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365 days 365 poems, daily poetry, discipline, Julian of Norwich, Lent, Love Poems, poems, Poetry, Sixteen Divine Revelations, Spirituality, Teaching Adolescents, Writing
Today I’m thinking about Lent. After falling off the health train, again, I am ready to participate in a cleansing, inside and out. A Spiritual Spring Cleaning is upon me, and I’m going to take these weeks until Easter to focus on making healthier choices. I will practice more yoga. I will be more mindful of the fuel I use to nourish my carrying unit. I will practice being more mindful. I will not let stress or fatigue gray my spirit. I will practice divine self-love. And after this period of personal lenten, I will eat chocolate Easter chocolates with wild joy.
What Lent really is, to my understanding, is a period of thoughtfulness before a great transformation. Let it begin. Resurrection is surely my favorite notion in the bible. That something can be reborn and that that something is somehow in us, is a good thought.
Happenstance brought me today to “Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love” , by Julian of Norwich, the fourteenth century English mystic nun who claimed to receive them when struck by a serious illness. She nearly died, and the sixteen revelations came to her. She wrote them down twenty to thirty years later. My revelations will not be about God, because I’m still figuring out my personal spirituality, but they will be about ways to love this vessel I’ve been given. A campaign of radical self-love will be my own kind of lent. This will probably be super cheesy, because, you know, love and goodness and whatnot. That’s okay. It’s been a hectic, teen-filled day and night, and it could use some cheese.
Sixteen Revelations
What Julian of Norwich saw, in her first revelation, was a hazelnut.
Given to her by God, she held it in her palm and saw a whole world, and heard the words, “it is all that is made”.
Taking that orb from her hand I heard a voice,
a voice of myself to myself, and was granted these sixteen revelations of love:
1) There is a trinity of care: mind, vessel, and its contents. Falter out of step with one and all will suffer.
2) Practice your worship of all three, and they will become one grand hazelnut containing a world.
3) The worship will take place in the Temple of Lying Around and Dreaming, and on the Altar of Noticing.
4) There will be daily devotions to each.
5) To the mind, the small moments of great challenge, and the devotion of creating. To the body, small moments of great effort. To the soul, small moments of great joy.
6) To the mind, making. To the vessel, sweat-making. To its contents, love-making. These are the rites.
7) This is how I feed I.
8) Listen to the angel choir in my children’s voices.
9) The love for humanity brought by human passion for this time, right now, and not after. Thoughts of after will no longer be given refuge.
10) Love gathers love.
11) The comfort in a beating heart is cause for celebration, often and with the wildest thrumming.
12) Meditation on my own suffering would break the heart of any deity.
13) The only meditation will be on my own strengths.
14) Preparation of the food that fills the vessel will become an act of worship.
15) The ground of our beseeching will ask of the birds, not the sky.
16) Taking for granted, failure to awe, and manufactured dread are the only sins.
This is how to rise, in resurrection.
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This one got a little abstract, but I think the sentiment is still worthy. Happy Sunday, poem peeps. I love you all, as I do myself.