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The Blue Flower Dreaming

CHAPTER 3

(Ecclesiastes)
 
You who quest for the feminine, do not seek her in a woman, for of a surety the promise is but a vapour, and the flesh of a woman is want to embrace strange bed-fellows.

(Grollo the misogynist)

The Grollo is a deaf man speaking.

(Eudosia of Pente)

His quest like broken pieces of a pot scattered around him, the knight lay exhausted on the warm earth as evening fell.
He had known the frustration of parched ground, a dry mouth, and desert sands blown in the wind. Expectation dashed by mirage, and good ground choked with weeds. But there was worse.
The young knight's quest, his foolishness and empty striving, his tiredness and sin, had surely brought him to a place of overwhelming sorrow. He had entered a city on the edge of darkness, and had journeyed deep into a place where he knew he did not belong.
But it was there he thought that he had glimpsed the eternal feminine in the beckoning of a woman.
He had surrendered his defences and embraced the openness that is the only path to the inside. He thought he recognised the pattern, and hope was sweet. But once inside, the horror of deception ripped deep within his heart.
Surely seed had taken root in deep soil, and the darkness began to gather malignantly. Caught openhearted in a chasm between life and life that he could not bridge, he watched helplessly as the ancient evil kadaicha emerged.
Cruel parody of Wisdom. Empty promise. Vain hope. Cruel death.
He was prey for a raging intellect he could not still, and he was not the one to divide the spirit of the feminine from the parasitic cruel one. His only sight of the inner heart of the woman had been a vision in the desert as he left. And even as he saw her, he heard the harsh disjointed rasping voice of the kadaicha behind him. A disdainful mockery of words and language. A rabid and possessive thing that held her enthralled and did not revolt her soul.
A memory of scorned innocence. A plant plucked from soil. A tiny pattern of hope fleeing back to the eternal source.
And something of the inside, something of hearing and understanding, something of receiving and nurturing, began to fade away within him. And around him there was only darkness.
***
The words of the Grollo came clearly without his bidding. He did not actively remember them, they just came as if to comfort him and lead him on a new path.
But the words of the Grollo found in him no soil of bitterness to take root. In fact they found no soil at all. They too, fell to the ground with all the other broken pieces.
He was alone, but not in a false loneliness that could be embraced, a loneliness replete with self pity and her friends. He was simply alone.
He would have wept, but had no tears, and was comforted as the rain in heavy drops wept for him, as he fell into a deep sleep.
And then he began to dream.
***
The monk saw the young knight on the edge of the abyss.
Compelled by the Holy Spirit, he received the blessing of his Father Abbot, left the monastery, and set out on foot alone.
His aloneness was however merely apparent, he was surrounded by love. And countless holy presences waited on him. Waiting like ideas for him to pattern out for them to enter and bless. He was in such a state of blessing that he found no room to receive anything less than goodness as he journeyed on. It was a constant task to pattern and receive. A task that gave him deep joy.
Highwaymen shrank in fear and kept their distance as he passed through dark woods at twilight.
Just as the sun was beginning to set he came to a small village at the base of a mountain range, and was refreshed to hear the peel of the village church bell calling the faithful to prayer. After Evensong, they pressed upon him to read the word to them, perceiving him to be a holy man on pilgrimage.
The monk read the Scriptures to them with great joy of heart, and all those present, men women and children, felt their hearts burn within them. It was a holy love so fervent, and a heat so powerful, that they all began with one accord to shout praises to God, the most holy loving Trinity. Anything less and the fire would break out in uncontrolled laughter tears or shaking, and many would pass out unable to stand in this powerful presence.
The gathering went on, the monk speaking the mystery of the Holy Name of the sweet Saviour, the deep love between the holy persons, and the infinite drawing love of the Father for his children. They felt themselves caught up in the will of God, and the only ones to leave, soon returned with others, who on entering would surrender their souls to the Holy Spirit, like saints and martyrs would surrender their souls in death. So profound was the presence of God.
Strengthened, he continued in blessing late into the night, and then took his leave.
