SELF; a place where we hold all of the strings of the awareness of our life. It is the place where all things come together. It is the place where God dwells. We retreat there in time of trouble and change. This place is called the heart. This cairn-space is a dot in eternity; a spiritual atom within which all creation is born and housed.
***
If we can recognize this process of going within and find this place that is within, we will be on the right road. We will be living up to our full potential as sacramental beings. We will have struck out on the most sacred journey—the journey to the heart—and we will have found there not only a home, but our true selves. In fact, the heart is the greatest cairn there is. It is the cairn established by God, to mark off our experiences of His Presence. The heart is the Holy of Holies.
This is just another way of looking at what is inside of us. The Fathers of the Church called this the Royal Road. The Royal Road always leads us to the place where God dwells in us. It leads us to the heart.
There is a longing deep within us; a yearning for this heart space within which we find oneness. It is the place we find our core identity. We await opportunities to settle into our being and feel a unity with God and all that is a part of His creation. Every experience of worship is a longing that we might discover the Presence of God in our lives and yield to that Presence. We perform acts of kindness with the hopes of catching a glimpse of God in the beggars and sick. We look for signs outside of what we sense inside.
Our eyes dart this way and that looking for a place we can call our own, a place of meeting. We want to meet the Divine One and do it again and again. We search desperately for cairns and markers that will call us into this place. We even try to buy and consume things that we believe will help us achieve this goal of “inwardness.” This place exists already. We buy books that give us clues. We attend workshops that reveal the way. We must simply interpret the cairns along the way as signs that point in.
Setting out and finding God-spaces, meeting-places, and realms of connection is really what “the path” is all about. Some people recognize that this quest for unity and relationship is at the root of everything we do—NOW. Finding God drives us to search all the more. The markers on the outside help move us to the inside, and there we wait for Godot. And, although this space exists in all of us, it is paradoxically waiting to be built.
***
Some tell us that waiting for Godot or searching for God is an empty task; it is absurd. But, it is not the search for the Holy One (the search for our core self and its relation to God) that is empty and absurd in the end. What is empty and absurd is not recognizing that we are all seeking wholeness in God—NOW.
We all hunger and thirst to find our completion in the Divine Wholeness. Some pretend they are looking for something other than God. They believe they aspire to be “better” people or more “learned.” It is simply that they do not know to call this aching passion within a hungering for God and the divine completion this represents. They have not examined the lineaments of this craving. All craving for completeness is a craving for the Holy One. It is a yearning to be One with the One. It is the rest of Saint Augustine that is only put to rest when it rests in God.
This path of hungering, longing, craving, and desiring is a path toward the heart. The heart is the place of ultimate encounter and union. Whether we believe we are questing for wholeness, integrity, actualization, or God, the quest is the same. In the non-Christian East it is said that we already have all that we long for; we must simply wake up.
We are hunting the Divine. We look everywhere for the perfect spot to unite. We turn everything upside-down to find our center—our heart. We look all around outside, to find the place that is inside. The greatest cairn is already within, and at the same time it clambers to be established. We have what we need, we must simply wake up.
Ultimately, all cairns are about getting into heart-space and experiencing the relationship we have with the Creative Father. Each cairn asks us to look at Him through the lens of some idea, topic, or event. “What does this marker say about who we are and where we have been with Him?” Everything has the ability to make us hungry for union with God—NOW.
When we find the cairns or our life, we must sit with them and honor them. We do this by going in to the space inside—into the heart—and seeking an encounter and chance to wrestle with what that cairn represents. What does this thing say about God, about waking up.
We ask ourselves what this marker offers us in order to be in union—NOW. When we have woken up, we should add a stone to the marker. When we have found Him, we should add a stone to the pile.
Every cairn is an image of the Great Cairn. The Great Cairn is our beloved heart-space. Being awake is the multi-dimensional awareness of all phenomena being present throughout all time in that space. The point that is our heart is the endless space of the Divine Milieu. We have the opportunity to meet God at every moment because meaning is layered on meaning throughout all creation. Everywhere we go we have arrived.
***
Under Every Rock
I am looking
under every rock
I find -
for something.
I am not sure
what it is
right yet.
I have been told
that I will
know it when I
find it,
when I see it,
or smell it
I will know.
I cannot help
but wonder
if I have forgotten
I am searching.
Turning rocks
is just
such fun.
What is it I am doing
again? Am I
looking for rocks,
or somehow looking
for myself?
***
It is remarkable how each religion finds its own way to image the heart and the journey within. We all build places to mark off encounters and wrestlings with God. Everyone has them.
Monks’ cells carved in sandstone and limestone cliffs, stone huts built along glorious pilgrimage vistas, cairns piled high to mark off the sacred, shrines along roads and trails, large stones in a field, they are all markers of the heart. “Something of importance happened here”, the cairns call out. “Stop and remember what these rocks stand for”, the rocks cry out.
All of these places shadow the interior space we go to when we pray. All of them give us an outward nexus from which to make an inward journey. All of them remind us that we know our ultimate solace comes from meeting the One in the silence of the heart. The outward “holy places” of the religious
