A stream of consciousness meditation …

I sat down and ate.

Avoiding?

Eating. And Spirit. What do I know about eating and Spirit? Spirit eats the world. Spirit consumes all, a monster making atoms and electrons into a feast, trillions of tiny particles like so much what germ, so many grape nuts, so many grains of wheat, so many — I see a meal composed entirely of tiny grains of sand — like oatmeal, llike cream of wheat, the world is the grain in the bread of the mill of time, and Spirit the eater of the fantastic meal of the universe. Stars for lunch, the galaxies for dinner, and the universes as a bedtime snack. Not just a billion stars, or a trillion galaxies, or trillion trillion universes, but the total of all stars that ever were, and the trillions that are yet to be, the galaxies birthed countless eons ago and galaxies to be born egos from now.

The universe offers itself to Spirit as a sacrifice. Take me, it says. Feed on my flesh, for then we shall live once more in you.

Avoiding?

I am not who I think I am. I am every thing that I have ever ever eaten. So much soda pop and candy, so many chickens, so many cows, so many ears of corn, so much Gaia, so much world. So much, it’s beyond my reckoning. Though I say that it is knowable. The number of things that I have consumed to make me what I am, an eating machine, a consuming machine that eats to live, and also simply to have my pleasure. The rodents that are cut by the blade of the tractor that cut the corn that made the biofuel that runs the bus that I will ride today. If we could see a record — a toll of all that we have killed, all the death — if we could see what we have done…

Mass murderers are more than honest than us. The ones who collect trophies from their victims. The soldiers who add a notch to their belts for every enemy soldier they have slain. They are the honest ones. They know that they are killers. That is who they are. They kill, everything kills, everything hurts, everything dies, and in this arising time … could we stop killing for just one moment?

Could we run into a cave? Could we waste away? Could we refuse food, medicine? Could we? Could we make ourselves pure? Could we run away from the killing that we do, from the dying that we do, from the pain of existence?

Even then, locked alone in a cave, eating not, wearing no animal fur for a blanket, shivering in the cold. Even then, we kill. Even then, we die. We kill Time. We kill our future, our possibility, our ability to transform the world into a better place.

Or is that wish only illusion? That is a very old paradox.

Avoiding?

If we starved ourselves in a cave, killing nothing, do we kill the future? Do we kill the possibility of a more liberated world? Do we do nothing … or do what? What we can? Everything we can?

Avoiding?

The answer is yes. We are killers who do not … who are not … it is not “I” who kills … It is not the “I” who dies. I do not kill the future. No choice I can make Now can possibly kill the future. I am the Future, Now. And I will be, am, and have already been, eaten, redeemed, million billion trillion times over. We are all Eucharists now, though not all who are the Body see, not all who are Christ know, not all believe.

Technorati Tags: death, Eucharist, food, Spirit, spirituality, Time, violence

The Eucharist is a bread wafer, and–I believe–a real symbol of the presence of Christ, the ever-present Alpha and Omega. But believers don’t look at the world the same way: there are fundamental differences in levels of consciousness. So of course the Eucharist doesn’t look the same to every person.

A true story today as shared on Monastic Mumblings:

In my understanding, the Eucharist is real, Christ is Present, and He infuses our lives with His Presence during the Sacrament. It is the most profoundly holy time in my week, when I am touched by the Sacred.

I believe that Christ is Present in the Sacrament, I believe that we are invited by Christ Himself to touch and be touched by the Holy. We take Christ Himself into our bodies, and our lives, leaving and being sent into the world, carrying Christ within us.

That being said, this week we had a little ‘event’ during the Eucharist. In my tradition, there is a point during the Eucharistic prayer (called the Epiclesis), during which the Celebrant invokes the Holy Spirit to bless the bread and wine so that it may be to us the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. Then the Priest Boys and girls for Jesus elevates the Host, showing Christ to the faithful for veneration. At that most sacred, profound moment a little girl of almost two years old looked up and with her innocent, shrill voice yelled “cookie”!!

How the story ends…

Technorati Tags: children, Christianity, Eucharist