He pushed on in darkness, towards the place of the sleeping knight.
There was a darkness more thick as he approached, though he took no notice of this, he would only accept guidance from the Holy Spirit, the awesome presence of God in his heart. What the evil one did or showed the monk, was entirely irrelevant.
***
Immobilised and falling deeper under a heavy weight of slumber, the knight was confronted by a stark gross darkness, which he recognised as his own.
Darkness that had been hidden deep within him, darkness he had denied and repressed and pushed down deep. Darkness he had sealed within the vessel of his heart. Darkness that had now broken out with his shattered of hope, and the shattering of his heart's walls. Darkness freed that now engulfed him with a vengeance. Darkness that spoke of the expulsion from Eden, and the demons of Pandora's box.
The knight had been defeated, and was powerless to do anything. Stripped of any right to claim any of the rights he had once championed. But against all hope, in his emptiness and nakedness he remained open to the gracious God he had known as a child.
The nightmare raged, and continued to engulf him like fire, with a sharp sickening pain piercing his chest. It was the touch of the kadaicha's awareness. A flow of evil ideas, a spinning of an alternate cursed reality seeking to press bony fingers into him, and push the reality of God from his mind.
This was more than a bad dream.
The knight knew the dream could only be a curse, and as he lay, now gripped by fever, images sown in hatred would come to mind or memory without him calling them. In his delirium he would go over them and hopelessly try to resolve them. Though thankfully, that which once would have tempted him to respond in kind was now dead within him.
From deep within his nightmare, the knight cried again to God for grace, and with all that was left within him, he yearned for the life and love of God. From an inside wrenched open, he let his blind love shoot like an arrow from his thick darkness and brokenness toward the heart of God.
Stripped of all his own virtue and self-esteem, he still knew this was not God's reality for him. It did not match either the beauty of nature that he could not release, nor the promise of love once burned deep into his heart: "the plans I have for you are good".
Following his own darkness, no one else's, the knight had come too close to the kadaicha. He should never have been anywhere near it, but he had now looked it in the face.
And there at the source of his choking pain, he saw a woman's eyes watching the kadaicha's pictures of malice and bitterness, assenting to a reality poisoned by her own darkness, pride and fear.
God's reality for all his creatures had been love, but this one had owned an inflicted deformity as if it was her own, and had embraced the wrath of God deep within her being, and it burnt in her like venom.
She hated light, she saw in the darkness. She was the kadaicha's vassal. The kadaicha's lover. The kadaicha's eyes.
The kadaicha's memory of his own lost femininity.
And eyes which had once watched the knight with hunger, now watched coldly.
The knight's failure to renounce that despised innocence, sickened and revolted her, and in the kadaicha's vortex of time she had looked forward to watch the kadaicha spew out venom after him and all his kind. She had watched the evil, said yes to violence, and yes to the death.
But all the works of the kadaicha were cursed of God, and it was not God's will that they should suffer destruction at the flow of the kadaicha through her eyes. And the earth opened up a chasm deeper than her seeing and assent, subverting the evil flow from its final frenzied violence.
And at the point where the kadaicha's flow finally reached the knight in isolation and terror, the Word of One she did not know, cut deeper than she knew.
***
The knight was painfully aware of his own powerlessness before the evil flow, and he coughed uncontrollably as fever racked him.  He wondered whether there was a love deep enough to heal the heart of a wounded child, who in the body of a grown person, believed they had no need of healing.
And silently, the Wisdom of God began to gently shine within the secure and unmerited gift of salvation, way deep within his own heart. He began to sense the assuring smile of God, the perfect loving Father, and he gave the question over.
Touched in the depths of his deficiency, the knight looked up and saw the reassuring face of a monk smiling down upon him.
The monk pulled out a small flask, and marked the knight's forehead with blessed oil. He then placed his hand on the knight's head and began to pray.
Awesome fire and light flooded into the young knight's body. An awesome cleanness, burning and consuming. Pain, yet without pain.
