Raven's Bread: Food for those in Solitude

A quote from a letter to Raven's Bread by an anonymous hermit:

On this level of consciousness, we experience God intuitively and directly (contemplatively beyond our thoughts and words "about Him".)

I apologize if use of the words God or Him trigger people.  I am 71 and those words don't bother me anymore.  I have other hills on which to die.  

This pandemic has gifted us with time in which we can be alone with our Higher Power.  In that Silence we come into conscious contact with God. Such is Union with God.  We can each of us experience this, sometimes in a moment, sometimes for days at a time.  
Hanging out with God is what our love relationship is all about.
When I began to pray and meditate, I had to set an egg timer for three minutes because my internal chaos was so loud that I could not manage longer than three minutes.  After 42-plus years, it is something essential for me.  Something I do almost without thinking.

During this odd time, I think solitaries and hermits have an advantage, as do introverts.  We tend to prefer solitude, and rarely experience loneliness.  I often think that if we only knew, that feeling of loneliness belongs as much to God as it does to us.  God is at least as lonely for us as we are for God.   I read a young person's book recently in which this phrase was used to describe a character's fate:  "He would be lonelier than God."  Loneliness yearns for relationship.  Love IS relationship.  Love is the Word of God.  Love is Christ.  Christ longs for us to live within God and for God to live within us.

Today I was struck during mass by the thought that "my body is food indeed." Raven's Bread.  Food.  While we must be isolated during our quarantine, we some of us will eat more than usual, to fill up the empty-seeming space within.  There are memes on line about how fat we will all be when it is over.  I'm not sure it will be as over as we would like.  However, for us, the Body of Christ is bread indeed.  The Church is the Body.  The People of God are the Church.  

So what am I getting at?  I am hoping each of us can be patient with ourselves and those with whom we find ourselves quarantined, tolerating one another with great love as we remember that each of us is the beloved of the Beloved.  Tolerating ourselves as we realize over and again how far we are from perfection.  Yet, what freedom to know we are already holy, before we start!

I pray for each and all of us to come into the experience of the reign of God, which is right here, right now.  No matter who we are, or are not, we are holy and whole, loved and loving.  

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