Energy. It comes in an infinite variety. Most of its forms, like the dark energy of the cosmos, we cannot even imagine. We recharge batteries, we sleep at night, we have good days and low days. Organisations go into the doldrums or buzz with life. It can be low key, like the rumination of cows in a time-space all their own, or the wired, impatient tension of an athlete in last-minute training. There is physical energy and the energy of a remembered word, cruel or loving, that lingers in the mind and shapes the electro-chemistry of our whole being for days.
More than this we can sometimes glimpse the truth that we are not just receptacles or channels of energy, not just receivers and transmitters. But we too are no more, no less, than a form of energy which itself is in constant permutation. In those moments of insight we feel, as the psalmist sang, the ‘wonder of our own being’. We see that our own energy is in flow and flux with all forms of energy. We belong to the world which ebbs and flows in relation to a source we cannot see or imagine and yet is ever-present.
It is in stillness that we experience energy in its simplest and purest form. We come closest to its source and realise that the source is our source, ourselves and yet infinitely other than our selves. To undergo that experience of identity- without-identity is love and then we know that the essence of all these myriad forms of energy is love.
Amazingly, we can forget it as quickly as we understand it. That is why we need to meditate every day of our lives in order not to forget to be fully alive.
Laurence Freeman OSB
