Starlight dance

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness 

was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God 

moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, 

"Let there be light: and there was light."

Genesis 1

We all may be familiar with these stirring opening sentences to Genesis, yet there is something so profound right there pointing to the scientific veracity of these ancient words describing how life began. Yes, God, created it all, but it's how God created life here that just overwhelms me.

Ancient and modern mysticism has revealed that God's love, God's creative, powerful love is the source of light and is comprised of God's wisdom and spirit / will. Light has an energetic (creative) quality and that energy is comprised of love. In short, love has a power to it and that power radiates as light. Certainly that light is not the light of the sun, yet surely it lit the sun which continues to bring life to our earth. It penetrates every atom, every subatomic particle, creates photons and leads to photosynthesis. It makes life. That seems so simple and yet really it transcends our minds ability to comprehend something so awesome. God's creative power is a love which is even brighter than the sun. 

For us, life always was and always will be nothing short of an awesome miracle. Yet, love is even more a miracle. Love is a miracle begetting the miracle of life. In creation is both action and substance, born of spirit and power coalescing, male and female polarities each essentially co-creating, together. Love is both the means to creation and the gift of creation. It is the way, the truth and life itself. And, even if we may not really understand love or life, we can feel it, touch it, hold it, experience it and even become it. 

Despite this awesome, gorgeous life all around us that we all share on this earth, there are too many times when we don't stop to gaze up at the starry canopy in childlike awe and wonder gratefully at the miraculous cosmic light show dancing quietly above us. 

Why are we too busy, too worried about things that we miss it? Why are we unwilling and unable to enter into God's great miracle of love, the doorway through which we enter authentic life, that tangible experience of starlight? What could be so important in our lives that we would miss this light show going on both above us in the cosmos and within us in our own hearts, where the essence of life sleeps awaiting our entrance to the dance floor of life? We all seem so serious that we lose the sweetness of engaging in the experience of awe we might feel, the magic, the joy, the beauty, the sheer thrill to be alive. We don't dance wildly in love by the moonlight anymore, do we? Our ancient forebears gathered at the end of the day together, around the fire, and danced, and sang and celebrated life in love together.

It seems an epidemic of apathetic, dull seriousness has become a plaque upon our houses, all neighborhoods and nations, cultures and religions. Long, tightly drawn faces, of those would-be religious devotees, striving to follow the laws of their religions, trying to pour their magnificent beautiful fluid spirits into tiny frozen boxes formed by laws written thousands of years ago until their hearts are so hard, their minds so dim, their lives so barren, so devoid of light, too stern to smile and laugh and sing that they can no longer gasp in awe at the beauty of all this light and life and love above and around and within them. 


Since the very essence of the law flows out of God's great wise heart, out of God's love and light, to meet the requirements of the law, to even enter into the most sincere obedience, we would follow with courage, rather than with fear-based control. (However, this is of a higher school of human spiritual development and does not imply that we should fall away from those guidelines the law sets up, but rather to embrace the great creator / lover beyond the laws.) 


It's a matter of perspective.  Love is expansive, legalism is reductive and diminishing.  Love wouldn't throw away or deliberately disobey the law, yet it would reach to the source of it. St. Paul suggests that to live in love would result in obeying "the law." Even though the goal is to love, the result would include the result legalism seeks as well, only it takes the human spirit into a realm to which law - or the subservient spirit of blind obedience -  doesn't open.

Millennia ago, we learned that love was a higher, more evolved revelation, the awareness of which stemmed from a kind of "higher heaven" which trumped and cancelled out religion's stern, rigid, fear-based controlling law. Love is the substance of consciousness. All of life, right down to a single cell, is created with and by that consciousness. It is both the means and reason for life itself. The gift of love and authentic life can only be received in a state of perfect freedom at a higher consciousness, a higher frequency. Clearly perfect freedom is a result of living without fear and so it follows that the joyous experience of love requires a great deal of courage. This life of love which we all seek asks a lot of us, but most of all is an openness to facing the fear that inhibits our courage. 


Yet, even more wonderfully, it seems that love is so gratuitous, so creative, so powerful and alchemical that with only a tiny bit of it in our consciousness, perhaps only with a flickering faith in the possibility of that love, which we may only imagine right now in this moment, we would be able to sift through and slip out of the grasp of that old fear-based religiosity and world view that holds the world frozen and lifeless in spiritual / psychological / economic poverty, slavery and war.


The letter of 1 John (4:18) says, "There is no fear in love but perfect love casts out fear because fear has torment. He that fears is not made perfect in love." 

Simply, fear stems from the idea that one will be punished, tortured, killed if he follows his heart that might challenge the status quo, enforced ruthlessly by the world's power brokers.  Which is a worse death: to live bound and shackled in a living death or to walk head up, courageously to the tune of your own heart?  You decide.  As long as we live oppressed and kept low by those who we allow to control and enslave us by our fear of their reaction to us, we are never going to grow up into the full stature of our inborn, innate divinity that is begging to be born in us and across the planet today.

If we could live by the light of God's awesome love, which he has given to us out of his great cosmic heart, poured into our human hearts to share with each other - heart to heart - arm in arm - in a smile, in a handshake, from a kiss to passionate love making, we just might taste heaven on earth. It's all there and it's all love. Pure joy. What a magnificent gift this love is that makes us want to sing in the rain and laugh in the sun. Just to feel life coming and going, to hold an elderly man's hand as he passes out of this life and to caress a newborn entering it, is a cosmic honor, a gift of God whose love has given us the light of consciousness along with the promise that this is all unending, the light cannot be extinguished, nor can the light of our souls.

The new year waxing in today is rich with promise, abounding in hope for a greater abundance of authentic living with more joy for every stage of our lives, for all of us, equally. Although just an imaginary time line, this sense of new beginning is deeply embedded in our collective awareness. Here - now - is the opportunity to look forward to a newborn opportunity to live more joyously, more abundantly, less materialistically, more authentically in love with all of life, large and small, macro and micro cosmically.

Maybe we could laugh more, sing often, tell our children nursery rhymes again and sing them to sleep with lullabies. We could turn off our televisions and cut back on our time on the computer. We could play games, go for walks, talk to each other, play with each other and love each other. We could do with a lot less guilt and fear and with a lot more free abandon. 

Maybe this year we could all take a deep breath, exhale all the heavy stuff that drags our spirits down, turns smiles into frowns, replaces the buoyancy of a happy day with a grievous burden. 

It's a choice. Joy is a choice. Laughter, play, happiness and love are all choices. We can each choose our thoughts. We are not victims. We can free ourselves of those heavy thoughts and replace them with beautiful hopes and dreams. We are all free - no matter where we live or under what conditions. We are all free to choose our thoughts and in that choice, in that very simple one-second choice, we choose life or death. I know that we all know this, but today as we embrace the hope a new beginning offers us all, a little reminding is always welcome. We can embrace the awe, receive the light and allow more creation into our lives. 

Today and everyday, we can choose joy and freedom and love and light. And for that choice, I am most grateful, most joyfully, radiantly grateful to our creator for this grand adventure, this poetic, romantic, beautiful journey of life through time on this radiant earth and this graced opportunity to love with all my heart even as I sing in the rain amid the wild quacking of ducks in the creek where I walk. My only hope is that we all would choose to be less serious and just a little bit more lavish with our laughter and joy.