On Sunday Jim Robinson's sermon focused on the writer Khalil Gibran, a man who lived deeply and intensely and who was able to experience the pain in his life as growth and transformation.
Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.
And how else can it be?
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
The idea that our being is 'carved' by our experience is simple yet beautiful because it conveys a sense of 'depth' in experience as well as the transforming qualities of the pain of life. The same 'depth' that is needed to be transformed by pain is the kind of intensity of living that we are meant to seek if we want to live a meaningful life.
Gibran writes about religion:
Your daily life is your temple and your religion
Whenever you enter into it take with you your all
Take the plough and the forge and the mallet and the lute
The things you have fashioned in necessity or for delight.
For in reverie you cannot rise above your achievements
nor fall lower than your failures.
And take with you all men.
For in adoration you cannot fly higher than their hopes nor humble yourself lower than their despair.
And if you would know God, be not therefore a solver of riddles
Rather look about you and you shall see Him playing with your children.
And look into space; you shall see Him walking in the cloud, outstretching His arms in the lightning and descending in rain.
You shall see Him smiling in flowers, then rising and waving His hands in trees.
To pause and make one's daily life a temple, to experience life in all its mystery and greatness (pain and joy alike) is one of our hardest tasks. We can merely have moments in which we feel the earth below our feet and the presence of our loved ones around us and then do we truly worship and then are we truly grateful.
(posted by Eleanor)
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