תַּעֲלוּמָה - The Beatitude of the Near: A Circa Text on Joy

The Beatitude of the Near: A Circa Text on Joy

From the Teachings of Jesus the Zennist

Blessed are you who do not arrive, for you are always arriving. Blessed are you who wander circa the Truth, hovering around the mystery like a moth around the flame, for the warmth is yours even before the burning.
You seek happiness as if it were a distant city, a final destination where the road ends and rest begins. But I say to you, the Great Way is not a straight line to a gate; it is the very ground beneath your feet. If you strive for a perfect joy, you create a perfect sorrow, for the mind that grasps at bliss creates the shadow of its loss.
To be truly happy is to have no preference for the peak over the valley. To be "poor in spirit" is to hold no opinion on where you should be, and to embrace fully where you are.

You have heard it said, "Be perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect." But the perfection of the Father is not the perfection of a stone, hard and unchanging. It is the perfection of the water—fluid, yielding, ever-moving circa the riverbed.
Do not despise your wandering mind. Do not judge your imperfect prayer. If you intended to pray at the high hour of noon, but find yourself turning your heart to God at the fading of the light, rejoice. You are circa the holy moment. The Kingdom does not keep a clock.
There is a grace in the "almost." When you are almost patient, you are witnessing the Spirit. When you are approximately kind, you are leaning toward the Light. Do not demand the finished statue when the clay is still wet. The joy is in the shaping.

The world teaches you to chase the sweet and spit out the bitter. But this picking and choosing is a disease of the soul. "Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted." Why? Because in deep mourning, the self-centered ego cracks open. And through that crack, the light of the One enters.
True Joy—the Nirvana of the heart—is not a giddy laughter that ignores the world's pain. It is the vast, spacious container that holds both the laughter of the child and the weeping of the widow without breaking. When you stop dividing your life into "good days" and "bad days," you enter the Sabbath of the heart. You realize that the rain and the sun are both necessary for the flower to bloom.

Do not lay up for yourselves treasures of "someday." Do not say, "I will be happy when I am holy," or "I will be at peace when I have mastered the Law." This thinking builds a house on shifting sands.
The wise builder knows that the rock is Now. The ultimate bliss you seek is not found by adding more holiness to your life, but by subtracting the illusion that you are separate from the Source. Remove the plank of "I want" from your eye, and you will see that the speck of joy you sought was a mountain of light standing right before you.

The Silent Hallelujah

Words cannot capture this. If I tell you "Joy is this" or "Joy is that," I have only given you a map, not the territory. The Way is beyond language. The Kingdom is not a definition; it is a realization.
So, be content to live circa the Mystery. Rest in the "approximately." Let your faith be soft, like the morning mist, not hard like a prison wall. You do not need to grasp the hem of the garment to be healed; to simply be in the crowd, pressing in, confused and hopeful, is enough.
Rejoice, not because you have solved the riddle of life. Rejoice because there is no riddle to solve. There is only this breath. This step. This moment. And in this imperfect, approximate, fleeting moment—you are already Home.