October 2001 (Vol. XIV, No. 9)

God – and humankind too – is a mystery, a living paradox of opposites:

"Most deeply hidden and most nearly present, always acting and always at rest, still gathering and never wanting, seeking although in need of nothing!"

I dive down deep as I can and I find no end.

Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.

The sacred is plainly a mystery of consciousness – using the word MYSTERY to signify not a problem that can be intellectually solved, but a process of awakening and transformation that must be acted out in order to be experienced, and experienced if one is to make it one's own.

We are a unity in our diversity
Jewels in a very large web
connected by "Mystery"

But "Mystery" the same for all
but called by different names

The name may be the limit
that tears the strands apart
of the web
connecting us in it.

Spiritual disciplines are being renewed throughout the world. For some, the ultimate mystery of things is experienced in the depth of the inner self, for others in the human community, for still others in the earth process itself. Yet in each instance, the full sense of communion seems to be present.

Dance was my way of praying, of listening, of celebrating, it was my way of being as beautiful as the life around me. Now I feel hideous, unloved, abandoned. I lie down and sob and I feel a screeching hunger for mil, for some essence to flow from the sky and reach down through my shattered mind and reconnect me to warmth and calm. And very gradually it happens. The life in the trees and grass and the warm rocks enters my body and joins me to them. One morning, I sit up and see the incandescent trees in silent communion with each other, immersed in love. This is the world, I think, the real world. Whatever happens to me, the world is still this luminous mystery.

And take upon 's the mystery of things,
As if we were God's spies.