Scripture
“Shall
matter be destroyed or not?”
The savior replied,
“Each nature and shaped thing and every creature
lives in and with each other, and will dissolve
into distinctive roots, and the nature of matter
will dissolve into the root of nature.
Whoever has ears to hear should hear.”
Homily
The Gospel of Mary, often also called the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, was lost for over a thousand years before an incomplete Coptic fragment was discovered in 1896. Later, additional fragments were discovered in Greek, the original language of the lost text as well as the canonical gospels. But as the above quote from the lost gospel of Jesus’ most well known female apostle demonstrates, the Gospel of Mary is concerned primarily with the metaphysical nature of things, including most especially human nature.
Here, an unknown disciple opens the fragmented gospel by asking Jesus Christ if matter will be destroyed. Jesus responds by reminding his audience that everything, which is to say every thing that is, that exists, that is extant, lives and exists and shares its being and becoming with all other things. This principle is familiar for students of Buddhism, where in the ancient language of Pali the concept is referred to as paticcasamuppada, translated as dependent origination or dependent arising. According to this principle, all phenomena exist in a state of dependence upon other things.
Jean-Yves LeLoup, a French priest and member of the Communion of Western Orthodox Churches, prefers a translation that is more poetic and consciously evocative of the Buddhist traditions: “All that is born, all that is created, all the elements of nature, are interwoven and united with each other. All that is composed shall be decomposed; everything returns to its roots; matter returns to the origins of matter.”
Whatever translation one prefers, the idea is rather simple: The many things we experience in the world of appearances and phenomena have a primordial root, and just as they have grown out of that root, they will fall back into it. For every birth, a death; for every womb, a tomb. When those first living things took their first metaphorical breaths, in reality whatever metabolic process that was necessary to live at the time, there was a shadow that was waiting for them, as it waits for the rocks that now carry their fossilized remains. To live is to change, and to change is to eventually experience a state that can be described as decay or decomposition or, most solemnly, Death.
Meditation
I sit with my breath. I allow my thoughts to pass, and observe them as they rise and fall with my breath, where every inhalation is followed by an exhalation, every rise of the abdomen by its fall. I take a walk down a busy street, and watch as people pass me by, their lives as dynamic and impermanent as my own. Each of them contains a world within, and shares with me the world without. Above me the clouds of the sky turn in the wind, which cools every creature and the waters from which they drink. The winds are driven by changes in temperature, which are driven by the light of the sun and the earth and its rotations. All of these things were composed, and all of them shall pass away in the fullness of time.
Prayer
To the One Beyond this World,
All who are born will die,
All beauty will fade,
All who are strong will become weak,
All who are healthy shall fall sick,
And no one can escape the turning of this world.
Even the vast seas and deserts and the things of the air and darkness
Will erode in the fullness of time
Alongside the earth and the moon and the stars and the worlds beyond
Which will turn and erode and fade into the black.
All that exists depends on You
All that depends on You will return to You
Give us Sophia, in our hours of despair and decay and death
And guide us to liberation in Your illumination.
thanks! i love these, both the prayer and meditation.