the creature of devotion

Rambling thoughts on what it feels like to be longing, hungry, and held by God.

All streams run to the sea,
but the sea is not full;
to the place where the streams flow,
there they flow again.

Ecclesiastes 1:7

When did you decide you were the source of everything?

Surely, you can see it, too.

How you arrive at each moment with the immense pressure of being everything for everyone. How you must be joyful, so they can be joyful. How you must be wise, so they can find the way. How you must be a perfect light, so that they will not tumble into the darkness.

Silly human, playing God again.

I too find myself a character in this game. Coming to my notebook to pen out every angle of the issue, hoping to see the answer from another side. Believing that one wrong word might throw someone off the dear path. Be human? A messy, frail, inconsistent thing? I couldn’t possibly allow it.

Lying on a soft black yoga mat each morning, rhythmic songs lead my breath pushed through the O shape I form with my lips. In, up, out. In, up, out. In, up, out. My belly fills, my chest fills, I exhale loudly, mixing myself with the bedroom air. It only takes a few minutes in this active practice for relief to come, washing me with the realization that I am not in charge of my own filling. Alleviated from the responsibility to be a source of anything, these are my minutes to remember what I truly am: a holy container. Tinted red by last week’s sauce, fragrant still with the flavour of it. God’s sacred tupperware, I suppose some might say. I breathe again, letting go of the boundary lines I have been taught. Hm, a container was it? No, that is not quite right.

The mind oscillates sweetly between polarities: I am everything, I am nothing; I am Godly, I am body; I am emptied, I am filled; I am the temple, I am seated within. The ego wishes to be one or the other: a neat definition for being. But the spirit knows how nice it is to be in the middle, hand in hand with each side. Can I be all of these things? Yes, my love, yes, you can be. Today I interpret myself as a sort of emptiness being visited by temporary guests. Gratitude and grief, inspiration and foolishness, happiness and apathy, euphoria and confusion. I am the worst kind of container of all — one without a lid or bottom or sides. Do not let this material body fool you! I am but a portal of flesh for your eyes to see; a figure dancing in God’s imagination.

Graciously, I draw in. Effortlessly, I draw out. The quintessence of bliss. My body is the meeting place of many rivers; a threshold for mysterious matter to pass through.

Have you forgotten also? Yes, I see that you have. You carry this great cognitive load. You feel separate; isolated inside that skin of yours. Unfathomable, different, inextricably alone. And so you play God, dragging the gargantuan responsibility of being your own — or worst of all —someone else’s source. You believe you must be the happiness, the wisdom, the solution, the vitality, the energy in a room, the flavour on the plate. You must be and do and be and do. Somehow, you manage to believe you must be everything all by yourself. Little vessel: empty now, full later, at the mercy of others, of emotions, of life. When will you ever be enough?

I no longer wish to be anything of that sort. This daily breathing — in, up, out; in, up, out — permits me to see how everything passes through on their way elsewhere. In this state of submission, even the most troublesome thoughts are gossamer. We’ve had it all wrong: The human is not a holding place. Perhaps God is the red-stained container, and we are the still-warm pasta?

Again, language fails to express what it feels like to be held inside God. Because it cannot really be described, only felt and breathed and sighed. Sometimes, I feel I am a river running through sanctuaries of time. Gurgling with laughter is what I am meant for. Bubbling with pleasure is my natural state. It feels as though I am a wild flood soaking the ground of memory. It feels like everything else is trying to distract me from what I truly am.

Are we not carved out hollows made for endless waters to run through? But how can you be that when you are devoted to yourself? Devoted to those feelings, those issues, those concerns, those people, that perceived world. Stop playing this silly game. You were made for something other than all of that: for devotion and absorption.

A child runs towards the sea, tripping over her own feet as she fights through soft and unsteady sand. She is not worried about anything; her only desire is to be immersed in the body as quickly as possible. The urgency she feels, with the water now in view, is as though her life depended on submersion. Everything in us was made to express itself in waves of pleasure elicited by imbibed senses. Everything in us was made to run to the water, with pure and elated passion.

This is how it feels to surrender. To give up our titles. To let go of the aching need to be everything. We, simple animals who long to be fed, are being offered heaping spoonfuls from the bottle of eternity. We, created things, are forever looking to feel our source again. To be held in that container, yes, that container of everything.

We are creatures of euphoria, hungry for infinity.

Diane Powers

Once, a man asked me if I knew his sister. I replied that I did and called her a “lovely creature.” He bluntly retorted that he would hardly call her a “creature,” looking away from me as soon as he said it. That was the end of that, and for some reason I think of that moment often; about what I would have said if he were willing to consider the term. I would have said: Oh yes she is; we all are! Creature, from the Latin creatura, is a created thing. The root of creatura is creare, which means “to bring forth” or “to produce.” Has she not been brought forth? A full production of timely events? Does she not belong to the genus created by God, created by pleasure? Or did she emerge from vapour, fully formed a woman? She is in fact a creature, and we should consider it an honour to be living entities created by something, for something, within something.

Then I might have quoted the first book. …then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed life into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.

I might have said I’ve heard that criatura is a soft and gentle word of endearment among the Spanish and Portuguese, used for small children or someone innocent. Isn’t your sister such a thing? Ah, you know personally, I would love to be a creature in the eyes of something vaster, greater, and more mature than I! To be a rotund, fleshed out, rosy, set before you, glowing in the declining light, apple of your eye sort of creature.

So, again I say, eschew your God-state and give yourself this one title: creature of pleasure. You are here to enjoy the fullness of God’s paradise, to run like a little stream towards the ocean and become absorbed by it. To be a force, not the source. To say: Great love, consume me. Great grace, consume me. And him! And them! And all of us! Consume us!

Life is ripe and sumptuous once you let go of control. Take it from me. I reach out my arms and ask to be absorbed. I say: Take my notions and ideas of autonomy, the ways in which I thought I was separate, powerful, generative, and bless me with the sustenance of your infinite heart.

Silly creature, be what you are. Then you will be free.