Picture and text © Keren Dibbens-Wyatt
If you gaze into the fire of the Sacred Heart, your own core will be broken into tiny pieces every day. Even if you decided not to watch the news, not to open the scrolls, if you closed your eyes and sat, maybe especially if you closed your eyes and sat, with your small yes in the silence, wouldn’t your heart be shattered by the presence of the loveliness of a hurting world? By the soft crying of the swifts circling in the air, searching for home, and the beauty of roses, spilling out their flames onto the ground?
Couldn’t you sense, then, the heart you are breaking with and into? There is a centre, a fulcrum, a crossways, a holding, an anchor. It is here, at the heartwood, in the groans of Spirit, a pained love so magnanimous that it never ceases to be cracked open, over and over, like a flower that blooms and opens to harshness, and chooses to blossom again the next day, knowing the effort will force death? Like eggshells hatching over and again inside one another, without seeing the freedom they are birthing, as cosmic Russian dolls.
And each of these mortalities, the quiet and the vicious, creates another layer, another crinoline surround, a nebula within those crinkling into fire before it, till this heart is full and overflowing into other universes, even as its centre burns to ash and rises again. An outpouring, a constant cataract of seeing, feeling, bursting, and from all of this, a love unthinkable, too enduring to grasp. And yet we sit and sense the edges of it, in our small pauses for prayer. We offer our song and our cries and our petals to this One, this Everything, this Love. And we too, become flame.
Picture and text © Keren Dibbens-Wyatt
About Keren Dibbens-Wyatt
Keren Dibbens-Wyatt is a chronically ill writer and artist with a passion for poetry, mysticism, story and colour. She is a contemplative in the Christian tradition who writes to encourage others into knowing the Lord more intimately, as well as to share the poetic ponderings of her heart. Keren suffers from M.E. (myalgic encephalomyelitis) which keeps her largely out of the trouble she would doubtless get into otherwise.
Keren’s work features regularly on spiritual blogs and in literary journals. She has published a number of books which can be found on Amazon and all the usual booksellers. Keren lives in South East England and is mainly housebound by her illness.