Scribbled margins

The Hermitage

April 23, 2019

Once again Anthony deMello has given me food for thought.

My take-away from “Disclosures” in One Minute Meditations (p. 170);

Life is a text, where the notes scribbled in the margins are as interesting as the life itself.

Clearly the meditation was tailor-made to focus me on my choosing to write this blog. I’m not going to claim my life, or the scribbles in its margins, are up to the caliber of “interesting”, but, just as clearly, at eighty-one these scribbles are me trying to make sense out of the text.

And I wonder...what (or where) are the scribbles from year thirty-one? Or forty-one? Or sixty-one for that matter?

Surely God was trying then, as now, to get me to write in the margins. But, in my exuberance, “life” --the text--was the focus.

It is rare for me to mark a book. In the few I have marked, such as van Breemen’s book, when I return I find the text that strikes me now is obscured by the scribblings and highlighting of years past.

Over the years I’ve meditated in my own way. As an advocate “active meditation” I was always seeing life as a flowing river, not a deep, still pond.

The image that comes to mind is driving a car past the windows of department stores in the city center, seeing the reflections in the glass more than the items in the window.

Granted, many of those items beyond the glass are not something meant for me. But wouldn’t I have to “see” the items to know whether I needed them or not?

Is the superficial image of the car speeding past more interesting?

Or distracting?

Or...what?

Downsizing from physical things is easy...well, that’s not quite true. As I look around my office, I guess it depends on how attached I am to them.

I’m a self professed gadget freak. When it comes to “things,” I’m like the robber jay who steals the aluminum foil from the camp table because it’s shiny. He has no use for it--it certainly doesn’t make his nest more habitable--but he tucks it away just the same.

Downsizing from outdated dogma I’ve self-created is far harder.

So the real focus this morning is not the useless trappings of my nest. It’s about the tin-foil in my spiritual life. It’s easy to see “gadgets” and “gee-gaws” in the physical world. How much harder is it to see them as I try to open the boxes in The Vault.

The basic premise of possessions in RVing is--if you come home from a trip and you haven’t used something...get rid of it. But every RVer I know, including myself, still has “stuff” in the storage bays and cabinets that “I might need some day.” How much spiritual “stuff” have I hoarded way past its ‘sell-by date.’

I’m reminded of the movie, The Mission, where we think Robert Deniro, dragging his armor up the mountain, is going to be killed. Instead, the sword of Jeremy Irons slices the bindings of the net holding the self-imposed penance and we hear the clatter of redeemed bondage as it plunges down the mountain into the river below.

How many more years before I’m able to see the “armor” I’m hauling up the mountain, and let the sword of the Spirit set me free?

Till then…

Thanks for journeying with me.