Rough life’s power
(Jn 1:1-18)
Gialal al-Din Rumi, mystic and lyric Persian of the thirteenth century, writes in his poem «The Inn»:
The human being is an Inn,
someone new is coming every morning.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
a few moment of awareness comes from time to time,
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome everyone, spend time with all!
even if there is a crowd of sorrows
that devastates the house violently
stripping it of all the furniture,
likewise, treat each guest with honor:
it could be that he’s freeing you
in view of new pleasures.
To dark thoughts, to shame, to malice,
go meet on the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for everything that comes,
because everything was sent
as a guide to the afterlife.
We recognize in this poem-emblem some keystones of discernment, underlying the existential paradoxes of the Incarnation theology.
A Sufi mystic helps to understand the supporting pillars of our Journey, better than many one-way evasive doctrines.
They are identical laws of the soul already expressed in the famous Prologue of the Fourth Gospel: raw life is filled with powers.
Incarnation: our most intimate fulcrums distinguish the adventure of Faith from the one-sided existence of the believer in God.
The experience of fullness in the world is launched from our own slums of the soul. As a Zen aphorism [collected in Ts'ai Ken T'an] suggests: «Too pure water has no fish».
Jn writes that the Logos became «flesh» in the Semitic meaning of a being full of limits, unfinished; for this reason voted to the relentless search of sense (partial until death).
The weakness of all of us is not redeemed by admiring a heroic model and imitating it off scale, but in a process of recovering the whole being and our history.
In short, there are no Gifts of the Spirit that do not pass through the human dimension.
Already here and now we thrive of a precious Word’ seed. His authentic Tent is in-us and in all the stimuli.
The more we manage to maximize our creatural and humanizing reality, the more we will be on the path towards the divine condition - rooted on earth of the priceless lineage generated by the Logos.
Wisely, we will not do it by becoming winners, but by hosting what comes from Providence, from people and emotions (even from inconvenience) without prejudice.
Not the Ten Words - a typical Semitic category - but the One inclusive Word (Dream and Sense of Creation) is at the foundation of the Father’s Work.
The Logos that takes root is qualitative, not partial, nor centred on a single name: One because Unitary.
Religions do not welcome all guests [they will prove to be much more fruitful than we imagine] knocking at the interior inn.
The story of Jesus of Nazareth suggests that sin has instead been torn apart, that is: imperfection is not an obstacle to communion with Heaven, but a spring.
Discomforts do not make us inadequate: they set us on the road.
The Lord has destroyed the feeling of insufficiency of carnal condition and the humiliation of the unbridgeable distances.
«Word» End on univocity.
To internalize and live the message:
How do you start your days? Welcome your guests (even the void)? Or do you face them with excess of judgment?
[December 31, seventh day between the Octave of Christmas]