Historical setting: 602 C.E. A cottage in the Vosges
All night last night, we sat at the table with a candle and the book. Ana and I took turns reading to one another through warm tugs and tears. We read the scribbles of words in Simon’s journal. [Footnote]
The pages are the story of his secret. He couldn’t speak it to God, because he feared God would tell us that he knew our secret, so he wrote it in his book. He wrote that he knew the soul of his twin. Though he knew nothing of his name and had never heard us speak of him, Simon knew his brother. And he also knew we loved his brother.
The intangible nature of Spirit is something that living, physical people try never to speak of, even though each of us probably has known Spirit since our infancies. When we learn language, we learn what we can talk about and what is ours alone. If we speak to others of the nature of Spirit those ears that don’t hear assume we are speaking of childish fantasies, or maybe we are pretending some kind of holy ordination only offered to saints. Personal communion with Spirit is kept silent.
In Jesus’ time the Greeks and the Persians had ways to speak of Spirit. And Jesus led us into Spirit in every way spoken and unspoken, through metaphor as signs, through words of prayer “on earth as it is in heaven,” through touch for Thomas who needed touch, through vision walking on the water, through love, through air, through wind, all things invisible yet known to us all.
For centuries bishop’s councils have met and met again, and even warred over it in Chalcedon, to come to some earthly concoction of Spirit conjoined with tangible being in order to fit into a world where belief is a dictum, not an experience. But encounters with Spirit are always personal and never prescribed.
Spirit is what nurtures the ascetic – that lone monk perceived as reclusive and alone. Maybe when we are well-fed and safely tucked in from the wind then it is easy not to know we yearn for Spirit because Spirit is invisible and we can pretend not to notice. But Simon knew Spirit as the vast, all-encompassing love – the flowing waters where child spirit mingled and he found his brother, and where we still find both of these sons who seem lost from earth. Death is only for the living.
[Footnote] This journal is “How Still Waters Run” available as a pdf on the homepage of this blog.
(Continues tomorrow)
Lazarus Ink 