Life in the Tears of God, Pt. 2

                                                        Fr. Bede Griffiths

Okay. Sure. God is Love. Regardless of religion or denomination, we all want to believe that -- if there is a "God" -- than That Being is Love... Okay. Sure.... But, what if...

What if God is not "just" Love, and instead, is the endless action of loving? Not "sort of", but exactly, like a Mother?

There is a Sufi story that goes something like this (updated of course): It is night. Someone is walking down the sidewalk. He notices another man under a street lamp, on his hands and knees rummaging around on the ground...

The first man asks, "Friend, have you lost something?" The other answers, "Yes. I have lost my  keys. Would you mind helping me look for them?" So, the first man joins the other in his rummaging around on the ground...

A number of minutes go by. The first man, in evident frustration asks the other, "Where did you lose your keys? They do not seen to be here." 

The other man replied, "I dropped my keys behind my house, but there was no light there. That's why I am looking here."

Much of what passes for religion or spirituality is sort of like the "man under a street lamp, on his hands and knees rummaging around on the ground..." in the light that he could find... [And that is okay, sometimes it is the best that we can do.] But, what if your heart is hungering, yearning, and longing for something more: where do you then look?

The answer is obvious, right? You look in the dark. You go into the secret places of your heart. You expose your trauma. You surrender your "shadow" self with all of its gift-full deceits, fears, and appetites for the safety of our various ego-delusions... And no, you do not get to throw any of it away! Just as you do not get to once again stuff it into a certain suitcase in the very back of your mind (a trick perfected by most of us men!) 

There is only one way forward... It is the last lesson taught by Fr. Bede Griffiths, as recorded by Andrew Harvey. "Then, quite suddenly... the inspiration came to surrender to the Mother. It was utterly unexpected; I heard a kind of inner voice say loudly, 'Surrender to the Mother,' and so, somehow, I really don't know how, I made a surrender to the Mother. Then I had what I can only describe as an experience of being invaded and overwhelmed by love. Waves of love flowed into me... I called out... 'I'm being overwhelmed by love.'

"What I see now is that this whole experience... of being overwhelmed by love and the consciousness that was born from it -- was one vast miraculous healing, a divinely orchestrated breakthrough into the dimension of the Divine Feminine..." [The Hope, A Guide to Sacred Activism, by Andrew Harvey]

Finally, "the dark" is the "descent of our mind into our heart"... "accomplished" through the grit and grace of surrender: through the radical self-emptying of a daily breaking heart... in this emptying, as we begin to "leak out all over the place" through service and solidarity, in mercy and compassion, just then,  there is that mystic-infilling that is the Mother birthing the Beloved in the cave of our heart... [Warning: there is no such thing as "once and done".] 

Life in the tears of God is a brand new way of looking / being in the world. Seriously: take a look at the image of the Little Brown Lady (Our Lady of Guadalupe)... and then surrender into your own birth as a new human. Yeshua the Poet of Nazareth, adored the Transcendent Being, but he didn't rest or stop there! He came to liberate the transcendent power of Love into Loving, so as to embody the wisdom and justice of the Divine Beloved and make it effective for the transformation of both person and world... 

[Do you think that God does not cry for our breaking hearts and for this breaking world? This is what it means to pray...and work...]