St Mary's

The essence and central message of the voice that cries in the wilderness is found in this story.

One night Rabbi Isaac was told in his dream to go to faraway Prague and there to dig for a hidden treasure under a bridge that led to the palace of the king. He did not take the dream seriously but when it recurred four or five times he made up his mind to go in search of the treasure.

When he got to the bridge he discovered to his dismay that it was heavily guarded day and night by soldiers. All he could do was gaze at the bridge from a distance. But since he went there every morning the captain of the guards came up to him one day to find out why. Rabbi Isaac, embarrassed as he was to tell his dream to another soul, told the captain everything for he liked the good-natured character of this Christian. The captain roared with laughter and said, “Good heavens! You a Rabbi and you take dreams so seriously? Why if I were stupid enough to act on my own dreams I would be wandering around in Poland today. Let me tell you one that I had last night that keeps recurring frequently. A voice tells me to go to Cracow and dig for treasure in the corner of the kitchen of one Isaac, son of Ezechiel! Now wouldn’t it be the most stupid thing in the world to search around Cracow for a man called Isaac and another called Ezechiel when half the male population there probably has one name and the other half the other?”

The Rabbi was stunned. He thanked the captain for his advice, hurried home, dug up the corner of the kitchen and found a treasure abundant enough to keep him in comfort till the day he died.

Now this is not an invitation to go home and dig up the corner of your kitchens. But an invitation to go within, to the is-ness of your life right now and to find the real treasure that you seek.

At this time every year, before Christmas, we hear in our liturgies from the voice that cries in the wilderness who pleads to us to prepare a way for the Lord. To go within, to that sometimes seemingly desert or ordinary place, and to discover what it is we truly seek.

As those in this Gospel, who made their way to him to find that something more, so we are invited into this space, this empty place to find that which is all in all, beyond, and everything. To become and recognize our no-thing-ness and hence discover the everything, our every-thing-ness, but mostly, we resist this empty place because it is the place of death, death of the self, the place deprived of thought and the mind-the place devoid of distraction.

When we come to meditate we are invited to enter this empty place, this wilderness, where the mind is invited to become still.

To the ego it can appear to be a dull and lifeless place and it can resist entry. Therefore it is often brought kicking and screaming to this place. But it is in this place of no-thing-ness we can discover the every-thing-ness which we are.

In the words of the famous Indian Sage Nisargadatta Maharaj, “When I see I am nothing that is wisdom; when I see I am everything that is love.”

The art of living is somehow to live both of these realizations at once.

The gospel sets out a blue-print of how to do this. We see in the beginnings of it in the story of John the Baptist.

The people made their way to John the Baptist in the desert. In the desert (the empty place) they are invited to repent, to metanoia, to transcend the small mind, to have a change of mind, and then to be baptized to enter the waters where the old self dies, is washed away, and the new self emerges which takes on the larger mind of God.

The small separate self is no longer. A new consciousness is put on, like the new garment of white which was worn by the newly baptized.

“Now, (to use the words of St Paul,) it is no longer I that live but Christ (universal consciousness) lives in me! And St Paul says, “The challenge of living is to put on the mind of Christ everyday.”

To live and move from this consciousness we are invited into the death/resurrection motif everyday. And so for me, this means simply to take time out from my busy life to be quiet, to still the mind, to move into the desert, to hear the voice crying from the wilderness, to prepare a way for the bigger, more universal consciousness than the small ego consciousness that dominates my insignificant thoughts and tiny world.

In this ordinary place within is the treasure we all seek in our dreams, it is the all and all, and it is found in the corner of our kitchens, the places we visit everyday.