“…this world is so fantastically mysterious,
so challengingly marvelous…
there is more than I see…
there’s endlessly more than I can express
or even conceive.”
This quote from Abraham Heschel, Rabbi, and author, who I consider one of my spiritual fathers, expresses the motivation that drives my continuing search for earthy windows into the deeper reality of the sacred dimension in which we live. We need to be on the alert for surprises that await us everywhere — like “The Bridge Across a Thousand Miles.”
Our car’s odometer clicks off less than two miles as we drive across the Golden Gate Bridge. But geologically, we’ve traveled more than 500 times that distance.
The land that is now Marin County spent millions of years as part of the Pacific Ocean basin, before drifting more than 1,000 miles to its present location across the bay from San Francisco. The hills of Marin Highlands are built from the fossil remains of ocean-life that once made its home at the bottom of the Pacific.
We never really know where life’s many bridges will take us. What we think may be just a routine crossing to a new job or a new relationship, often takes us far farther than we expected, to a whole different way of life.
Relative security and regular meals — there’s something to be said for the fishbowl-life.
But then, isn’t life more than just a bowl-to-bowl existence?
Once we sense that there’s a larger dimension to life, our fishbowl-life can quickly become small and confining.
We’re all called to escape the confines of our ego-bowl to surrender ourselves to the greater flow of a life.
How can a self-respecting butterfly be proud of her caterpillar off-spring? It bears no family resemblance. And it does nothing but gorge itself on milkweed leaves all day?
The mother Monarch doesn’t give up on her caterpillar-child, even when it attaches itself to a milkweed twig, sheds its outer skin, and shape-shifts into an even less-promising pupa.
But then, within a couple weeks, that seemingly lifeless blob begins to move. And before long, a new creation emerges and takes flight — a child that any parent would be proud of.
Can that be why our parent-God never loses hope in us caterpillar-kids?
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