Liz Wessel shared with me a powerful bit of writing from Father Richard Rohr that includes the following:

   "Everything is profane if you live on the surface of it, and everything is sacred if you go into the depths of it—even your sin. Jesus lived and loved the depths of things, as all mystics do. So the division for the mystic is not between the secular and the sacred, but between the superficial and the profound. Karl Rahner, the German Jesuit, who was an expert at Vatican II, loved to call this “the mysticism of ordinary life.” Adapted from Following the Mystics through the Narrow Gate  Prayer: My deepest me is God!" (emphasis added)

   Banyan trees hold a particular fascination. In some ways, they appear upside down – their roots reaching into the sky instead of digging into the ground. Their complexity reveals depth as well as Beauty.

   Consistent superficiality converts the sacred to sacrilege. Frenetic living blocks us from engaging the holy.

   God is, of course, still there at the surface. But, if that's where we are living, we can't see or experience God's Love. 

   We have the chance to live the profound only if we find the courage and the quiet to live deep – to face into rather than to run away, to embrace rather to flee, to care for the patient in agony rather than to avert our gaze.

-Erie Chapman

Photograph: Banyan Tree #1 copyright erie chapman 2012