The Return

Many are stuck in la (negation); many have come to a halt there, mistaking the stepping-stones for a final destination. The negative way.

The hunters, with their fragile fellowship, look at the multitude which is 'the world' and imagine her to be empty, an illusion of dust and ashes, so many "dots or dreams". The truth of life is elsewhere. Rooted in their tracks, exhausted, they dare not retrace their steps into the wilderness, but return to the nothingness of the world, carrying the desert that is in the heart of man with them....

The hunter, with his cold exacting eye, looks on at the life that carries on without him and this only confirms to him that everything is passing, save the Face of God. Can there be love or knowledge of what is beyond the senses? The world is reduced to a place of frozen absences; devoid of human warmth and light, this no-place like home is necessary for there to be a leap of faith.

He remembers the ancient raag:
No-one is mine it seems,
This world is full of dreams.

Only the saint "knows how to bless". There are no saints. But this affirmation comes, if it comes at all, when he himself is nothing; only against the purity of the snow can one see any tracks....on the road Saint Paul was blinded and saw nothing, nothing but God.

Then the hunter wonders if he isn't mistaken: it is not only at the extremes, at the limits of finitude, when all possibilities have been exhausted, that such an awareness emerges; in the very heart of life and the ordinary one can hear the faint ringing of its arrival...the winter sun, tired but still giving in her ceaseless generosity, a bird taking flight after resting in a tree, a thought that comes to nestle in his tangled hair, and today, unseen to many, a girl smiling to herself in a dark corner of the world sighed, the brilliance of the fire spread its wings....a friend extends a hand to a stranger and a dog stops barking, content with the day's work; a tree dreams of infinity and the ice melts an inch.

In a thousand ways and more nature gives thanks for the gift of existence; only we humans-the multitude- have the freedom to accept or reject this gift, to praise or to blaspheme. But even this is not ours in an unqualified way: only through grace is it so. The more we blaspheme the more we praise God.

But Rumi said it better: Freedom is the ability to give thanks to God for His Beneficence.

And so he trudges home, weary, but glad at the sight of his loved ones, and he forgets what he was hunting for, forgets his melancholic thoughts, the search for contact in uncharted territories.

The world, the body, is no longer a prison that he must flee or escape from. He learns to live with the small fires in the cave, to care for them, to tend to them. The good life is not about contemplation, or 'knowing' goodness but enacting it, about returning to the ordinary life full of jumble and imperfections, and its pleasures: happiness, health, friendship, love, deep attachments. The correct approach to Reality is Reality. No, not Icarus.

This, which flickers at night
the thin glimmer striking down there
wasn't that of a match.
--Montale.

But everything glorious is around
us already: black and blue graffiti shining in
the rain's bright glaze,
the small rainbows of oil on the pavement,
where the last car to park has left its mark on the glistening
street, this radiant world.

And eventually a thought comes to him: perhaps it is he who is the one who is being stalked and hunted by the Lover...and so he chants Holy, Holy, Holy....

We find God everywhere in the world, seeing in material things the spiritual reality which is beyond them. For the spiritual and the holy we are to look at toward all the world, not toward our isolated self-will.
---Iris Murdoch