Becoming Real

Bearing the Pain. Bearing the Light.

Photo by Олег Мороз on Unsplash

It doesn't happen all at once, said the Skin Horse.
You become. It takes a long time.
That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily...
But once you are Real you can't be ugly,
except to people who don't understand.
The Velveteen Rabbit
Margery Williams

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.
Rilke, Book of Hours

From this week’s post: We need stories, rituals, songs, practices, and postures to help us to become more real?

This is why I choose to frame my reflections in a liturgical format. We need to engage as deeply as we can in life-giving stories and practices. And so, I offer you a gentle nudge this week, inviting you to make a bit of space to practice and to pray with whatever challenges or draws you - here or, indeed, elsewhere.

Blessings!
Julie

Opening Meditation

Breathing out, let go the ego’s hurry.

Breathing in, slow down. Listen for the Spirit.

Are you listening?

1^st Readings

I challenge myself most weeks to put a given scripture from the week’s lectionary (C of E) in conversation with contemporary concerns and ideas and, of course, poetry!

This week, I’ve taken the liberty of shaping this passage just a little, in a way that might help us look beyond its contemporary concerns about circumcision and emphasise the basic message as I understand it: to move beyond ego and religious debate, and into the Spirit of Christ.

Galatians 6

My friends, if anyone is detected in a transgression, you who have received the Spirit should restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness. Take care that you yourselves are not tempted. Bear one another’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfil^* the law of Christ. For if those who are nothing think they are something, they deceive themselves.... For all must carry their own loads…

Do not be deceived; God is not mocked, for you reap whatever you sow.If you sow to your ego you will reap corruption from the ego; but if you sow to the Spirit, you will reap eternal life from the Spirit. So let us not grow weary in doing what is right, for we will reap at harvest time, if we do not give up. So then, whenever we have an opportunity, let us work for the good of all…

See what large letters I make when I am writing in my own hand! It is those who want to make a good showing in the flesh that try to compel you… May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which^* the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. For neither side of this debate is ultimately anything; but a new creation is everything!

REFLECTION

Last weekend I gathered with 150 others at St Giles House in Dorset to attend The Realisation Festival. That might sound a little woo-woo, but it was anything but. It was a deeply challenging, deeply inspiring weekend. For three days, we committed ourselves to curious, compassionate, courageous, and creative enquiry into our growing world crisis. We connected across generations, worldviews, spiritualities, and countries. It was, for me, a Festival of Soul-Making.

Its strap-line: Getting Real. Becoming Real. Making Real.

I can’t think of a better scripture to go alongside the getting real part than Paul’s line to the Galatians: Do not be deceived; God is not mocked, for you reap whatever you sow.

The question here might be: What have we been sowing, and what is it reaping?

We have to get real about how frantically we’ve been sowing to the ego and its self-centred impulses: power, acquisition, convenience, progress at any cost and so much more. And so, we’ve reaped what many now describe as a global systems collapse. When we find the courage to step out of denial, the evidence is all around us - economic, environmental, social, political. It’s not good.

Getting real is hard. Very hard. But it’s the necessary first step.
Becoming real is what can help move us beyond despair.

At the Festival, becoming real began with recognising our deep connection to past, present, and future: to our ancestors - both noble and ignoble; to the land and its layered history; to the more-than-human world; and to our shared responsibility for the life of the planet. Becoming real, for me, means connecting the dots between what’s happening out there and how I live. It means allowing myself to feel some of the fear and grief, even though those of us in the global North aren’t yet bearing the worst of it.

The questions we were asking weren’t: Who is right? Who is to blame? We know those questions lead only to defensiveness and division. Instead, we asked:

What are the stories, rituals, songs, practices, and postures that help us become more real?

When our first speaker, Sarah Wilson¹, was asked what she hoped to become, her reply was something like: I want to be someone prepared to do the bearing and the holding.

She spoke of bearing the grief of where we are, and holding the truth of our deepest humanity - still revealing itself through the sorrow and the wreckage: holding both the terror and the beauty.

That moved many of us to tears. For me, they were tears of recognition. Because this is my deepest understanding of what Jesus did. He didn’t fight, or flee, or freeze -though sometimes, of course, we must. He didn’t demand to be right, though surely he, of all people, was. Instead, he chose something strange, almost impossible: he bore the pain. With fierce and tender compassion, he held it - even as he was dying. In doing so, he showed us the way back to our own hearts. Through his wounds, held in love, he opened a portal to the eternal, to peace. That, to me, is a story worthy of our time. And it’s one I long to be faithful to

May I never boast in anything except the cross of Jesus Christ, writes Paul. It’s not, ultimately, a religious or moral debate. A new creation is everything.

So perhaps making real is what happens when we begin to sow to that Spirit - when, even amid the devastation, we plant seeds of the new creation: seeds of new life watered with tears of grief; seeds of transformation found in the dying; seeds of the kingdom quietly growing, often unseen.

Making real, for me, means practicing humility. It means returning, again and again, to the things that re-root me in what really matters: prayer, silence, meditation, grief, forgiveness, the natural world, poetry, community, care. These are the things that help me live into a deeper story - not one of panic or blame, but of courage, compassion, and faith.

They help me remember that even in times of unraveling, grace is still at work.
And maybe that is the Spirit’s invitation to us all:
To get real.
To become real.
To help make what is most real… visible.

Whatever happens.

Bearing the pain.
And bearing the light.

Ponder. Practice. Pray

What is on the edge of your awareness waiting for you to get real about?

What are the stories, rituals, songs, practices, and postures that help you become real? How will you engage this week?

How might you be called to make real the invisible life of the Spirit?

Continue to ponder some or all of the questions above. Journal and pray with what arises.

Widening the Circle

Take some time to feel your grief and longing for our world- remembering those people and places on your heart today.

The Lord’s Prayer

Eternal Spirit, Earth-maker, Pain-bearer, Life-giver,
Source of all that is and that shall be,
Father and Mother of us all,
Loving God, in whom is heaven:

The hallowing of your name echo through the universe!
The way of your justice be followed by the peoples of the world!
Your heavenly will be done by all created beings!
Your commonwealth of peace and freedom sustain our hope and come on earth.

With the bread we need for today, feed us.
In the hurts we absorb from one another, forgive us.
In times of temptation and test, strengthen us.
From trials too great to endure, spare us.
From the grip of all that is evil, free us.

For you reign in the glory of the power that is love, now and for ever.
Amen.

2nd Readings

I want a word that means
okay and not okay,
more than that: a word that means
devastated and stunned with joy.
I want the word that says
I feel it all all at once.
The heart is not like a songbird
singing only one note at a time,
more like a Tuvan throat singer
able to sing both a drone
and simultaneously
two or three harmonics high above it—
a sound, the Tuvans say,
that gives the impression
of wind swirling among rocks.
The heart understands swirl,
how the churning of opposite feelings
weaves through us like an insistent breeze
leads us wordlessly deeper into ourselves,
blesses us with paradox
so we might walk more openly
into this world so rife with devastation,
this world so ripe with joy.

Rosemary Wahtoler Trommer

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

Rilke, from Book of Hours

Blessing

And so may we take the hand of Love and go into our worlds willing to feel it all, the devastation and the joy. May we be led wordlessly deeper into ourselves. May we get real, be real and make real the invisible life of the Spirit in our lives. And the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us all now and evermore. Amen.

Music:

Ubi Caritas. Where there is love, there is God.

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