In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,
coming back to this life from the other,
more secret, movable and frighteningly honest world
where everything began,
there is a small opening into the new day
which closes the moment you begin your plans.

What you can plan is too small for you to live.

What you can live wholeheartedly
will make plans enough for the vitality
hidden in your sleep.

To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden
as a gift to others.

To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.

You are not a troubled guest on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents.
You were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which you have just emerged.

Now looking through
the slanting light of the morning window
toward the mountain presence
of everything that can be,
what urgency calls you to your one love?
What shape waits in the seed of you
to grow and spread its branches
against a future sky?

Is it waiting in the fertile sea?
In the trees beyond the house?
In the life you can imagine for yourself?
In the open and lovely
white page on the waiting desk?  (1)

I love that poem.  The poet says that each morning as we awaken, “there is a small opening into the new day that closes the moment (we) begin (our) plans.”   The opening into the day closes when we begin our plans because “what (we) can plan is too small for (us) to live.”   Do you see?  Our clutching, grasping, and clinging to a tight-fisted management of our own lives flattens and eventually deadens our humanity because there is no room then for Spirit in us and so we cease to breathe the breath of life but only the stale air of fear and boredom.  We fear the loss of control in our lives and so, despite St. Paul ’s reminder that it is for freedom that Christ has set us free and that we are not ever again to submit ourselves to a yoke of slavery, we often do precisely that.  We live in servitude to fear that keeps us paralyzed in our places and so we mount no resistance to the present arrangements of things that, no matter how injurious to our souls and spirits, we delude ourselves into believing are too complex, complicated, and wearisome to change.

This, then, is salvation: to hold in abeyance our carefully constructed, all-planned-out-in-advance lives long enough to be open to whatever we can live with our whole hearts and souls.  Not to do so is a failure of our imaginations and that is the sin from which all other sins arise and the one from which we need to be saved.  It is never too late for this attentiveness to what makes our spirits sing and soar.  Remember when Jesus said that we are to “love the Lord our God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength”?  Loving God means living into the fullness of our own particular humanity.  We do not love God by singing praise songs and reading books purchased in Christian bookstores.  We love God by living more fully into our humanity.  “The glory of God,” St. Irenaeus said, “is a human being fully alive.”  There is only a small opening into the new day, the transformed life, the new heaven and new earth and we’ll miss it if we do not attend to that which comes to us from beyond ourselves or from deep within us.  “To be human,” the poet says, “is to become visible while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.” 

I do not think I know a better description of the Christian life than that.  Being a Christian is all about becoming a human being.  That is what Jesus did.  Cognizant of the small opening into a new day, a new way of life and living, he did not quickly busy himself in plans of his own making but was open to a Plan that came, in the poet’s words, “from another world.”  The world of Spirit.  God.  The reason that Jesus is such a towering presence in the life of the church is that his humanity became  transparent and translucent to us as he carried faithfully what was hidden within him – the call to authenticity, to the way of love, to a practice of the oneness of everything – as a gift to others, all others, to the world.  “To remember the other world in this world is to live in your true inheritance,” the poet proclaims.  Of course, we need to make our smaller plans to get us through the day, but they never should obscure the larger Plan that we hardly can describe or name but is the truest thing about us. 

Our lives have truth in them, purpose, meaning.  “You are not a troubled guest on this earth,” David Whyte says.  “You are not an accident amidst other accidents.  You were invited from another and greater night than the one from which you have just emerged.”  So before closing that small opening into the new day by making premature plans for our lives without listening for and to the Plan that comes to us from beyond this world or from deep within us, here is a question we ought to be asking ourselves:  What is the courageous conversation I should be having right now?  We can have it with ourselves, or with the silence, or perhaps with a trusted friend, but we each of us need to have it.  What is the courageous conversation I should be having right now?   The poet poses the question this way:  “Looking through the slanting light of the morning window toward the mountain presence of everything that can be, what urgency calls you to your one love?  What shape waits in the seed of you to grow and spread its branches against a future sky?” 

St. John , to whom the Book of Revelation is attributed, was a poet, too, and a pastor, and in the evening years of his life he had been exiled to Patmos , an island prison, on account of his fidelity to the gospel.  The word of God put him where he was but it also had made him who he was.  He had refused to traffic in “little plans” that would have closed him off to the larger Plan for his life even though the larger Plan was costly to John in so many ways.  One day, while worshiping on the Lord’s Day, John had an ecstatic vision that comprises the content of the Book of Revelation, and his vision included “a new heaven and a new earth.”

Heaven, in John’s understanding, is not a place where we go when we die.  It is not remote from earth. It is not separate or different.  Heaven is, in David Whyte’s image, “the other world in this world.”  Heaven is not the promise of anything more or other than what we already are given in faith, but it is the completion of it, the fulfillment of it, the perfection of it.  Heaven is a matter of attending to what is normally just outside the range of our senses, this realm of the Spirit, so that we “may carry what is hidden as a gift to others.”  When John in his vision sees and hears Jesus saying, “See, I am making all things new,” that is a far different thing than if Jesus had said, “I am making all new things.”  There is no rescue, no escape from present realities save by the same Spirit who was in Jesus being welcomed in us, too, to give us, if we will, the grace to live on earth in such a way as to renew it and to fill it with hope and compassion and kindness.

This is the great work of our lives to which God is all the time calling us…to be healed and to heal and to be loved and to love.  Then will there be a new heaven and new earth indeed!

Amen.

(1)  Poem by David Whyte found in his collection of poems entitled The House of Belonging published by Many Rivers Press in 1997.

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