Skip to main content

Happy Easter in a hazelnut


God's wounded hand
reached out to place in hers
the entire world, 'round as a ball,
small as a hazelnut'. Just so one day
of infant light remembered
her mother might have given
into her cupped palms
a new laid egg, warm from the hen;
just so her brother
risked to her solem joy
his delicate treasure,
a sparrow's egg from the hedgerow.
What can this be? the eye of her understanding marvelled.

God for a moment of our history
placed in that five-fingered
human nest
the macrocosmic egg, sublime paradox
brown hazelnut of All that Is-
made, and beloved, and preserved.
As still, waking each day within
our microcosm, we find it, and ourselves.

From The Showings: Lady Julian of Norwich, 1342-1416 No. 4 from "Breathing the Water" by Denise Levertov

In the icon above, it is the crucified Christ that shows the hazelnut to Julian witnessing to her the three properties she understood from it: The first that God made all, that God loves it and that God preserves it ever as gift.

Of which the resurrected Christ is ever the seal on that understanding. Death is no more, violence can never be the final word, you, all of you, every particular thing in its uniqueness is loved because God is at the heart of all things and love is the meaning. You can forget this, misplace it, rail against it and it makes no ultimate difference, delaying only the moment when 'waking each day within our microcosm, we find it, and ourselves' and in our neighbour.

Who is our neighbour? Everyone, everything that is gifted with its loved meaning within the hazelnut. Unless you are a citizen of everyone, everywhere, how can you be a loving citizen of any particular place? Their identity, our identity rests in the gift, and the gift is one.

Happy Easter!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age

Searching for paradise in the hidden Himalayas

At moments of dislocation and intense social uncertainty people will appear offering the possibility of another land where people will be blessed, liberated and genuinely at home. In this case, it was not 'Brexit' but a hidden land of actual immortality, enfolded within the mountain ranges around Mt Kanchenjunga on the Nepalese/Sikkim border. Unlike Shangri-la, Beyul Demoshong was not simply a physical space, carefully hidden (as imagined in Hilton's Lost Horizon) but an occulted place spiritually hidden. The person offering this journey and opening the way to it was the 'crazy lama', Tulshuk Lingpa. Lingpa was a 'terton' a finder of 'terma' which were texts magically hidden until discovered at the right moment for them to be of maximum usefulness to people's spiritual development. They were often hidden by Padmasambhava, the robust wonder-working bringer of Buddhism to Tibet; and, Tibetan Buddhism is alive with such discoveries (though und

Parzival and the neutral angels

Fresh from contemplating 'Lost Christianity', I read Lindsay Clarke's fabulous re-telling of Wolfram von Eschenbach's poem, 'Parzival and the Stone from Heaven' from which 'Christendom' is lost! Von Eschenbach was a sacred poet but one of ecumenical sympathies where not only is Parzival's final battle (unknowingly) with his brother, the piebald Saracen, Feirefiz, essential to his self-discovery but the two of them enter the Grail castle together and are granted together a vision of the 'stone' that is the Grail. When Feirefiz asks whether it is permitted to see this Christian  mystery, Parzival answers (in Clarke's version) yes for, "all Nature's increase is there, so I think that this stone from Heaven must be a living emblem of the earth itself, which is mother and father to us all." There are knights, ladies, sorcerers, hermits and wise old hags abounding in Eschenbach's world but interestingly for a mediev