Valentine's Day

To love another person is to see the face of God

- Victor Hugo

Softly, an effervescent light dawns, awakening love's sleeping presence. Then, sparkling in the eyes of the beloved, this new love lures the couple's submission, as Cupid's arrow pierces all their defensive layers, to its den of light. This powerful, intoxicating love is only a teaspoon from the ocean of God's great universal love. It is a taste of divine love.  As these two surrender to each other, open and trusting, love magically flows, transforming time and space, changing their lives forever.

Jesus said whenever two or more are gathered in His name, He is there.  He is love as God is love and so our very human love is a touch of God's very presence within and among us.

Valentinus, c.100 AD, a great teacher and poet of the Gnostic tradition, understood perhaps more than others about the power of God's love to transform our mundane human experience in this illusionary experience of life. He taught that it is only through the heart that we enter into relationship with God and each other.  In less sentimental language, he espoused through poetry the means to open the inner chambers of the heart and enter the gateway to heaven.

As this is Valentine's Day, named for the Valentine who trumpeted romantic love, it is an awesome coincidence that this greatest of all should-have-been pope's mystical theology brings us face to face, heart to heart with each other in our pursuit of something more loving, more divine, in our escape from this transitory realm of pain and darkness. All love offers us that escape. 

An interesting thing about romantic love is that it is not only the beloved's love that gives us love.  It just feels like that. Rather, it is our own love we feel which the other invites or calls forth from us.  The other also experiences his own love drawn from the divine well within him which he trades for our love. While it is an exchange, it is also the same substance drawn from our two wells that we share. For both, is one's own love, buried within,  that is drawn out by the other whom we so dearly cherish.  It is in sharing our love that we are able to experience it at all.

When our beloved is gone, sadly the light dims in our heart, and we are sorely tempted to close up shop. But, the love was not his love to give in the first place.  It was always ours, called forth by his open invitation, his enamored need and plea to be graced by the love he saw dancing in our eyes as they met his. It was light from light, love from love, that drew us together into the most gorgeous dance of life. 

It is no wonder that love, romantic love in particular, is a frequent visitor to people who also dearly love God. It is a dusting of the divine that so often brings us to our knees and often to the altar.

Lent's dark night

His disciples questioned him, (and) they said to him:
"Do you want us to fast?
And how should we pray and give alms?
And what diet should we observe?"

Jesus says: "Do not lie. And do not do what you hate.
For everything is disclosed in view of truth.
For there is nothing hidden that will not become revealed.
And there is nothing covered that will remain undisclosed." *

You are all so amazing. You are more joyous, more radiant and wise than you could possibly imagine.  You are an unlimited, radiant, powerfully creative, free and loving eternal spirit.  There is no end to you.  You contain within you the most incredible diamondesque radiance, a light which is both wisdom and power, love and infinite knowledge. 

And, that's not all.  It's only just a glimpse of who you really are.  You are boundless and within your own inner being you contain the entire universe and in that infinity you can and will experience your own self as also unlimited and a joy beyond anything you know today. You will also encounter each other in new and more fully expansive and loving ways. When (if) we attain ascension consciousness in this life, you will remember your life and the others you knew in this life.  You will live eternally either way, but you will remember your life here if you enter it while you're living. 

So, what does that have to do with Lent? 

Imagine you plant a little seed in the Earth and you water it everyday, knowing that the potential in that seed is a beautiful tree.  Everyday you watch it, consider the tree it will be one day, water it and protect it.  Meanwhile the tiny seed it gestating in the earth, responding to the water it's getting, and slowly it puts out a root and then another, and then eventually it sends up a shoot which then greens after a little while above ground in response to the sun's warmth. 

Lent is like that.  You contain within you your real spiritual self, the eternal seed which contains all that is most beautiful in the universe.  During Lent, you water it, you protect it, and watch it and you learn about it.  Then, finally, after a 40-day gestation period, your newly Christed self is born and you are resurrected spiritually as Christ Himself was.  It's Easter and you are reborn.

That's the idea anyway.  So, now, what does sacrifice have to do with this?

