The Veil is Thin
Why my life often feels like a shadow puppet play
“As soon as a man is fully disposed to be alone with God, he is alone with God no matter where he may be — in the country, the monastery, the woods or the city. The lightning flashes from East to West, illuminating the whole horizon and striking where it pleases and at the same instant the infinite liberty of God flashes in the depths of that man’s soul, and he is illumined. At that moment he sees that though he seems to be in the middle of his journey, he has already arrived at the end. For the life of grace on earth is the beginning of the life of glory. Although he is a traveler in time, he has opened his eyes, for a moment, in eternity.”
— Thomas Merton from Thoughts in Solitude
These days feel like a shadow puppet play, cast by Divine lights from unknowable sources upon the damp clay of the earth, and I, aware of myself embodied in the shadow player, and the puppet made of wood, and the artist animating both the puppet and the shadow from below. A dozen times a day or more, I look over my shoulder and see myself playing myself, enacting a drama, a love play for my Lover, and I wonder, always I wonder, does it please Him? Of course I know it does. I know he’s proud of me. But I’m so desperate for his affection, you see. From the moment I first tasted his love, it has been my undoing.
These days, the veils between the realms are transparent to me. There’s the me who is here in this earthbound play, playing my part as I’m meant to, and there’s the me making that me, choosing him, shaping him, loving him into being, into becoming what he must. Then there’s the me holding them both from the vast dark where God abides, unutterably at rest, unutterably in love, consumed in laughter, consumed by delight, not because he cannot help himself, but because that is what love most wants to be.
This shadow play, it has a good purpose, same as a hammer and chisel in the sculptor’s hands. Most of us suspect, I think, we’re being shaped by God, that there’s a point to all this madness and suffering, that there’s some art at work here, even if we can’t see it or imagine its ends. But few of us, I think, realize that we, too, have a hand in crafting the play we inhabit in this shadow realm. A part of us, the larger part, in fact, that part that even now partakes of God’s Divine nature, sits at one with that Great Spirit and holds the chisel where God can strike it in just the right way to chip some burden off your shoulder you longer need to carry.
Everything is a love affair between you and the Divine, you see? Even the things you lose. Even the tears of grief you cry for having lost them. There is beauty in suffering; this is the Great Mystery of our becoming. Even the darkest tragedies of life are secretly held by threads of the finest spun glory God can weave.
