In our visits with the Divine , sometimes we meet people who hold spirit-fire inside them. Their paths have been lit by their prayer. Through daily practice, they have cultivated the awareness that all are expressions of the Divine.
It sometimes makes me ask, what if the Kingdom of Heaven is not a place that we are going to, but the place we live from?
Some monks in Japan play the shakuhachi bamboo flute while practising Zen. When doing so, primary attention is given to the breath-sound, while blowing on the bamboo.
This morning I invite us to close our eyes and pray in the silence with the sound of shakuhachi. Just pay attention to the sound and the breath: that which goes with us wherever we go.
If we linger with it long enough, it just might bring us to a felt sense of “where we live from”.