It has nothing to do with this, which is why Jesus somewhat dismisses the question posed to him by his disciples.  His response is simple and yet profound. "Do not lie and do not do what you hate."  Isn't that what most of us do?  Don't we all lie and don't we all do what we hate?  Yet, we don't know it because we're all in denial about who we are.  We don't know who we are.  We are all enslaved to the world.  We are feasting at the world's table while Christ is calling us all to the Great Banquet.  The world's table is a lie and we are doing it and we hate it.  We just don't know it because we don't know anything better.  But, there is something so much better.

Elsewhere in the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says:

Rather, the kingdom is inside of you, and outside of you."
"When you come to know yourselves, then you will be known,
and you will realize that you are the children of the living Father.
But if you do not come to know yourselves, then you exist in poverty, and you are poverty."  

And, in Luke, Jesus says, "a good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart .... For out of the overflow of his heart his mouth speaks." (Luke 6:15)

And, in the Gospel of John is the famous nightime conversation Jesus has with Nicodemus in which he says that unless we are "born again," we cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. (John 3: 3)

That "born again," is the birth of your true self, your own personal resurrection, your own birthing of your true self out of the dark night of your own life.  Easter is the very real birth of your true self, your Christed self as it is the resurrection of Jesus, which is what he is calling us - his own disciples of today - to do also. 

Lent is that time of gestating.  It has nothing to do with abstaining from chocolate or wearing ashes on your forehead.  It has everything to do with prayer, meditation, studying and challenging yourself in every way to be more authentic, to bring forth what is in you.  You may find that by uncovering your creative talents, you may find some inner tools to help you dig deeper.  It is a very deep dig, but with the help of the Holy Spirit it can be done.  

This is not easy and every year we once again consciously try again, begin again, remember again that this may be the only thing really worth doing in life. Yet, Christ is there, He is very alive and very there and is able to help you.  He is calling.  He is knocking and if we even limp toward the door of our heart, He will help us open it to our true selves, to eternal life, to Him and eternity. 

P.S.  I'm not saying I'm there, but, I am saying that I'm working on it, just like you are.  The hardest temptation though is doing Lent and not getting sucked into the whole sacrificial mindset that only forces us further down and farther away from our true destination.

*THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS;
TRANSLATED BY STEPHEN J. PATTERSON AND JAMES M. ROBINSON

Children of Syria

Today, thousands of children fled Syria's war in the cold, in the dark, with fear at their backs, amid rebel and government forces' gunfire and bombing.  They saw friends and relatives shot, killed in their presence, and that's if they were lucky and didn't witness worse.  Jordan is overflowing with as many as 350,000 refugees with many more expected daily. Turkey is also offering safety to more than 150,000 Syrian refugees along its borders and in camps. Estimates are that another 100,000 or more Syrians have fled to Lebanon and Iraq.

The United States has already provided more than $200 million in humanitarian aid and yesterday President Obama approved another $155 million in aid to the people of Syria to provide, "warm clothes and food," he said. But, if your heart aches for these people - especially the children - as mine, you may want to offer to help. 

Below is some information on how you can help the children of Syria through "Save the Children," the well known international relief agency that is helping the children of Syria and the British Red Cross.

And, if you are willing, pray for these dear ones, these precious children, the lost innocents whose lives will never be the same. 

https://secure.savethechildren.org /site/c.8rKLIXMGIpI4E/b.7998763/k.FEA/Donate_to_the_Syria_Children_in_Crisis_Fund/apps/ka/sd/donor.asp?msource=wexgpsyr0312&gclid=COek8KLKnLICFYhM4AodSmQA4g

http://www.redcross.org.uk/Donate-Now/Make-a-single-donation/Syria-Crisis-Appeal

Another Way

If this speaks to you, then you know who you are and celebrate! This is a brilliant video However Tiger Lilies is neither endorsing nor not endorsing the movement. Tiger Lilies is saying that this is awesome and truly mind opening, something Tiger Lilies is also calling for. You decide.

peace, passion and purpose

Clothed with Power

In this new age, this ascension age, as these times are being called, we are reaching for a renewed understanding of what is real - really real.  Often I think through a very modern lens, one that combines science, physics, ancient writings - known and newly discovered - and yet so often come right back to where it all began for me - in the Gospels.  I've asked myself a million times, "Do I honestly and authentically believe that Jesus is the Christ and what does that mean?"  

