After a visit with my friend Scottie in Peterborough, I am flush with some new cd's. He manages a store called "Moondance", possibly the coolest record/cd/t-shirt/poster shop in all of southern Ontario. I found the following quote on a recording he gave me by Irish singer-songwriter, Jackie Leven: "The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic just because the body is rotten -- that is all fantasy. What is found now is found then. If you find nothing now you will end up with an apartment in the city of Death."
This piece of wisdom is credited to the Eastern mystic poet, Kabir. The virtue of this quote, it seems to me, is that it brings into focus the dreadful determination, of which we are all quite capable, to find nothing now. Perhaps the eighth deadly sin should be depression - to despair of the earthly incarnate incomplete realm, and to seek instead some gnostic vision of ecstasy. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to go through life so steeped in the conviction that Jesus is victor, that one could not avoid the experience that the Kingdom of God has been established, right here, right now, and these are the days. Would we change the way we behave if we truly believed that God's kingdom is manifest, breaking through all the time? How would that change how we deal with disappointment, fear, grief, etc.?
