An excerpt from Laurence Freeman OSB from “Dearest Friends” in Meditatio Newsletter October 2017.
The word “contemplation” hides the word templum or “temple.” Today we imagine this as a religious building. But the original meaning was not the physical structure but pure space itself – before the building was erected or the sacred events enacted there. This gives new meaning to St Paul: “Do you not know that you yourselves are God’s temple and God’s Spirit dwells in you?” (1 Cor 3:16) So we are space. Not just containers of amazing thoughts and imagination, neural pathways and complex biology. We are the spaciousness of God.
[And we are in relationship.] Sr Eileen O’Hea had a moving phrase I always remember: relationship is the sacred ground of our humanity. This is an insight into all relationships. Existentially speaking, we cannot imagine ourselves not embedded in relationship in every dimension: historically, socially, emotionally, ecologically and cosmically. We live in an inter-related network of being. Contemplative relationship means passing beyond the narrow sense of ‘my’ relationships altogether – the kind that we control, possess, feel jealous about or violently defend with the dark side of Eros. Alternatively, we see relationships as fields of growth where we learn to be faithful, non-possessive, loving with detachment and without projection – and growing in self-knowledge. Relationships are not ego-construction but temple spaces.
After meditation: “In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being” by Denise Levertov in THE STREAM AND THE SAPPHIRE (NY: New Directions, 1997), p. 27.
Birds afloat in air’s current,
sacred breath? No, not breath of God,
it seems, but God
the air enveloping the whole
globe of being.
It’s we who breathe, in, out, in, the sacred,
leaves astir, our wings
rising, ruffled—but only the saints
take flight. We cower
in cliff-crevice or edge out gingerly
on branches close to the nest. The wind
marks the passage of holy ones riding
that ocean of air. Slowly their wake
reaches us, rocks us.
But storm or still,
numb or poised in attention,
we inhale, exhale, inhale,
encompassed, encompassed.
