I am not sure if it can be defined as lingering in a passage of Scripture, or meditating, ruminating...however one wishes to define it, it's where I have been with a portion of John 8 - all about seeing and touching yet knowing little. These words have taken me by surprise, in fact they have arrested me and held me in this teaching of Jesus for weeks.
Living with the 5 senses, embracing them, knowing The Almighty through them, has been my heart life in the last year. To come fully alive and awake with them and therefore learn to live very present and through being present to experience Holy Presence: this is what the Spirit has taught me to embrace LIFE within, to embrace Their presence, and to carry life to the world I walk in. At least I should say I am in this process.
But Jesus words in this passage in John have intrigued me.
"You decide according to what you can see and touch. I don't make judgements like that. But even if I did, my judgement would be true because I wouldn't make it out of the narrowness of my experience but in the largeness of the One who sent me, the Father."
What? Our own experiences is all we have isn't it? It is not the paradigm from which we "know" the world around us?
"You're tied down to the mundane. I'm in touch with what is beyond your horizons. You live in terms of what you see and touch. I'm living on other terms....You're missing God in your lives."
Is the mundane not where we can find and experience you God? Is this quest to live with one's senses fully alive not what the Spirit has been speaking to me about? Or is it that there is more beyond what my senses can experience here?
In the ordinary occupation of eating over this last week of the year 2006, the sacred has been shown to my heart in new ways. Standing in the back of a flower shop with the 2 women who run it, toasting the last day of the year with a plastic cup and a tipple of sherry, with a slice of baguette - this was sacred communion. Or seeing the life in the eyes of a woman at the table on Christmas Day - her first Christmas not spent in hibernation for many years. That was sacred and the meal was a beautiful gift of communion in Holy Presence. Are those the things beyond sight? Beyond touch? Is this the very ordinary where we find God, Jesus, the Spirit, yet miss them because we don't see more, or feel more?
The very words of the Almighty, of Yeshua, the speaking of the Spirit have begun to come alive to my senses - is there more beyond this to know? I am sure of it. As 2007 begins, the theme to my heart and soul is to "see" differently - to see with the heart and to touch life so I can understand what Jesus was talking about and the narrowness of my own experience can be expanded. What does it really mean to live beyond our senses and remain very present in this life with the senses we are created with? have begun to travel this road more purposefully and will see what is revealed.