It was a cool summer afternoon and I was walking in the prairies along a river guarded by rows of cypress trees as far as the eyes could see. I was on foot and my donkey walking next to me. It was after a day of hard labor in the upper field.
All of a sudden God appeared before me in the form of a black wild horse. I tried to approach it but it became violent and stood up on its hind legs with its front hooves off the ground, and its loud roar frightened me back toward my donkey.
I longed to put my hand on it and ride it but its temperament made any approach impossible.
And in all this and from a certain strange space that seemed to be stacked parallel to my natural perception of the ordinary world, appeared from under my cloak a disguised horse-whisperer and it said to me this:
“A dark, wild horse
That’s what God is
It awaits your taming
And a tamed, dark horse is all that a heart needs
To trot to the farthest lands, drunk and bewildered
Repeat into the opening wherefrom the horse strikes
It shall make itself more available with each stride
Its name is what tames the wild horse
And what I transmit to thee you shall whisper to the horse, and it shall become yours“
It planted into me inaudible words of some subtle form. The strange world closed itself off and with it disappeared under my cloak the wizard as if it never was.
And repetition of its name is what tames God! I was reminded of the sacred formula that with regard to the Divine, the name and the named are one and the same.
Seeing all this from the vantage point of a more recent stream of consciousness, the story of The Little Prince from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry came to my mind. He talks about taming, a form of tender tending to things that makes the ordinary into the extraordinary, that makes relationships essential and unique. Taming requires time, patience, and ritual.
The fox, longing to be tamed, instructs the prince to sit a little closer each day at the exact same hour so anticipation can grow. The secret is “One sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye.”
It says, “You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.”
And nothing longs to be tamed and to be yours more than God, the black wild horse that it is.
