Recently my husband D and I were at the Thomas Merton Society "Conference for Peace - non-violence". John Dear, SJ was the main speaker for this event.
While it was focused on non-violence, peace, and how as Christians we are called to be peace-makers, my thoughts continued to focus on the fact that we cannot be peacemakers, work at non-violence effectively unless we begin to look at the internal war, the internal violence we inflict upon ourselves so regularly!
Jesus said "Blessed are the peace makers" or as it is translated in The Message (Matthew 5:8)
"You're blessed when you get your inside world - your mind and heart -
put right. Then you can see God in the outside world."
This translation by Eugene Peterson seems to point toward the fact that peacemakers have an internal peace, an internal home, an internal place of freedom and comfort for the Spirit with much room, and then they can not only see God in the outside world, but they begin to be God in the world around them.
So this then has triggered for me the connection to internal peace and living with our senses alive - to taste, see, hear, smell, touch life around us and within us!
This morning I read from Seeds, Thomas Merton passages and find the connection to my thoughts expanding.
"One of the most important - and most neglected - elements in the beginnings of the interior life is the ability to respond to reality, to see the value and the beauty in ordinary things, to come alive to the splendor that is all around us in the creatures of God. We do not see these things because we have withdrawn from them. In a way we have to. In modern life our senses are so constantly bombarded with stimulation from every side that unless we developed a kind of protective insensibility we would go crazy trying to respond to all the advertisements at the same time!
The first step in the interior life, nowadays, is not, as some might imagine, learning NOT to see and taste and hear and feel things. On the contrary, what we must do is begin by unlearning our wrong ways of seeing, tasting, feeling, and so forth, and acquire a few of the right ones.
For asceticism is not merely a matter of renouncing television, cigarettes and gin. Before we can begin to be ascetics, we first have to learn to see life as if it were something more than a hypnotizing telecast. And we must be able to taste something besides tobacco and alcohol: we must perhaps even be able to taste these luxuries themselves as if they too were good.
How can our conscience tell us whether or not we are renouncing things unless it first tells us that how to use them properly? For renunciation is not an end in itself: it helps us to use things better. It helps us to give them away. If reality revolts us, if we merely turn away from it in digust, to whom shall we sacrifice it? How shall we consecrate it? How shall we make of it a gift to God and to men?"
(NM 33-34)from page 15, Seeds
I cannot help but see how my quest to bring my own senses alive is connected to many other levels of how Jesus has asked me to live. I cannot help but ask today how does a culinary minister be a carrier of life and be a peace maker as I interact with those who come to the sacred table? How do I hold life within my wombless body, how do I not do violence to my own soul in order to allow the peace and powerful presence of the Spirit to bring colour, flavour, scent, texture, taste, hope and wonder to the table where meals are shared?
Tending to the restoration of my own sensuality, embracing that I am so, on my own individually, and letting my heart and soul continue to dance in a vibrant way, a renewed and restored way is one important factor to seek. Perhaps this is a key to this year's pilgrimage theme - no longer going to war with my own self.