Last Friday morning in Ubud.

I’m lying by the swimming pool in the bottom of a canyon in the middle of Bali. A flock of darks swallows arc in the moist warm air under high clouds like translucent paper waves while sounds of machinery and construction underway nearby are joined by humming insects vibrating and singing in the green trees, vines and flowers that are everywhere. 

Beautiful women dressed in brown, green and orange are working here, cleaning the pool and offering incense. I feel the warm moist air, see the swallows circling like unfinished poetry over the waterway in this particular canyon, and know again that all the world is a word pregnant with love. Yes, death too, disappointments, misunderstandings, masses and messes of mediocrity too, all that, but love unending breathing in the warm middle of it.

Thus says the retired American Australian Anglican priest (poet, puer, pedant, possible fill in the blank with whatever) lazing by the pool in Ubud on the way home from a winter vacation and pilgrimage wondering about getting a manicure. After all, he ponders, these are hands assigned by the community, ordained by the church, anointed by the bishop to outline and indicate the rumour of God incarnate in the world — the good news of a feast in the country beyond words, to quote that famous Sufi or was it Rilke? Should I, after much silent prayer and noisy conversation, both fasting and feasting, and even enough sleep, take better care of the cuticles?

Across the ravine someone takes a seat by a stone or wooden figure and places flowers on the edge of the embankment, waves incense, kneels,  appears to watch me for a moment and leaves. The swallows circle while my iPad helps me by suggesting familiar words as I finger pad my way into making sense of my reflections of the day. Birds join the chorus and maybe some percussive instruments I can’t identify provides the central note or counterpoint. I make an appointment for a manicure in 25 minutes.

The Eucharist is the third greatest joy of my life. To stand in the gathering community and point with words and gestures to the loving mystery which centres and surrounds us is a salutary joy that still surprises me mightily after these seven years. Last Christmas during the fifth mass I wanted to dance in the air like these swallows and somehow I did.

There is only the dance, the remembering, reaching, falling, rising risky rhythm of celebration, sacrifice, summary in the middle of it all — always inconclusive and completely open to misunderstanding as well as miracles: the parable of the present moment.

This is our body, the hang ups and contradictions, the inevitabilities and accidents, the ambitions and aversions as well as everything else we have and hold and allow to be blessed and broken and shared in a community of care. All mixed together in this matrix of obedience to some nearer and further dimension of largesse we can never understand. Maybe the richest experience of existence is to be stretched out on the paradox of this mysterious yearning, where sometimes dried seeds bloom into life. Who knows?

The wind comes up for a moment, the bands of swallows seem to disappear then reappear, the air comes cooler. It’s time to get these hands clean!