Coracle Trust E-Reflections

Faith transitions: Reading to Being Read

Thursday 17 November 2011

What is this wondrous mystery
unfolding within me?
I have no words to name it,
for that One is above all praise,
transcends all words

St.Symeon the New Theologian

Image: Place de L’Etoile, 35000 feet up

Press the Play button to hear a blessing from Garmina Cadelica read by Gus McLeod.

There is a line in the Vedic texts which says ‘The world is as you are’.

We can – each one of us – see the same film, read the same book or listen to the same piece of music and experience them quite differently.  The world is as I experience it, as you experience it.  And at one level this is of course right.  How could it be otherwise?

A strange upending

And yet we can experience – perhaps more and more as time goes by – a strange upending of this.  More and more I find that the allusive, elliptical, koan-like parables of Jesus call me into a different way of being, more inclined – on my better days! – to let the world be as it is without my first having critiqued or categorised it.  From this place emerges the rich possibility that the parables are reading me rather than me reading the parables; the world reading me rather than me reading the world.