The Hymn of the Mystic Gospel
A portrait of the Gospel of John in prose
The Hymn of the Mystic Gospel
A portrait of the Gospel of John in prose
You stand on a threshold.
Before First Breath
Drew starlight into being,
There pulsed the Unnamed.
Not silence,
But the womb of all utterance,
Pregnant with infinite becoming.
The Word was never spoken
But Vibration
Eternally speaking,
Not descending like rain,
But rising like sap through
The secret veins of existence.
In the cathedral of flesh,
Divinity did not visit but recognized itself
Awakening from the dream.
Christ moves
Not as savior, nor stranger
But as the Mirror
Finally unveiled,
Reflecting what we have always been
Beneath the gossamer of forgetting.
I AM,
He breathes,
And the pronoun dissolves
No longer his,
No longer ours,
But the One golden thread
Weaving self through Self,
The luminous river flowing both ways
Between the banks of seeming separation.
It is both Mirror and Meadow.
Not for solving, but dissolving.
Not for grasping, but for being taken.
Yet to follow is
Not by pilgrimage,
But arriving where we are,
Not climbing Jacob's ladder
But discovering
The ladder is us,
Each vertebra, each rung, a heaven,
Each heartbeat the footfall of the Beloved
Walking home through our own wilderness.
Water shimmers, shivers into wine,
Not by miracle but revelation:
Everything is already transformed,
Waiting only for eyes washed clean
Of the illusion that sacred and ordinary
Wear different faces.
The Message unfolds
Like a lotus blooming
In the dark soil of paradox:
Not scripture
But scripture
Reading itself,
Not words about the Mystery
But Mystery
Speaking its own name
Through our lips,
The All shares
One breath.
In the end, the beginning,
Where language empties into Light,
Thoughts diffuse in the ocean of Being,
And what remains
Is the taste of recognition
Honey upon the tongue,
Ancient
And immediate,
The flavor of never having been away.
It is You!
You are the water
Becoming wine,
Whispers the voice
That has no sound,
No Source that is an other,
The Word learning to speak itself
Through the beautiful bewilderment
Of thinking you were only human.
Shining in the Silence,
The Fullness without edges.
A flame that leaves no ash.
You step across a line
To find that you are home.
What remains is but to remember
The path you never left.