forth ever deeper and wider in their search for the strength to flourish, the roots hold the Tree fast to the Earth. And with her sustaining strength, the Tree grows higher, taller, opening up further and further to the light, to the sun and the air, and expressing itself through its boughs and leaves, its flowers and fruit. Life teems all around it and within it. Birds and insects prosper within its embrace, transporting seeds and pollen. They build their nests, multiply, sing, buzz, hum, glorifying Creation.
The Tree grows, matures and changes. It is battered by storms and lightning, seared by frost and fire. Boughs die and new boughs are grown. The Tree is open and vulnerable to life’s drama, yet for all that it grows, continuously; its roots penetrate deeply into the darkness; its branches fill with sap, and reach ever higher, upwards, and outwards – to the world, to the light.
The human stands with his back pressed against the tree. The human ponders life’s tribulations and joys. As the tree rises out of the earth, so also do its roots sink deeply into the dark, fertile loam, piercing the soil of existence, finding strength from deep within it, binding it fast to the earth, and thereby enabling it to grow tall, to grow high, reaching towards the sun.
The human being reflects upon the morning and the evening, in the great, vast forest of prayers that is so thoroughly suffused with benevolent life, and with life’s Grace. And the human being prays.