I’m not an authority on anything. The ridiculous certificates one gets after certain courses do little more than confirm one’s literacy.
Way back there used to be a tag Roma locuta est, causa finita! Rome has spoken, that closes the issue! (We had Latin in school.) Well, in no sense am I a Roma echo!
I preface today’s item with it because I’ve been once referred to in those terms.
As the singer asserts in My Fair Lady, “I’m an ordinary man.” An old one at that. It’s the ‘old’ bit that gives whatever authenticity and authority these pieces may claim – I’ve done a lot of living. And dying. And lots of other ‘ing’ things.
Creation is at the moment going through a measurable phase. We can apply all sorts of statistics to creation, even to recognising that there is Dark Matter out there about which we know little more than that very sentence asserts. We are a statistician’s playground.
And we are a playground too for mystery. I’ll explain: While we tend to locate its centre in our head, the experience is that lots of worlds are where we live at any moment of the day – or night.
We dream stuff. We remember stuff. We envisage stuff. We create stuff. Vast, scary, cheery, unwilled and willed, priceless and useless, heroic and cowardly, sexy and saintly, and cull all the appropriate adverbs and adjectives you like: they’re all true – and can be implemented while you take a bus ride to the restaurant.
I’m a guy who tries to pray pretty frequently. Kind seniors have taught me ways to do so. What exactly is going on when I’m doing this? The honest-to-God answer is, I don’t really know.
What I do is, I turn my mind to the realisation that all creation is a manifestation of love, and that the one commonly labelled ‘God’ is no ‘one’ at all: is simply Love, at its fullest meaning. And I just sort of dwell in that. Like relishing a good memory, only it’s now.
How do I know this is so? I have certainly been given reason to be cautious about it, because others relate to God as Father, some even as one of what they refer to as the Blessed Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Others as Allah, as Bhagwan, others as Lord Krishna, the Dhamma, Ahura Mazda, etc. They go along with the activity of divine love but are more wary about my trip: that there is no divinity except Love. So I tread cautiously because though in my own mind I am convinced, that doesn’t make me infallible. (What a sick history of infallibility our religions have!)
Dare. Don’t be afraid. Don’t get locked into present reality
In 2019 I had the life-changing experience during three months in Europe of being loved, and of being a part in that very thing called love. I’ve talked of this before, so I won’t wallow in it again, though ‘wallow’ is both apt and inept in this context.
Just let’s say, I live in love, nonstop, after spending all of four scores of my life’s story convinced there was, at best, bodily love and even commitment culminating in a life partnership, but nothing as total as where I now find myself.
There was no particular moment, it was a gradual transforming, but all within that three-month spell. (My life up to then had been empty beyond description, for reasons that don’t matter here.)
So when I now explore What’s it all about? and try to offer this new insight to brave people like you who read it, this is where I start from.
It is quite possible that you yourself are so familiar with this understanding of your being that you hardly blink on reading it – but for me, it is a new life. And real; that’s the point.
A few paragraphs back I said Creation is at the moment going through a measurable phase. I think that Covid might be a step towards abandoning this state, and turning Earth, and all creation, into one of those I listed in the paragraph after that.
After all, if our minds “inside our heads” can conjure notions like this, why cannot those conjurations become realities? This one, where we are now living, hasn’t ended very happily, so let’s start over.
Really what I wanted this particular reflection to say, dear reader is Dare. Don’t be afraid. Don’t get locked into present reality.
Let your mind do its stuff of creating a totally new reality, happier for all who dwell in it. Love really is the door to all fullness, all totality, all meaning – and in this era, we have not realised that. There is at least as much non-love abroad as love.
As for everything else, it hardly matters. Love your associates, your family, your world, yes yes yes: but celebrate the marvellous universe you yourself are.
How come I am not saying ‘Love God’? Hang it, God is all this!
And you!
- Brendan MacCarthaigh is a Christian Brother from Dublin working in India for over 50 years, mostly in Value Education with senior classes and teachers.
- First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.