“By my bedside is a reproduction of a scroll by a Zen monk of the seventeenth century, a great calligrapher named Tetsugyu. The translation of the characters is “Self revealed: all things in heaven and earth exist in oneself.”
The discovery that “all things are there” within the human heart is one of the great themes of desert preaching:
Within the heart are unfathomable depths. there are reception rooms and bedchambers in it, doors and porches, and many offices and passages. In it is the workshop of righteousness and of wickedness. In it is death; in it is life… The heart is Christ’s palace: there Christ the Kind comes to take his rest, with the angels and spirits of the saints, and he dwells there, walking within it and placing his Kingdom there… The heart is but a small vessel: and yet dragons and lions are there, and there poisonous creatures and all the treasures of wickedness; rough uneven places are there, and gaping chasms. The likewise is God, there are the angels, there life and the Kingdom, there light and the apostles, the heavenly cities and the treasures of grace. All things are there. (St. Macarius)
This great insight that the whole world is mysteriously summed up in my own self, that I am God’s world in miniature, if a great gift.”
–Martin L. Smith, A Season for the Spirit
