Heaven Within

Spirit speaks to me mornings, sometimes, as the dogs and I walk. Sometimes it is because I have managed to clear a space inside me, managed to still the clamoring voices and echoes in my mind, so that I can hear. Sometimes it is because Spirit speaks undeniably loudly--as a voice inside my head, or in an elemental force, the wind, a storm, the waves--, and I have finally, as I near my 50th year, learned to listen.

A couple of mornings ago, as I walked beneath the black fringed Norway spruces that create a holy space, a vestige, a mere whisper of what the great groves must have once been, a space the cathedrals sought, perhaps, to mimic, it was as if the waters of clear understanding inside me rose and spilled over and suddenly I knew something important. I knew as I spoke Psalm 23 as a prayer, I knew as I spoke the Lord's Prayer, I knew that heaven lives within me, that the Kingdom of God is a place inside me, and I have felt it growing ever stronger and stronger inside me, as God has transformed me from within during these months and years that I have sought to know God's will and to follow it. It manifests itself as sweet, sweet calm, as peace within despite what is happening around me. I knew that God's heavenly kingdom is not something we necessarily find only after we die, but that we can know and embody right now, as we live this earthly life.

Going to the orphanage in Jamaica changes me like that, every trip, every time. The change takes months, like water trickling inside a wall, slowly eroding it away until it crumbles and falls. Case in point: I have loved to hate my boss. I have issues with authority figures (big surprise, considering what my parents were like). Last winter, I had gotten to such an unhappy place in my job, I had asked my dear friend and Pastor for help. She asked me if I ever pray for him. I told her I had no idea what to pray for about him--he apparently has everything! And she gently suggested I pray for clarity about the nature of our relationship, that I pray for peace in that place. So I did. And despite the delight I took in making fun of him and complaining about him, that peace began to rise like water inside me, and I began to be able to co-exist with this person who had offended me so greatly in the past. I was able to see him for the flawed human he is, instead of some puffed up egomaniac, and forgive him for that. And then, about a month ago, something even stronger happened.

He was going on and on, bragging about why something of his was so much better than something of mine. The usual scenario for me to think "Asshole", and shut him out of my mind. But then, in a pesky moment of insight, I saw him for the little boy he was and often still is, a little boy who dearly needs to know--for whatever reasons--that what he has IS, in fact, better than what other people have. And in that moment of compassionate vision, my heart expanded, a wall inside me crumbled and fell, and I was able to see him as a person just like me--flawed, of course!,--but not so bad, really not so bad. And I thought, "Damn! Now I won't be able to make fun of him, ever again!"

More than that, even, I find myself feeling affection and compassion for him as he struggles with the challenges his own life offers him. I can look at him and see the little boy in his eyes, a very sweet, endearing little boy! I can see his kind heart, and when he does act like the asshole he can be (as we all can be sometimes), I am able to chide him and tease him, and laugh with him--not at him, in some private sneering little place, a place where resentment festers and grows and real dislike can take root and flourish.

So the question is now, how do we do this, all of us, how do we find this heaven within, so that we can look out at the world with such compassion that our enemies become friends? How do we do that? Because I can't do it with every one who annoys me, and I certainly cannot even do it for people who have really hurt me, like my mother. Or, perhaps I can, but I just don't want to. Yet. Because I know I am a work in progress, and God isn't finished with me yet.

Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai