Suzanne Editorial - from A Way of Life Issue 12.4   |   Text View

I am in an aircraft, high above the Atlantic….between Paris and Chicago….ruminating God.  I've given God a lot of thought lately, more and more as the simplicity of it all becomes so apparent.  The more completely I realise that there is only me and God, the room to move really shuts down.  No matter what's happening or how I feel, I have to keep bringing it all back to me. 

I guess I've hit a point in these teachings where I realized that if I exist, I am part of God, simple, start and finish  Now that is such an idiotically obvious statement, that it's embarrassing to say it.  But one day not long ago I just got it.  It makes it superfluous to say most things, because what can I say, what in fact can I bring to anything. 

Something that occurred in my life about 20 years ago that left a lasting impression was the passing of one of the great influences in my life, my Grandfather.  He represented Truth and Deep Goodness that has given me a navigation light all my life. A gentle man of few words, he was a truly unselfish soul, some one who knew how to love deeply and give.  Being the oldest Grandchild I was blessed with a great number of years to know him.  When I look around at how so many lives unfold and I realize that many people have to make it through with out ever experiencing anyone like my Grandfather, my eyes fill with tears and I am really humbled.  I was in my mid thirties when he finally passed and so he was around for all the formative years, child, teenager, young adult and parent.  My Grandmother was his perfect partner, also a beacon of the kind of LOVE that embraces every facet of life with care and spaciousness, not just selecting what serves the self.

They were perfect lovers.  Simple hardworking people, they met shortly after the First World War and migrated to Australia together to start a new life.  My Grandfather trained to be a butcher and so they found work on a property in Central Victoria, where Pa was a cattle hand and my Grandmother was a cook.  They were gentle refined people and the early years in a new land, far away from family and friends in England took its toll on Gran as she endured many hardships.  They worked long hours, lost a child at birth, successfully brought two others into the world and later moved to Melbourne where my Grandfather followed his passion and became a professional Landscape Gardner.

They eventually bought their own home, a simple cottage in the suburbs of Melbourne, but it had the air of a temple in the Love that filled it. Peace and beauty exuded from everything from the polish on the furniture, to the vases of flowers and the cooking smells in the kitchen.  Everything was cared for in a way that kept it perfect, whether it was old or new.  Food was taken to needy neighbours, and I never heard them say an unkind word about anyone.  The memories of visiting them bring a smile to my face to this day, such happy events, feasts and treats, laughter and music, time for everybody and everything.  When they came to stay with us the excitement would build for weeks and the magic of Love imbued all of life. 

Sometime around my eighth birthday I found my father crying, something I had never seen before and we were all gathered together to be told that my Grandmother was gravely ill with a brain tumour, a terrifyingly ominous sentence in those times and she was to have emergency surgery.

She survived that crude operation, only to have the tumour grow back and have to go through the whole ordeal again two years later.  The damage to her brain required some fourteen other operations to stop the involuntary spasms in other parts of her body, and she laid in a hospital bed for weeks, with the diagnosis of being severely disabled for life.  Her face was badly affected on one side and she went through terrible pain.

My Grandfather only saw her through the eyes of love.  Determined to love her back to health, he ignored Doctors and dire predictions and took her to their beautiful home and set about nursing and caring for her and loving her day and night as she needed every kind of care.  He spoon fed her like a little bird and just kept up enough certainty for them both.

The house was a simple weatherboard on an average suburban block, but my Grandfather kept it a pristine white with black trim and red and white canvas awnings, set in an enchanting garden of silver birches, perfect green lawns, roses and azalea bushes.  As Nan started to recover, he set about remodelling the garden and growing magnificent tubs of seasonal flowers so that he could create beautiful flower displays out of every window so that wherever Nan was able to look out, she could see all the things that she loved. 

Eventually with her courage and his faith, she learnt to speak again, walk, write with her left hand, cook, care for everyone and became fully immersed in life again.  Over all those years one of my favourite things in life was to visit them.  Jobs came and went, we all got married and had children of our own and they quietly got older. 

I always lived reasonably close to them and so visited regularly and gardened with Pa to help him with the things that became harder and harder for him to get around in the later years.  Outside in the garden together, nothing much to say except the quiet chatter of how everyone was doing amid discussions of when to re pot the bonsai and what I should do in my own garden.   I can still see his big hands gently prying out the tiniest weeds with silent love and patience.  Teaching me the names of flowers and the secrets of gardening, such perfect times and although my life is astonishing now, challenging and exciting, nothing in life has ever topped those times with my Grandparents, and the gratitude and love that I am able to feel now, how I found my values, where I get my grit from, comes from them.

When my Grandfather finally passed we were given the opportunity to be with him to say our goodbyes.  It was so strange to touch his beautiful face, cold and unmoving and realize that he simply wasn't there anymore.  In that moment I had the most profound understanding of what we are, we are the indwelling presence that is the light and love.  When It's in, there is life and when It is not, there is nothing.  That Presence is life.

So back to me and God.  I might have saved myself quite a chunk of the Journey if I had really stopped and fully contemplated what I realized then.  But I didn't, I simply allowed the realization to occur and went back to life as I knew it.  Now, some twenty years later the same realization is coming to mean everything to me. 

I am just a hollow tube, a random expression of nature that can only exist and know itself to be because Something breathes life into it and wishes it to be.  I am a filament extending from the Source of all life, expressing as an integral part of a vast tapestry and as such I am the Holy Child of God and a 'nothing of itself' at the same time.  I have no idea what I am, so it's cute that I can exist in a mindset of an individual me, all the while held among and with all other things in creation in absolute unconditional love, in the loving care of All That Is.

Watching myself playing out the idea of an individual me has become more and more interesting, the feelings, the mood swings, the embarrassing realizations, including the resilience of the idea of 'a me'.  At this level I truly am nothing.  Life will live me and I will pass like a leaf from a tree.  All of life's seeming dramas and significance, the struggle to survive, live out a story that repeats itself ad nauseam from one generation to the next has no meaning of itself, the famous, infamous and insignificant, all the same in the end and all the getting comes to naught!

If I want God, I simply have to acknowledge the Life Force that powers the thing I call me.  Be still and allow It to be present in me more fully, cultivate the capacity to allow It more fully, through Compassion, Forgiveness and Gratitude, realizing that It alone can complete me and bring me into the realm of the Real, as I allow the Love that It is to flow unimpeded.  This can occur most profoundly when I tune into Giving, because that is what It does.  It, serves and gives through everything It creates.  As my life this past year changed gear into being more deeply involved in service, I witnessed astonishing flow, Miracles and satisfaction beyond anything I have experienced before.  It has been like coming online directly in proportion to how I practice coming to a greater spaciousness through Gratitude, Compassion and Forgiveness.  Allowing myself to be used for Love, everything is brighter and more fulfilling.

My only real purpose is to be the presence of love, in service, extending love.  I am a creature, like all things alive by virtue of the Divine, made in God's likeness I have been given the capacity to see, hear, feel, think and create, using Divine power given to me freely and without condition.  My capacity to think, reason and create makes me first among all creatures, in this realm I have no equal, and yet of myself I am still no thing, except when I am a vehicle for Love, then I become Real.    

So I guess 'The Promise Etched in Forever' is simply that no matter how or what I am, total unconditional Love is always holding me.  As I give Love, I become more of the Life Force.  Love becomes mine and that is Bliss and Fulfilment.  In the end Only Love is real and nothing Unreal exists.  All of my life I have been held gently and persistently shaped to understand that this.  It is my purpose and the fulfilment of who I AM.

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