God Can’t Eat a Poached Egg -- Credo XIII

I am adding this to my Credos, though some of you may know the story already.
Every Sunday, here at Rosecroft, my darling husband Walter, the Polar Bear, would make poached eggs from scratch and serve them on toast on our two wedding gift plates. Then he would proudly put mine in front of me and beam. One morning, the sun hit them and I exclaimed humorously, “These are so beautiful, I must share them with my Divine Guest!” So I bowed over them and invited my Divine Guest to come through me and enjoy them.

Then I had a huge AHA!! That is basically the spiritual purpose of consciousness – to share the beauty of creation and one’s personal joys with one’s Divine Guest. Normally, most of us turn to God when in extremis or shame or pain, but if you anthropomorphize Spirit, he might be looking down into your psyche and thinking “It looks pretty gloomy down there, best to try again in a week or so.”

The Chinese have a lovely saying: If you keep a green bough in your heart, surely the singing bird will come.

Well, after the poached egg experience, I realized something else: The common superstition that people have never to say you are happy because something will surely take it away. That is the ego’s wanting to grasp and hold rather than to go with the flow . . . which led to my memory of Goethe’s Faust in which Mephistopheles says, when bargaining with Faust for his soul: Aber, wenn jeh Du sagst, "O bleibe dochI Du bist so schoen, dann hab" ich dich! But if ever you say, "O time stand still," then I’ve got you! HAH!

Now here is the curious thing, we discovered: Whatever you share with your Divine Guest, you get to keep! So one of the two of us, would from then on, on the spur of the moment, simply stop and say, “You know what? I’m happy!” and we would hug each other and laugh, old as we were. Now that he has been gone almost ten years, those joyous moments are still with me and as fresh as this minute.

Using the image of the circle with the ego on the circumference, shooting it up the radius of Sophia to the center, confirms the function of Holy Wisdom as being "full of delight"! The Joy of Wisdom and the Wisdom of Joy. Given the state of the world as it is presented to us on the news, this may be flying in the face of reason BUT one thing I have learned from being almost housebound the last eight years or so is the pleasure one can take from little things: swallowing hot coffee, apples in a bowl, my wooden spoon from Iona in 1967, the golden leaves of autumn, the deer that come at dawn, etc. Everything I look at these days conjures a memory of association. Voices of friends. My warm puffy in bed. Gratitude and grace come from the same root. Gratias.

Which brings me to Jung. In Memories, Dreams Reflections, the account of him in the jungle, he thinks that probably he is the first white man to be sitting on that spot looking at the animals and trees. "What is his purpose?" he asks. Making it conscious!
So, now I am about to light the fire that my dear son-in-law Al has set for me, and sit down for my Scottish communion, filled with gratitude that I am still able to share these odd bits and pieces with some of you!

lovingly,
ao