Daily Reading, May 7
My adventure into fullness of life (which I take to be the kingdom of heaven) involves reading, writing, and great conversation—preferably over a good meal. It is nourished by the arts, especially music. But there is a paradox here, one that the mystics might understand. What are virtues for the mystics are torments for many of us: alienation, loneliness, silence, solitude, interior emptiness, stripping bare, poverty, not-knowing, emptiness. The arts have, more often than not, given me an experience of being emptied. What we really need is often to be found in what we dread most—risk, not being in control, in the emptiness of the self. This doesn’t sound much like “heaven,” but how else can we make an inner space for living with ourselves and with each other? Cultivating gratitude helps us draw out the gold that is often hidden in the loneliness, the silence, the interior emptiness, the suffering, the poverty, and “the knowledge-that-knows-nothing.”
Emptiness, then, is indispensable to true enjoyment of the world because true enjoyment has nothing to do with possession. It is the kind of emptiness that encourages me to give myself away to others in love and service. Heaven isn’t a private possession, anymore than music, anymore than food.
Food is a delight. I love cookbooks and miss the times when the whole family would gather together to make bread. There was flour all over the kitchen and we loved to throw the dough around—especially the smooth oily dough of challah. There’s no pleasure quite like preparing and cooking a meal with the bounty of the earth. Where is the food for the soul? It is in the “useless” activities of music and play. We get a taste of heaven in the various ways in which we “waste” our time eating and drinking and delighting in one another.
From “’I Tell You a Further Mystery’” by Alan Jones, in Heaven, edited by Roger Ferlo. A Seabury Book from Church Publishing. Copyright © 2007. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org