“Always the sea Inside”

H,

We are sometimes fooled into believing that the material universe is the most impending thing.  It is the one we deal with immediately we wake up. There is nothing more urgent than a hungry stomach. The solutions to the lack of basic needs, food-shelter-clothing, may pre-occupy all our lives and we may simply miss the inside.

I must note here that this is not a strike against material reality. There is no need to deny that there is a place for that. We live in a world that keeps that in our face. We have families, friends and neighbors that deserve the luxury of options and the opportunity to live full lives on every level. Every human being is deserving of ordinary and absolute dignity.

Yet, there is more. This is not all there is. No matter the material reality in front of us there is always the sea inside us. This sea may be affected by what the world looks like, and, to be honest, it frequently is, but it is also the superior garden we must tend to in order to access the full human being we were created to be. The spiritual reality that is sometimes grit, other times bravery, always wisdom and frequently empathy and compassion. The material reality makes us thirsty but only the spiritual reality can make us truly full and satisfied.

“Return the call to home.”

H,

The hardest thing is to go back to the people we used to be. Those people do not exist and probably never did. They are fictional characters we have made up to hide the past and all its non-incandescence. In the seemingly darker moments of the present we make up the radiating brightness of some past glory we never really touched.

This is not to say the past has no value or was all bad. It is not even to say that the past is always worse off than the present and we are always making progress. The only thing I mean is that it did not happen the way we imagined it. Our fractured minds are the ultimate unreliable narrator.

And, also, our faith tells us there is nothing there for us. It is a forward motion sort of belief system. There is no pain or pleasure back there that cannot be unlocked or resolved by the glory ahead of us. The home we have never seen or felt is much more like us than we will ever be. We will know in that eternity to come, the length and breadth of who we truly are. This home keeps calling to us. It is about time we started picking up.