THE BURNING BUSH

I like to think about the uncontrollable and controlling genius of fire, the unexplainable efflux that uses the process of destruction to create heat and light. It’s evidence, I think, of God’s love affair with the world, in the same way that Love is proof of God’s existence in the first place. Everything else is just the main distraction, since everything we touch with our senses gives us merely the texture of deception. Through these senses we have achieved the philosophy we always wanted, but at the cost of our souls.

To try to explain this I’m looking for a verbal trait that is older than the earth, older even than matter itself, that was perhaps created in the same breath as the genius of fire – a spontaneous combustion of word and life together. The imagination here conjures up a picture of a great arrowhead splitting the sky from horizon to horizon, and blue shards falling soundlessly onto the sea. So, this is the flashpoint, the point from which we proceeded to hatch the very first baby eggs. You may, however, point out the simultaneous creation of serpent and scorpion, lion and leopard, but which of us can calculate the tiger’s remorse as the flesh of his victim renews the tiger’s life? There are too many things we cannot know, even while we ourselves are sitting in the blind with hammers cocked. Could it be, after all, that if something bad happens, it’s because good people did it?

There’s a plane on which the hunters thrive, on which the sea of grass parts soundless before the path of the tiger, and on which the remorse of man is simply incalculable. There’s another plane on which you can lie on the earth and watch all the stars just coming through from Bethlehem, on which you can arise at noon and walk through downtown Eden until arriving at last at the shop made all of glass, and then going inside and purchasing love for the very reasonable price of your whole heart.

There is in the heart of things a perfect echo of divine grace, in which we sometimes hear the angels singing Om Sweet Om. On our planet, we are only the naturalists, always at one end of nature with our microscopes or telescopes, but never learning how to be in nature. We must learn to twitch with the long-tailed grass in a passing wind, learn to drop our leaves when the days grow short, learn to enter the water along with our flocks. We must learn to understand this thing about death – that from time to time the lake and all its fish need to be restocked. It’s not the shortness of life that instructs, and it’s not a tragedy that we are temporary. For what is not temporary is the great spiritual bazaar that takes place on the earth century after century, millennium after millennium. This is the necessary provision of the endless opportunity to exercise love. Wherever there are enemies to slay, there are wounds to be healed. We find new ways to neutralize the warrior, not by breaking his foot, just his foot’s ability to wound.

And since all potential exists only in the eternal present, we learn to burn each moment with intent. Just as intent preceded the creation of fire, we combust the eternal present with that same intent – the will that we inherited from the Divine Creator. In the moment of that creation, and this eternal re-creation of that moment, in that and this very moment, suddenly, one of the mystic secrets of celebratory prayer was, and is, driven low across the waves. And in each prayer we succeed in making another well in the heavens, from which the angels drink. It’s only possible to say to God that which you have the courage to say to yourself, that which you find in the awful forgotten frontiers of inner space. Where there is an outflow of eagles the sky grows dark; where there is an outflow of vultures the earth grows dark. And therefore we must tame our minds – however poor, the man who tames the elephant is King of the Howdah. We find, moreover, that those who are not heavenly have no power to hurt the King.

Through prayer we can release our synaptic defenses, release ourselves to the Cosmic Ego which says, not “I”, but “One”. All life on earth endures but for a day. Yet the end of every saint, every buddha, every spiritual master and avatar is this: Dis-organized, he rose from the death of his body and purchased from the Lord a sign of his immortality.

I walk outside and gaze serenely at the burning bush.