The first coming of Christ is the sudden awareness of one-mindedness as experienced by a particular individual -- any individual -- whether you, or me, or Jesus, or Francis, or Dogen, or your mother, or your brother.
The second coming of Christ will be the awareness on the part of each one of us that we have the awareness of one-mindedness -- everyone -- and that there is a choice to be made.
What choice? The choice will be whether to recognize, accept, and act on the awareness of unity-consciousness, or, to opt to remain in the clutches of the illusory ego-self and to fight against the communion of creation as a singular yet particular revelation of truth, love, and service.
It will be the mythic choice of Eden.
A man of the Way comes rapping
At my brushwood gate,
Wants to discuss the essentials of Zen experience.
Don't take it wrong if this mountain monk's
Too lazy to open his mouth:
Late spring warblers singing their heart out,
A village of drifting petals.
- Jakushitsu Genko (1290-1367)
I don't know why the notion continues that what we've called the Godhead, with Trinitarian or Unitarian expression, should be considered to be other than the corpus of human existence. Even in the metaphor of Gospel lore there was a birth into humankind of the very creator of the world. God becomes human.
GENESIS --POEM
The dust has no time to settle.
It is doing creation's work,
becoming all the air there is,
sucking itself into the vortex,
the universe filled with powder.
The light begins to flood fields,
to bring the flowers into focus
in the dusky air that with each moment's
clearing becomes more invisible.
But now the blues darken with rain,
the whites become emphatic,
the leaves' sharp outlines the dawn.
And Adam rises from the mud,
whole, moving his feet slowly
through the clay, as it sucks and
pulls him back, not yet ready to
give him up. His legs move
and then he stands as still as stone,
exhaling what God has breathed
into him, the mud drying on his arms
as he watches himself and wonders
where he was before these arms
were his, these legs, this mud, and each
finger's evidence of particularity.
Had he been there always stirring
the mind of God, waiting for the mandate
to rise from His mesh of images,
to conform to flesh? Adam stands,
warming, thinking his way into the world.
He is the only one, symmetrical,
sufficient, the crux of matter,
the focal point. What does breathing
have to do with it, he wants to know
as he begins to think fox, lynx, otter,
mistle thrush, marmoset. Words
without contexts, names he mouths
as fast they come to him: fairy
shrimp, lark, tamarin, sturgeon.
His respiration fills with utterance,
his mind with images of skunk,
pigeon, ibex, wallaby. Trapped
in the rhythm of naming, he seeks
the spaces between syllables,
desires respite from the phonics'
tumble. The words' roll unthroats
him, makes him listen for inflections
to meet his in more than an echo.
He leans back into the cumulus
of grass and dreams images of hair,
eyes, skin, thinks when he awakens
that his dreams have made her up.
Eve knows she has been there always,
kindling his mind, teasing the hairs
on his arm. She says skitter, punt,
hedge, fleece, speckle. That words
are acts had not occurred to him.
She says jostle, dice, pepper, twine.
When she says stick, pedal, march,
he is stirred to reciprocity, sensing
rationale, antecedent, cogitation. Eve
gazes at the fading sunlight and sees
God above and through. Adam sees
the dust on fire with twilight. His fingers
seek hers. She raises his palm and with
her finger spells her love inside it.
He moves close for her interpretation.
(Poem by Jill Pelaez Baumgaertner, in The Christian Century, C. 1996 The Christian Century Foundation, C.2004, Gale Group)
I'm not wed to belief. Beliefs come and go. The reality of holiness is not dependent on statements of intellectual holdings, but on the partnering middle way, that place where everything intersects and moves through one another in a creativity of wholeness.
I hammer nails. I lay roofing tiles on boardwalk. I close up openings between roof and framing of the cabin completed (so we thought) six years ago.
Nearing midnight. Prison in AM. Saskia grounds hazelnuts for tomorrow's baking.
I would like to see, and be seen by, Christ. Christ-mind. Christ-reality.
It's only Zen that keeps faith from becoming anachronistic.
This seeing faith is unretrogressive faith.
Be perfect, (that is, make one's way through), as your heavenly Father is making 'itself' a way through.
Itself, being itself, is a way through.