Sunday, September 04, 2005

In the Garden of Orthodoxy

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It was the sweet garden of refreshment. It was not a creed but a wish. Your wish to be there was how you came to be there. It was not work that you did that got you there. It was your wish to be there you walked along. The path was a wish. The wish then became the place or was the place. The creed in a sense came later, the creed was words of history, historical words that you took for your own in order to describe where you were or really who you were. Words described things correctly but what mattered was what they described, that was really all that mattered. The place you walked to.

The plants hung in exertion and strain.

You walked along the path. As for this sweet scented garden, you never knew when you'd arrived - it was so lucid and so transparent that, even as you were standing in an industrial parking lot, you might say you were there. It extended its branches everywhere potentially. Sitting on a public bench you were there. That is, if you wanted to be.

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In the Garden of Orthodoxy, there was no law. As one walked toward God -- if one did -- no law was needed or possible. The walk itself was obedience. Without obedience the feet couldn't even move.

So... if faith was lawful, that was only an attribute that it had. It was like the smell that the flowers gave off, as if by nature. As if in no way coerced to obey. Because obedience itself is impossible to coerce or constrain. So as a person walked, the walk itself did all of the work - that is, if the walk was the right one, in the right direction. And then everything else followed. The attention turned that way and then the heart followed.

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