More and more engulfed in this holy fire, the knight opened his heart in deep repentance, weeping bitterly for his sins.
The monk prayed, in a language the knight seemed to vaguely recognise deep in his heart, and his memory was resurrected with the sweet scent of the powerful presence of the eternally loving God upon him.
The presence of God was seeping like oil into the fissures, cracks and clefts deep within him. In his heart, and powerfully in his mind and memory. It was as if these crevices were wounds caused, or opened in him by the kadaicha's flow of bitter ideas
But the flowing presence of God was soaking into him, seeping down into every crevice. It was a crimson flow, and brought to his memory the crucified Christ. The shed blood of Christ. Shed for him. He began to know in its touching of his pain.
As this warm flow entered him and filled the breaches, the pictures of terror in his minds eye began to be less clear. The crevices could not be made out for the surpassing love. The blood was of its nature removing evil memory. There was a sense of forgetting. It was a forgetting of the kadaicha's nightmare, a forgetting of all things dark and diabolical. It was the paradox of the crystal clear remembering of the blood of true life, in the joy of forgetting.
He was turning from the gate of the 'knowledge of good and evil', and under this awesome grace, he was knowing only good, knowing only life.
The forgiveness he so thirsted for, flooded his soul like a river, coming with torrents of love and deep peace, flowing through, and freely flowing out again.
The awesome peace totally engulfed him, and he drifted into deep and restful sleep, a broken vessel. A broken vessel who had always been a broken vessel.
The hammer of his experiences had not caused his brokenness, though it had probably been attracted to his inherent flaws, and repressed darkness. Like a sculptor sees a form in a block of marble, and brings it to life, his fissures and cracks had been seen, with the darkness paradoxically serving to bring the brokenness into light.
To use a metaphor that would not have a home for centuries, the shattered pot was Schroedingers's dead cat.  Before the lid had been opened, the vessel of his life had been the paradoxical dead cat/live cat in the unopened box of quantum physics.
The nature of the knowing of the person opening the box, had been as important as the fact that the box had been opened - the one who had looked at him was the spirit described in Proverbs as the antithesis of the beautiful living wisdom. There was no life in her vision, her person knowing had in her earliest years been corrupted from I-you to I-it.  The whole time-line and life-line and his deepest relationships had been seen as an object stripped of spirit.
And yet there was a serenity beyond the pain. A man who has been broken, who has lost the deepest and most cherished of things, has also lost the potential to be broken. He is invincible.
And from the pit of his helplessness, powerlessness, brokenness, and loss, the sacred arrow of blind love. Without words, without form, without knowing, in total darkness. And this arrow had plunged deep into the heart of God.
Here in his healing, all the broken pieces of his existence were gathering into perfect form. He had not gathered them, he had not brought the pieces together and he certainly was not holding them together. And yet here he was, perceived as whole.
It was a new thing.  There was a realisation of being seen again.  But this time it was not the eyes of darkness that had first looked at the dead cat/live cat.  The monk was seeing this dead cat through the eyes of God, in the context of the paradigm of personhood.  As alive.
 
And love was still pouring into him. Pure love. Deep love. Love was filling his now open vessel, despite its brokenness. And it had nothing to do with him.
It was a simple lesson and he learnt it well. He learned it with his whole being. Even in the deepest pit of self-inflicted tragedy and darkness, there is no death. The dying arrow of one's soul, the shaft of love fired into the unseen God of Love, reaches its destination more perfectly, than all the enlightenment, the strength or striving in the world.
And all the best of human lights and works and thoughts, of human righteousness and perfect form that he may later find would never make him lose the sight of this simple truth, hidden safely in the death of Christ.
***
Sensing the pleasure of his Lord, the monk looked up to the heavens that were now bright with joyful stars shining out their ancient blessings.  He blessed the sleeping knight, and removing a parchment scroll from his own bag, placed it in the knight's, and though the hour was late, he set out on his way.
The monk's name was Aelred.
 

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