Flow

‘Therefore I tell you, [Jesus said] do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? (Matthew 6:25)

I saw it again the other day. Flow.

It started with a TV interview with Al Pacino, the Academy Award winning actor. Pacino described the day his eighth-grade teacher came to his house and told his mother to encourage him to keep acting, keep getting up on stage. She saw something come alive in him every time he performed in a school play.

Pacino shared early days working in small theaters in New York City, amazed and totally one with some elixir of life in his soul, knowing he had to do this. It didn’t matter if I was successful or not, he said, whether I had money or not, whether anyone liked me or not. This was my life. I had to do it.

On the stage, bringing a character to life, he came alive. The outward expression of his life and work flowed seamlessly with an inner current of creative love and joy he didn’t create but discovered within himself. He was one with himself and, as a person of faith, I’ll venture to say he was one with the Creative Love who fashioned the mystery of his soul.

‘It is in this unity of love that life consists,’ Julian of Norwich, writes in her Showings of Divine Love.

Yes, not in what we wear or how we look or whether we have money or success or comfort or struggle, life is oneness with a love that makes everything else but itself irrelevant.

When the love that is our true nature finds its natural expression, a flood of joy and freedom flows like a fountain, filling our soul, lighting our eyes, awakening our energies. We flow, one with ourselves and with the Love who made us, each of us an embodied expression of the Loving Mystery who transcends our knowing.

But as we flow with this love, we do know.

We know God, for we are one with the Love who made us, fulfilling the hope for which we were created. And we are free. Distractions disappear. Worries about how we are doing evaporate. We go with the flow, knowing we were made to enjoy this grace, this bliss, this comfort, this joy, this unity of hearts.

Sometimes, this happens in prayer or song, when love surrounds and silences the heart, words having become both unnecessary and meaningless because a great love has swamped our being.

Two friends, professors at college and graduate school levels, speak of moments when they totally forget themselves and are ‘carried away,’ a most helpful phrase. Doing becomes being, and being becomes doing as they give themselves fully to the moment, freely pouring out what they know, utterly forgetful of all other concerns.

As a boy, I recall adults in my life counseling me or someone else not to get too carried away with what we were saying or doing. All things in moderation seemed to be their message. Certainly, there is some wisdom in this.

But the life to which Jesus invites us, the life that he gives us is all about being carried away in the flow of a great love, carried away by beauty, carried away by the surge of joy that fills us when we fall upon that which God fashioned us to be and do.

It takes years, really decades, to discover what Pacino found on his eight-grade stage, and then only if you are awake, careful to notice when and where the love that you are, the love that lives at your core, begins to flow and render everything else … irrelevant.

David L. Miller