Thought for the Week: An ocean of awareness
'An ocean of awareness' by Christopher Goodchild
‘The end of words is to bring men to the knowledge of things beyond what words can utter.’ These words by Isaac Penington, said some 300 years ago, speak so much to me with respect to Quaker Meeting for Worship.
I see silence like a screen upon which the movies of our lives are played out. Meeting for Worship is, for me, like an auditorium, in which we are all invited to step off the stage and drama of life, gently witnessing this as a ‘passing show’, and enter into this very different dimension – together. There is something about this quality of being together which, for me, resonates deeply with Jesus calling us to ‘be in the world but not of the world’.
This deeper dimension is always with me. However, it often gets obscured by my over-identifying with the roles I play in life – father, son, teacher and writer. When I am blinded to my deeper identity, I become like an actor preparing for the stage. I select my costumes, learn my lines and play my part in this compelling and colourful drama that is life. However, Meeting for Worship invites me to go deeper, to be in my roles but not consumed by them.
I see the teachings of Jesus not so much as drawing my attention to being in right relationship with God, as discovering the right identity as God. Meister Eckhart said: ‘The Father gives birth to his Son without ceasing; and I say more: he gives birth to me, his Son and the same Son.’
In my experience, the only thing stopping me from union with the divine has been my very searching for it, like a fish in the ocean swimming around and around asking ‘Where, O where, is the ocean?’ In Meeting for Worship I move from identification with the waves of thought, to identification with the ocean itself – the ocean of awareness – of ‘God-ness’
‘If we try to go to the ocean as a single drop of water,’ says Thich Nhat Hanh, ‘we will evaporate before we ever arrive.’ I have an image of Meeting for Worship being like a river, that has a force to pull us away from our small sense of self and into a larger more expansive self, and so carry us closer to the wide ocean of freedom.
What excites me about our Meeting for Worship is that we don’t draw from a creed, or use prayer forms or rigid structures, which can be like oars that propel us through this ocean of existence. To reach the greater shore, I intuitively sense we have to abandon all forms completely. ‘Be still and know that I am God’ (Psalm 46:10).
In the silence of Meeting for Worship, I float freely upon this ocean of awareness. By floating in such a way I experience not so much a foretaste of what waits for me, but what I am in essence right here, right now – Loving awareness.
Although I call this deeper dimension awareness, tomorrow I might call it something else like the divine, ultimate truth, or maybe even God.
Words are never the same as that which each word attempts to convey. The word God is not God, the word mother is not mother. I use all these words and concepts to help me move beyond them into direct experience. In so doing, I do not see theists or nontheists, gays or straights, I see only love. Love and truth have no form. They flow in to forms and out of forms, like an ocean, constantly moving and changing amidst a backdrop of timelessness and eternal love.
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