Spilling Rubies

Ezekiel 17:22-24
17:22 Thus says the Lord God: I myself will take a sprig from the lofty top of a cedar; I will set it out. I will break off a tender one from the topmost of its young twigs; I myself will plant it on a high and lofty mountain.

17:23 On the mountain height of Israel I will plant it, in order that it may produce boughs and bear fruit, and become a noble cedar. Under it every kind of bird will live; in the shade of its branches will nest winged creatures of every kind.

17:24 All the trees of the field shall know that I am the Lord. I bring low the high tree, I make high the low tree; I dry up the green tree and make the dry tree flourish. I the Lord have spoken; I will accomplish it.

In this passage from Ezekiel, we hear the kind of incarnational spirituality that will inform Jesus’ thinking centuries later. “The first shall be last,” is one of the perplexing statements his disciples remember him making. In some of the non-canonical writings, we also read that the beginning and the end are the same. The trees will grow tall, but eventually fall to age or to the axes of people who want to make their own buildings. But it is in the Divine pattern to move through the cycle from sprig to old age to sprig again, ever new and ever old. Everything is a spiral. Life turns and returns but never exactly the same. To be in sync with the Divine is to understand this spiral nature and to scorn the ladder in favour of the whirling dance of spirit and prayer. In many cultures, dance is a holy act in which people are transported beyond the limits of their expectations. I remember when theologian, Matthew Fox, talked about the phenomenon of Raves. Where others were fearful about the ecstatic dancing, Fox saw a deep need for communion in body and souls, the longing for connection for transcendence of the mundane.  

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves