Weekly SUMMER SNIPPETS for July 22, 2012: Seeing with Your 3rd Eye

Summer Snippets: Seeing with Your 3^rd Eye

You don’t have to spend hours in silent prayer to experience contemplative presence. That is not to say that 10 or 15 minutes every day in silence before the Lord cannot be a wonderful way of recharging your batteries and receiving the grace to live a rewarding day.

This week I would like to look at how some summertime activities can make a big difference in your transformation, simple things like a stroll after supper, watering the garden, or walking the dog. I would like to look at a very practical way that can help you notice lots of things you’ve been missing, things that can be understood to be a sort of private revelation of God to you in the ordinariness of things. The practice is Seeing with your 3^rd eye.  Yes, I realize we only have two eyes, but it’s the third eye or way of seeing that will take you into a whole new dimension of seeing and believing. Stay with me.

Richard Rohr, a contemporary and well-known author in the area of contemplative presence, speaks of seeing with three eyes. To explain it he tells a story of three men who stand before a large oak tree with the afternoon sun casting its shadow through the layers of leaves. One man sees the immense physical dimensions of the mighty oak: its height, enormous trunk and grand canopy of leaves. This man is the “sensate” type who, like 80 percent of the world, deals with what he can see, feel, touch, move, and fix. This is enough reality for him, for he has little interest in larger ideas, intuitions, or the grand scheme of things. He sees the mighty oak with his 1^st eye and this is good.

A second man, however, sees the same tree a bit differently. He enjoys the sun shading each series of leaves differently and the gentle breeze turning each leaf a different shade of green. He delights in all the beauty that the first man does, but like all lovers of thought, technology, and science, he also enjoys his ability to make sense of plant life and explain what he sees. So he thinks about the nurturing roots that feed the tree, the leaves that will soon be changing into the many shades of autumn color. Through his imagination, intuition, and reason, he sees with his 2^nd eye, which is even better.

The third man, however, sees the sun dappling the hundreds of leaves, knowing and enjoying all that the first and the second men do. But in his ability to progress from seeing to explaining to “tasting,” he remains in awe before an underlying mystery of life that flows between him and the tree, a flowing that connects him with the tree, making him physically part of it, receiving its nutrients, luxuriating in the sunlight, bearing fruit with it. After all, the same creator made them both from the same matter. Both were nurtured on the same water and nutrients. And both were in a unique relationship of interdependence. Without the tree’s ability to take sun energy and convert it through photosynthesis to a different form of energy, without animals eating its fruits or returning its decayed leaves to the ground to replenish nutrients, he would not be standing there. He uses his 3^rd eye, which is the full goal of all seeing and all knowing. This seeing is the best.

What sort of reality between him and his followers was Jesus seeing when he tries to explain the mystery of their relationship by using the comparison of the vine? Recall in John 15, where he says, “I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. If you do not remain in me, you are like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned. If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples. As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit —fruit that will last—and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you. This is my command: Love each other.”

This sort of reality cannot be seen much less understood and lived out with the 1^st or 2^nd eye. It really takes your 3^rd eye! Imagine what is out there waiting to be revealed? All it takes is seeing properly.

Fondly,

Father Nicholas