A Way Through
Life seems simpler if we blot out awareness of its mystery, but such a life is an impoverished one. There is a dimension to ourselves, the most essential dimension, which it is folly to ignore. Patricia Wright’s Gate is a delicate image of this. She shows us the complexities of a normal existence – lines in confusion, with hints of gridded order behind, to which we are not privy. As we move to the center, the lines grow ever more clotted and chaotic: who can understand the meaning of events that make up our conscious experience – in relationships, in business, or whatever? But the swirls of events are the context wherein is held the gate. It is a real but shadowy presence, a way through, a possibility. If we allow silence to open up within, we shall see the gate and be free to open it. Sister Wendy Beckett, Meditations on Silence.
The decision to end the Sunday meditation at A Single Thread is both clear and fitting for this new dimension of practice. It is, however, not a decision to stop practice but to embrace it in the middle of the swirls of change where the gate to liberation is in a frame of silence, solitude, sitting, and study; it is a Way Through in the middle of the complexity of our lives.
No one is able to do the work for another. The Way Through is …a real but shadowy presence which requires that we do the work to see the gate and go through.