Unbounded abundance
Source: Luke 24:13-24,31One day I will call by your name everything in the universe that I miss.
I will give your name to all those I cherished whose departure left my spirit a wordless void.
And so, as I write your name in the footprints their absence has left, flowers will blossom there.
And because they bear your name, your life and light will descend upon them.
Then my wasted night will fade, and its shadowy blooms will breathe out the scent of lost joys.
Weary of chaos, my spirit will curl up and crumble. But when it dies, the dreams that carried it will keep moving outward.
Then, perhaps, you will allow them to nestle in the palm of your hand.
Then the time will come when I will have been, and when only you will remember me. I will no longer exist except in your Spirit, like a spark twittering in your light.
And so, by your grace, I will remember how it all happened.
Overhead, the sky was odd: leaden, pale, deadly sluggish, ailing. A bland blue sky, exhausting in its monotony. It showed us the world's beauty just as our eyes had witnessed death. It seemed both grand and pointless, glorious and hostile, vast and signifying nothing.
Its unending blueness magnified our suffering.
We were walking, she, and I, and in our hearts our dead child.
No one can know what led you to write your name in our hearts, but at one point you imprinted visions on our senses. I remember now what those visions were.
The child, splendid in your eyes, was gone. His soul had returned to you. Although our ears could hear him no longer, you let us hear the drumming of infinity pouring down on our earthbound sorrows. You filled our universe with echoes. And as the world tried to erase the traces of his magnificent being, you allowed his babbling to become wild, as if not knowing where to go because it no longer knew where it was coming from. It found refuge in our ears, and there it began to sing.
The child was singing, but already in the language of angels. To us at that moment it was incomprehensible. At the heart of our tiny world, the infinite poured itself out in a deafening racket. But we could hear an echo, coming to us from beyond the world, that resonated here. The echo told us the story of you and the child.
Why splendid in your eyes?
O Lord of the universe, because when I say his name I see your smile, the way I noticed the bright blue scoop in a night sky, and because when I say his name in your presence I glimpse a fragment of your joy.
And to me that fragment is already like a blessing for every human being.
Then came the visions that you imprinted on the depths of our eyes. They shaped our spirits; it was like a prolonged moment of pure magic. O Lord of the universe, you astound me, so much that sometimes I feel my own soul ready to take off, leave me behind, and fly away to you.
You fascinated me so much that suffering hardly ever entered my soul. But it left my spirit naked so that your visions could clothe it. Out of death you made love, giving the essence of destruction a fragrance of the transcendent. But that's your way, isn't it?
Texts via St. Luke.