Once upon a time there was a puppet made of salt who had traveled a long time through dry and desert places until one evening he came to a sea which he had never before seen and didn't know what it was. The puppet asked the sea: "Who are you?" "I am the sea," it replied. "But," the puppet insisted, "What is the sea?" "I AM," was the answer. "I don't understand," said the puppet made of salt. The sea replied, "That's easy; touch me!" The salt puppet timidly touched the sea with the tip of his toes. At that moment he realized that the sea began to make itself vividly perceptible, but at the same time he noticed the tips of his toes had disappeared. "What have you done to me?" he cried to the sea. "You have given a little of yourself to understand me," the sea replied.
Slowly, the salt puppet began to walk into the sea with great solemnity as though he were about to perform the most important act of his life. The further he moved along, the more he dissolved, but at the same time he had the impression that he knew more and more about the sea. Again and again, the puppet asked, "What is the sea?" until the waves covered him completely. Just before he was entirely dissolved by the sea, he exclaimed: "I exist!"
Hymns to the Beloved
The Divine cannot be known from the outside; only union brings about this sort of knowledge. Classically, the term for this is "mysticism" - union with Ultimate Reality. As this parable illustrates, we only know the Divine by sacrificing ourselves - through love - into union with the Beloved. It is then that we realize that we are reborn - out of the seamless ocean of Divine Love - at each and every moment. Indeed, sacrifice-and-rebirth is a continual process. When this realization occurs, our perspective suddenly shifts. For we then see that the spiritual journey is less about knowing God - the oceanic All - than about being known by - and embraced within - God, the All. As Thomas Merton says, "Our knowledge of God is paradoxically a knowledge not of him as the object of our scrutiny, but of ourselves as utterly dependent on his saving and merciful knowledge of us." Rabbi Abraham Heschel agrees when he writes: "To think of God is not to find Him as an object in our minds, but to find ourselves in Him . . . a perception of our being perceived. The task is not to know the unknown but to be penetrated with it; not to know but to be known to Him, to expose ourselves to Him rather than Him to us." In this awareness is our transformation.
Photo: Gold Bluffs Beach, Redwood National Park, CA, August 2, 2011
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