Meditations in Fast Times: 25. If there is a reality we cannot bear

Note to Readers: “Meditations in Fast Times” is a devotional writing experiment for the Season of Lent. Each day during the season, I am writing a poem as a meditation on, taking as my inspiration and intertextual basis, T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets”, as well as incorporating the daily office, current events, and other readings—some the same as those Eliot used while composing his seminal work and others.

                25.

If there is a reality we cannot bear,
it is the unknown tomorrow.

Indeed, it is the menace of tomorrow that drives
the need to consult apostles and prophets,
to follow gurus and miracle workers,
seek out faith healers, politicians,
spell-casters and semioticians.

This urge to cast runes,
read palms or plot the stars,
reaching back to reclaim
a nostalgic vision of the past
and cast it forward on a formless future
provides entertainment, certainly,
and obsessive preoccupation,
but is a wasted exercise,
in which we miss this moment.

But this moment is where science and magic lie.

The Divine can only meet you
in the abyss of unincorporated now.

The ardent heart enters the sacred wood,
answering the call of the music of the spheres,
offering the only gift there is to give: selfless self.

The right action
of the ardent heart
meets unforeseen moment
in surrender
and is nearly subsumed,
but awakens to a newer identity.

Turns out,
potential and possibility are bits of future
that comingle during the indelible union
of ardent heart with unforeseen moment;
an infinitude of such meetings,
where opposites cannot avoid attraction,
are creation incarnate or, if you will,
a live concert of the continuous music
of every iteration of the very next now.

That’s how it works.
All the rest is a waste of effort,
for time will not be outwitted.

© 2014 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen