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In prostration I find the wings of my heart. I feel the closest to my Beloved when prostrating my self and my heart before Him. Prostration is the most upright approach to the Divine.
But I have to say, Pride is a bitch. It rears its ugly head in the most twistedly creative ways.
My beloved and I have been joining a local Eastern Orthodox parish for morning prayer on Sundays and it has been so wonderfully sobering, humbling and fulfilling. After I started on my Sufi path most western Christian worship seemed hollow and meaningless to me. I’m sure that it is my own fallen nature that limits me in this way. Not that western worship IS meaningless and hollow, just my own experience of it. I was thinking last Sunday how long it’s been since I’ve actually looked forward to Sunday worship and tears filled my heart with hope and thankfulness for EO morning prayer. Thank God! Anyway…
This last Tuesday, Juanita and I went to the “Vesperal Liturgy of The Forerunner.” There was a point when everyone prostrated them selves before the Eucharist and I wanted to as well but all these thoughts and fears got in the way.
Every Sunday as well, I long to throw off the coat of self-consciousness and false humility. I long to throw myself before the feet of God. But every time this longing in my heart arises, I start to fear. I start to fear what will other people think who are REAL Orthodox? Will they think, “how inappropriate for a non-orthodox christian to worship in this way” or “just how inappropriate”? Will they think that I am being like the Pharisee who prayed at the top of his lungs, “thank you god that I am not like this sinner over here”? Will they think that I am simply doing it because everyone else is doing it and I just want to fit in? All this flaunts itself under the guise of, “there is a time and place for everything” or “after a while I’ll feel more comfortable doing… whatever.” Unfortunately though… possibly… if I take this route I’m sure those “comforts” will come to pass. But will I then be giving into the lies that my pride is telling me? Should I just go for it? Probably so… maybe not… but probably so. May God give me His courage over my pride! Ya Allah Al-Aziz!
Thanks be to God.
I am looking at my wedding ring. It tells a story. it tells the the story of the tension between singularity and plurality. This is why i consider myself a “traditionalist”.
I remember when I received the weld spot on my wedding ring. It was while I was Ironworking for Lewis Herrera. I was tack welding a jig for some job… near the end of the day… very mundane work… no fuss, no grand piece of art. it was “just” a jig. a “tool” which was created for one specific job and would be discarded after the job was done. I was rushing along tacking my jig together (without gloves, because whats the chance that I would injure myself from a few tack welds) and suddenly… INTENSE PAIN on my left hand… on my ring finger.
OH MY GOD IT WON’T STOP! FUCK IT HURTS FUCK FUCK FUCK!
A piece of weld spatter had stuck to my 18K white gold wedding band and had supper heated it and burned a semi-circular scar into my finger. I couldn’t flick it off, I couldn’t make the pain stop until the red hot ring of fire had cooled on its own. Then I thought of plunging my hand into the quench tank, but by then it was already cooled.
The pain is gone and even the scare is mostly gone, but the spot of hard steel remains on the soft tissue of my wedding ring.
It reminds me of the sacrifice that my beloved has made for me to follow my dreams and how she has never once held it against me or used them as cannon fodder for her rage.
Thank you my sweet. I love you with all my Heart!
-john
Arthur held the vile meticulously in his hand. The waters of the tiny world trembled in his grip. He imagined a microscopic version of himself doing a cannon-ball into this little ocean.
His mind wandered past all of the cataclysmic events of the last few days and weeks and years that had led up to this point in time, the point in time where Arthur Holt was grasping the last 4 ounces of water on earth. The chemical’s new found singularity struck him strange, for prior to this moment, water had been the most common, elemental, forgotten and taken for granted substance known to man. Even if he was completely parched, he knew that somewhere, no matter how inaccessible it might be, there was water. But now… this was not even the case.
Now Arthur really held the last drop of water in his fingers. He wondered what it would feel like to drink the last 4 ounces of water, what emotions would rush through his veins, what thoughts of despair or ecstasy would swim around his head. This single water might be saved for later when truly needed at a cataclysmic moment of desperate rescue. It was a glistening potion of hope and despair, of comfort and anxiety, a monument to creation and a crumbled ruin of a reminder to the past.
How, Arthur wondered, how could this simple compound of Hydrogen and Oxygen contain so many paradoxes, enigmas and mysteries of the life it used to uphold. It held every question to every answer of earthly life. It was life itself. It told a story, not a human story, but a story of energy, power, creation, of god breathing life into a fiery, explosive element. The human element, they had exploded on the earth and scorched it beyond recognition ironically using the element of fire that when bonded with the breath of god created this basic building block of earthly life.
The vile, so precious and so endangered reminded him of the stories he read as a child where there was always a precious vile, singular in it’s ability and availability to offer its barer hope in darkness, healing at the last gasp of life and protection in the face of horror.
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