Spin Around in Our Hearts
I am taking a scripture class at a local monastery. It is so beautiful to take the twenty minute drive into the forest. Today I made my way through snowflakes. We have homework to do every week, and obviously, it requires reading the Bible. I blew it off this week in a big way. So, I had about a half hour this morning, between school drop off, and scripture class. So, there I was, sitting with my Bible in my rocking chair, "skimming" the book of Judges in thirty minutes. Now, I know many of you probably have not read Judges, I know I hadn't even heard of it until last week. But Judges is not a book you skim. It is all about people needing heroes; legends and the recounting of civil war and power. Well, it's about more than that, but in a nutshell. And back in these days, people thought that God caused everything. Everything. If they won a war, God was happy with them and on their side. And if they were put out in the wilderness for forty years, God was pissed. If they were good, God was good to them. And if they were naughty, God brought down His wrath. Pretty black and white if I do pass judgement myself. It's part of the bigger picture, but that sort of God is hard for me to stomach somedays.
So, it got my heart spinning and I wound up with a Rumi poem. And it goes like this,
Out there beyond wrong doing and right doing
there is a field, I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is to full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase "each other"
doesn't make any sense.
there is a field, I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is to full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase "each other"
doesn't make any sense.
Beyond right and wrong, black and white, there is a field, I'll meet you there. When we spend to much time in our heads, we get more and more black and white. Who is right and who is wrong? If I pray hard enough, God will give me what I want? And if I don't pray, God will be mad and take away what I love. That is a tough God to want to be involved with. The Bible is a story of faith; of a people struggling to relate with God. We know that story, don't we? We are all in it now. And yes, sometimes we can get black and white and get all judgmental on ourselves and each other. But let's spin around in our hearts a little bit. Get out of our heads and into our bodies. The field can feel scary, when we have lived in black and white land. But when we lie down in that grass..well, like Rumi says, the world is just to full to talk about.
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