Bricks and Mortar

"Bricks and mortar sing us no audible tune; the heart opens only to the human chant of being."
        ~ Paramahansa Yogananda's teacher

During a recession, these words offer a different way of knowing life.  Sages are like the lilies of the field.  They neither toil nor spin.  I believe this does not mean one should not work.  It means one's work should be indistinguishable from other parts of life. This wise man was a yogi, and the 'perfume saint'.  I like that name. If I could be a saint, I think I would be the flower saint.  What would your symbol be, if you were a saint?

My Feast day approaches soon, on October 17, the feast of St. Margaret Mary of Alcoque. The Feast day marks the day the saint died. My namesake was a nun, who, I recently learned, was anorexic.  She became so weakened from not eating that she saw visions, namely, the sacred heart of Jesus.  The ruling clerical bosses decided this was useful to the cause, and so she was canonized.

I have a copy of a painting depicting the miracle.  It is taped above my computer in order for me to be inspired as my parents wished when they gave me the name.  When I was little my mother often reminded me how special my saint was, and therefore how special that made me.

In the painting Sister Margaret Mary, dressed in the same black garb my first teachers wore, is kneeling in a chapel praying earnestly. Reportedly, the actual heart of the man Jesus is what she saw, the organ red and beating, as though the skin were pulled apart to reveal internal organs. I wonder what would happen to a young woman who claimed something similar today.

Yet, I feel somehow connected to this woman who lived a very short life and spent it in the quest for spiritual enlightenment.  I share the fever to find the meaning in life.  To see the real heart of people, and not the 'bricks and mortar' of the material world, only an illusion reinforced every day in the story we are told, the story we tell ourselves.

When we practice yoga we ask ourselves to soften the heart, open the heart to the pose, to life. In practice I like to think of chants, deep red love music of the heart, harmony in the world.