So Close to the Miraculous

A friend confided to me that she was struggling to comprehend what was real and what wasn’t, and I was taken aback by the admission. It took a few days for me to respond, not knowing if it was a psychological condition, or an inability to discern the truth of the current global situation. Biased media, statistical trickery, censorship? Or perhaps she was alluding to how we perceive the world, or people and relationships, when we gaze through a warped lens. Especially when our lens is our ego, and we are desperate not to be criticised or hurt.  

Truth is tough to get at. We twist it ourselves, and recast ourselves as the victims or victors. Fundamentally, we don't understand Truth and can't see it. We place ourselves at the centre of Reality, and we flail around trying to grasp a picture that is very wrong. 

“‘So you are a king?’ Jesus answered, ‘You say that I am a king…for this I was born… to bear witness to the truth….’ Pilate said, ‘What is truth?’ ...But Jesus gave no answer” (John 18:37, 19:7)

Ivanka Demchuk, Pilate Condemns Jesus

+++

When I moved out here – to the bush – it was the dead of summer, and I was ‘alone’ with two children and heavily pregnant. In a strange new house, I slept on the second floor with the balcony door open into the night. I woke with a start at a scream. It was something human but also rather beastly, half and half, a chimera. I imagined 1960s Sinbad Claymation monsters come to life. Perhaps a dragon or a low-flying raptor, with a human face. My mind struggled to bring a picture to the sound. Again, the valley echoed with the scream. Sweat beads gathered on my upper lip, moonbeams fell across the floor. 

I later learned it was a fox. Truth, according to philosophy, is the property of being which aligns with fact or reality. 

+++

In winter we had three days of heavy snow - we were soon snowed in with a power outage to boot. Again, the house rose as a stranger around me. Pumps needed to be fixed and a generator was moved to the house from the pottery studio. The kids skied across the hill in front of our house over a foot of snow. Never in their wildest suburban dreams did they picture this. I collected snowmelt dripping from the shade cloths over our outdoor dining area and heated the water in metal buckets on our wood heater for a shower a la Siberia. Soon after the snow day, I stayed at a hotel while travelling. I called for room service. The curtains opened with a remote. In the granite shower, under vigorously massaging water pressure, I laughed. 

In our new, strange home, I grew sourdough starter from our rainwater and flour. We cooked Lenten food on a camp stove for five weeks when we had a demolished kitchen. Life was sometimes tedious, don't get me wrong. But we are surrounded by the almost-miraculous.

A warm chicken egg or two. The shocking bright pumpkin and crimson of an alpine shaggy-pea flower, or the star-like royal bluebell.  A cauliflower with infinite Fibonacci spirals in its florets. Sunflowers growing from seed.

I drove to the convent in snow drift and when I arrived at the chapel, it was draped in a veil of snow on the Nativity of the Holy Mother of God. Inside; incense and the warmth of Slavonic tonal singing. Outside, the morning snow melted under a brightening sun.

+++

Perhaps Akhmatova was right. When she was temporarily relocated to Russia’s north, the St Petersburg-based poet wrote:

Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold,

Death's great black wing scrapes the air,

Misery gnaws to the bone.

Why then do we not despair?

By day, from the surrounding woods,

cherries blow summer into town;

at night the deep transparent skies

glitter with new galaxies.

And the miraculous comes so close

to the ruined, dirty houses --

something not known to anyone at all,

but wild in our breast for centuries.

The beloved poet lived through unimaginable difficulty - deep personal loss and suffering under Stalin. When she wrote that the miraculous comes so close to the ruined, dirty houses, I feel as though she is talking about us. It is all our dirt, our minds, our ruin, our lies. The night hangs eternal outside with its stars, it’s our choice to find it.

+++

Truth according to Christianity, is not a concept. It’s a person. 

It's our choice to find Him, too.