What we contemplate in faithfulness
“What you gaze on, gazes back.
What you contemplate in faithfulness,
Changes you into itself.
Turning and turning you’ll come around
To being
Open like the earth
In which much can grow.”
– Gunilla Norris
The gardener/ poet comes to realize that what she had thought of as “working in the garden” was actually, the garden “working on her.” There is within her soul, a willingness to be worked upon, an openness.
If someone were to come along and see her, it would look to them as if she were just a person working in the garden. But there is much more happening than that.
We are the ones who decide on what level we are working, walking, eating, and relating to people.
If we are merely working on a job without letting it inform us, it is going to be tedious. If we are merely “enduring” a relationship it is going to be deadening. If we are consuming food without asking it to enliven us, without a blessing, it will just be “filler” for our stomachs; a semblance of food without being real nourishment.
Nicodemus comes to Christ in the night, already on a different level because he recognizes that something entirely new from what he has ever known is breaking in upon the earth. When the Gospels report that something occurs “in the night” it means, “in the Spirit.”
To come to a new birth through “the formative power of the water and the breath of the Spirit” is to take hold of our spiritual development, to become a beggar of the Spirit as it says in the Beatitudes, humble, with our bowl always empty. In this way, we allow what we encounter to work upon us.
On earth, we have much hardship, but we are also hardened. Darkness prevails in our political/ social/ economic sphere. But if the light within us turns into darkness, then we are lost entirely.
Imagine that what you contemplate in faithfulness actually changes you into itself. What do you contemplate? What do you direct yourself to contemplate while you are doing something else? When do you become still and just contemplate one thing only?
We are the “bearers” of the Consecration of the Human Being. The Sacrament is born and borne through the human soul. We carry it for the rest of humanity. It is a light in the darkness. We do not come to church perfunctorily just to say we did. We come to allow it to work on us!
If we want to work on a higher level than we have up until now, we have to be born again. We have to allow ourselves to be informed by the Spirit in all that we do and say, if possible. We also need to act but let us do so in the light and with the power of the Spirit. Let us become what we contemplate and let us contemplate that which we would want to become.
Rev. Carol Kelly