A Return to a Source

          It is difficult to know how to begin. I lack the practice I had when I posted regularly and with some frequency. The more contemplative aspects of my life have taken me to places that must remain relatively private. Why is this? Because there are occasions when new inner experiences requires time to mature, and gain no benefit from having intellectual boots walked over them. When a seed bed is sown, it needs time for the germinating seeds to grow.
          Having said that, there has been an ongoing activity that is bearing fruit, and one which I would like to talk about. It all began with a book of daily meditations for Lent and based on the Bible, but one which turned things around so that the meditation came first (based on a sentence), and that was followed by the biblical passage that formed the basis of the meditation. The purpose of the exercise was to look at the chosen passage and interpret it in a non-literal, non-fundamentalist manner. I found the process more and more interesting, even when the meditation period revealed nothing noteworthy. When the book was finished with, at Easter of course, I went on to study further passages with the hope, even expectation, that something of interest would arise. My guide has been the Catholic Daily Missal, chosen for no other reason than it gave me a structure for my meditational studies. In one sense it has been a return, in a roundabout way, to a source but with my inner eyes open. What has emerged has been surprisingly interesting to me.
          Now the question has arisen as to how to introduce my thoughts about this work. Should I even be talking about it? Will it cause offence to those who hold different views from mine? I would most certainly hope not, yet would at the same time wish to be completely frank. Would anything I have to say be of any interest? I simply do not know the answer to that question. And what of that fragile acquisition called reputation? Do I have one that is worth owning? Will my revealed thoughts in the future damage that reputation, assuming I have one? Well that may turn out to be the case, so I must ask myself whether or not I really care, and that is a difficult one to answer.
          I am old enough, and ego-free enough not to care too much about reputation for its own sake. However, does one write anything which one would like to see discarded as the ramblings of someone whose brain has gone soft? I think not. It seems to me that once again I must take a risk and hope for some joining of minds that share my interest in exploring the depths of the spirit, unfettered - as far as that is possible - by preconceptions rigidly held onto.
          If I have achieved nothing else with this post, I have at least overcome my initial difficulty of knowing how to begin. Now I can tentatively move on and see what can be discovered from inner conversations. Yet it would seem that the real point of all this is to hold the conversation. If something is revealed as a result, that will be a bonus.