"In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness." - Antoine de St. Exupery
This quote is at the heart of my most significant 'Bowling Ball from God' moment to date.
It was in January of this year and I was traveling through Egypt and Romania with a group filming a documentary about Orthodox monasticism. We were nearing the end of our adventure and we found ourselves making an unscheduled stop at a small town in Northern Romania. In the last decade, the church in this remote outpost had become the focus of many Orthodox faithful hoping to secure a miracle. Apparently at the beginning of the 1990's villagers had disinterred the remains of an Orthodox priest who had been killed earlier in the century as a result of religious persecution. The workers who were unearthing the body were shocked to find that it had not 'decomposed.' The result of this miracle prompted the ascension of this former person to the ranks of Orthodox sainthood and pilgrims from all over Romania and beyond now travel to the church to pray at the side of his glass-enclosed, vestment-shrouded body.
All of this was related to me in a conspiratorial whisper by the irrepressible Father John McGuckin, perhaps the world's only Irish-British-American university professor and fly-fishing Romanian Orthodox priest. Father John finished the account just as our bus was pulling up in front of the 'Miracle Church.' This stop on our journey was a departure from the other destinations in that having no relevance to our film, we were not required to document it with our cameras. As a result, I found myself approaching the church without being preoccupied with the usual mental clutter surrounding gear, exposures and tape stock. Unencumbered , my brain gave thought to the idea of approaching the church in search of a miracle, as most who come there would.
For a fleeting moment, my brain accessed the most selfish and trite reasons that people look towards the divine and I considered asking for a miracle of fame and/or fortune. But as I walked across the road, I was hit by the Bowling Ball. In its wake, I understood that I truly wanted for nothing that held real importance and this realization was a miracle in and of itself. I was loved and in love with Leigh (then my girlfriend, now my wife), I had a loving and supporting family, I had extensive and meaningful friendships including one with my business partner Pat who was part of this adventure, I had health, relative wealth and I was employed doing something I actively enjoyed.
It was at that moment that I thought back over the many blessings I had been 'receiving' from our hosts along the way through Egypt and Romania. Every monk, Father, Bishop and Starets we had encountered had bestowed upon me a blessing. While not Orthodox and only loosely Christian by virtue of my upbringing, I still consider myself a spiritual person and I relished these blessings perhaps as much as the initiated. What the Bowling Ball had brought to a head (excuse the pun), was that the monks were not conferring a new blessing upon me in an additive sense. They were, rather, making a present statement, that I am blessed, have always been blessed and I carry my own blessings wherever I go. Their act of blessing was simply the act of revealing myself to me.
This is the essence of the understanding of God who told Moses simply: "I am who I am."
The spirit of this Bowling Ball is also reflected in the words of my new literary hero, Thomas Merton, who wrote the following in 'Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander':
"Life is, or should be, nothing but a struggle to seek truth; yet what we seek is really the truth that we already possess. Truth is mine in the reality of life as it is given to me to live: yet to take life thoughtlessly, passively as it comes, is to renounce the struggle and purification which are necessary. One cannot simply open his eyes and see."
This quote is at the heart of my most significant 'Bowling Ball from God' moment to date.
It was in January of this year and I was traveling through Egypt and Romania with a group filming a documentary about Orthodox monasticism. We were nearing the end of our adventure and we found ourselves making an unscheduled stop at a small town in Northern Romania. In the last decade, the church in this remote outpost had become the focus of many Orthodox faithful hoping to secure a miracle. Apparently at the beginning of the 1990's villagers had disinterred the remains of an Orthodox priest who had been killed earlier in the century as a result of religious persecution. The workers who were unearthing the body were shocked to find that it had not 'decomposed.' The result of this miracle prompted the ascension of this former person to the ranks of Orthodox sainthood and pilgrims from all over Romania and beyond now travel to the church to pray at the side of his glass-enclosed, vestment-shrouded body.
All of this was related to me in a conspiratorial whisper by the irrepressible Father John McGuckin, perhaps the world's only Irish-British-American university professor and fly-fishing Romanian Orthodox priest. Father John finished the account just as our bus was pulling up in front of the 'Miracle Church.' This stop on our journey was a departure from the other destinations in that having no relevance to our film, we were not required to document it with our cameras. As a result, I found myself approaching the church without being preoccupied with the usual mental clutter surrounding gear, exposures and tape stock. Unencumbered , my brain gave thought to the idea of approaching the church in search of a miracle, as most who come there would.
For a fleeting moment, my brain accessed the most selfish and trite reasons that people look towards the divine and I considered asking for a miracle of fame and/or fortune. But as I walked across the road, I was hit by the Bowling Ball. In its wake, I understood that I truly wanted for nothing that held real importance and this realization was a miracle in and of itself. I was loved and in love with Leigh (then my girlfriend, now my wife), I had a loving and supporting family, I had extensive and meaningful friendships including one with my business partner Pat who was part of this adventure, I had health, relative wealth and I was employed doing something I actively enjoyed.
It was at that moment that I thought back over the many blessings I had been 'receiving' from our hosts along the way through Egypt and Romania. Every monk, Father, Bishop and Starets we had encountered had bestowed upon me a blessing. While not Orthodox and only loosely Christian by virtue of my upbringing, I still consider myself a spiritual person and I relished these blessings perhaps as much as the initiated. What the Bowling Ball had brought to a head (excuse the pun), was that the monks were not conferring a new blessing upon me in an additive sense. They were, rather, making a present statement, that I am blessed, have always been blessed and I carry my own blessings wherever I go. Their act of blessing was simply the act of revealing myself to me.
This is the essence of the understanding of God who told Moses simply: "I am who I am."
The spirit of this Bowling Ball is also reflected in the words of my new literary hero, Thomas Merton, who wrote the following in 'Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander':
"Life is, or should be, nothing but a struggle to seek truth; yet what we seek is really the truth that we already possess. Truth is mine in the reality of life as it is given to me to live: yet to take life thoughtlessly, passively as it comes, is to renounce the struggle and purification which are necessary. One cannot simply open his eyes and see."
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