I would like to offer you this week an old wisdom story I came across from Africa. It's about a village in Kenya that experienced a three-year drought. The adults were desperate, the babies listless, the animals skeletal and the land semi desert. Without a harvest for three years the place became a casket of death. Maybe the village Rainmaker could rescue the situation, the village elders were saying.
The young and the fittest were sent out in search of the Rainmaker who had not been seen for three years. Blessed by the gods and the ancestors, they found him and persuaded him to return with them to the village. He listened to their tragic story and then fled into the wilderness. After three days it began to rain. There was transformation all round. Smiles returned as bodies became stronger. Eyes began to light up again and people danced with wild joy to the greening of their fields. One day, the villagers set out to seek the Rainmaker in order to thank him.
The Rainmaker said: 'Do not thank me, for I did not make the rain to fall. When I visited you, I found no inner peace in the people; there was no harmony and Nature was affected. Hearts were starved as well as bodies, and imaginations had dried up. I prayed to the gods for the rhythm to return, and it did.' The rain fell.
What is the wisdom of the Rainmaker? Our inner peace and the ways of nature are not separate phenomena. We humans are part and parcel of nature, the whole universe. There is only one source of life, one mighty source of energy - the Cosmic Christ. This Christ embraces all the indwelling divinity that integrates, infuses and redeems the whole of creation. Integration of this kind awakens and reconfigures the human psyche to the ways of the universe as the one flow of grace.
What did the Rainmaker do to discover the universal rhythm of being? He breathed himself into a listening stillness, bringing balance and calm. Breathing is something we do all the time whether we are aware of it or not, whether our breathing is done with gratitude or not. The baby arrives gasping for breath. The umbilical cord is broken only so that a more universal intimacy may begin. Our first breath brings us into a deep and vital conversation with all of nature. In our breathing we are part of a universal common body. We are the human lungs of the Cosmic Christ. There is no religious way of breathing. Breathing and stillness are universal. The experience of breathing is sacred, a connecting lifeline we all share, our common relationship and bond.
How good are we at breathing and stillness? The Rainmaker fled to the dying hard edges of the village in order to be still, to be rooted in his deepest self, confident in his own truest being, secure in his own capacity for loving and being loved. For that to happen he had to be in harmony with nature, stripping himself of illusions and moving out into the heartbeat of the surrounding cosmos. In the stillness he was dancing with the inner throbbing of universal serenity. It is in this that right relations may be restored in a sometimes splintered and fragmented world. The Rainmaker knew only too well the fragile balance between war and peace, torment and stillness, sickness and health, isolation and community.
Is 'stillness' a lost gift in our world today? Are we over-hooked on gadgetry, surfing, texting, sexting, browsing....? In the wake of the onslaught of artificial/digital intelligence have we sacrificed our sanity and crucified our capacity for reflective living? In all the clutter have we forgotten we have a divine origin? We need silent awareness for healthy living. Our spirit needs room to stretch, breathe and be free. Our spirit fires the imagination, ignites our creativity and makes real a vibrant vitality. It wakes us up to the larger picture we are part of, and to the divine source of our energy. John Henry Newman spoke of the need to nourish the heart and imagination if we would have a faith that is for real.
Can we, this Advent season, discover again within ourselves the potential to be quiet, still, and present to ourselves and the awesome universe? Let's give rebirth 'to our one wild and precious life,' as the poet Mary Oliver beautifully puts it. Can we set on fire again our potential for creative and imaginative living, reconcile within us what is splintered and separated, and allow our original oneness with our Cosmic God to happen again? The truly human heart is the divine catalyst of everything that has lost its place in God's original dream for the world. Heart and imagination! That's what the family dinner table is all about.
PASTOR EMERITUS
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