And, I have sincerely come to answer with a resounding, "Yes."  As I move in and out and around so many different schools of thought on all the metaphysical information and other religions, including  scientific and religious thought - all of which I cherish for its brilliance - I return over and over again to an increasingly beautiful awareness that this precious man who lived among us, who himself was clothed and filled with power, was indeed the full human manifestation of God, born to bring us into the selfhood of God, spiritually and consciously.  

We never left God.  We have only slept in this dimension, this illusion which it is often called, unaware of who we are.  It is the power of our mind, the ability to consider something larger than all this, that allows us to open up our minds, awaken our sleeping imaginations and receive a new thought, a new idea of who we are.

When we begin to awaken, a new electrical charge surges through us, enlivening us.  It is the awakening itself that allows us to open and in opening, we receive.  I think there are a couple of ways to approach or engage with this new awareness.  One is to accept that this man, Jesus, is indeed the full expression, manifestation, of God and yet He is not the whole ocean of God.  He is a gathering of the substance of God.  If we could wrap our minds around that idea, I think we would be able to enter into his "army of light," for lack of a better metaphor at this moment. It is an army that heals, that brings life, that resurrects our sleeping souls from this soup of madness that currently presents itself as "real."

Is there another image that may work better for our modern minds that has been overburdened with church language for so long that we are immune to its meaning?  

Greg Braden, a kind of modern guru of the quantum physics / spirituality movement, drawing from some of Albert Einstein's thought, says the universe if filled with an energy field.  That energy field is like a fabric, a web, which is responsive to human thought and emotion, especially emotion.  It is creative, intelligent and powerful, which are the qualities of consciousness. That "web" is conscious.  Our modern minds can receive that. 

Now, look at the Gospel of John: "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." Several years ago in an Education for Ministry class in my parish in East Aurora, NY, I asked one of the leaders, "What exactly is the Word?" His response was a bit flippant.  He said, "You know (you idiot!)  The Word is words, language."  Clearly, I knew that's not what The Word was.  It was more than that.  Our world is a babbling swamp land.  All that babbling isn't The Word. Since then, I have reflected on what exactly, the Logos, The Word is.  I have come to realize The Word is that very substance of God that fills the universe.  It is the Body of God and the Wisdom of God, which is the Spirit of God.  It is The Christ. How can I express this?

Putting on my 3-D spiritual vision glasses, I look out into the universe and it is no longer dark and vast with a sprinkling of stars.  Now, it is a glowing, sparkling, golden ocean filling the entire universe. I can see it undulating, surging rhythmically with a musical tone and radiance.  Its power is awesome.  It is heavy and light at the same time.  It breathes and exhales.  It is alive in some really awesome, yet incomprehensible way.  Maybe that is The Word.  

Now, as I step back a bit from the intensity of this awesome vision, I can see it surging and moving and forming, by its own will, into a kind of ball of fire - but it's not fire, although it's bright and brilliant like fire, it's not destructive, rather its creative.  Then I see it emerge into the form of a human body of light.  As I look more carefully, I can see that it is a very familiar light form - perhaps it is The Christ who is being formed and is stepping out of that oceanic body of light.  

Ok, so now, maybe the opening line of the Gospel of John makes a bit more sense ... let's hear it again ... "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God."

As I see Him, brilliant, sparkling, His presence is powerful, in a way that is impossible for me to convey.  This light being, in all His God-ness and all his power and light, then enters our humanity through his miraculous birth through the Blessed Mary.  (So far the Church story and language works with this new idea.) 

So often He said to us during His time among us, that his teachings "are for those who have eyes to see."  What did he mean? Possibly he meant we could see who He is and from which (Who) he came only through those special 3-D glasses, which are our spiritually awakened eyes and imagination.  What he said and taught and did only makes sense through that awareness.  Soon you come to realize that it was never about worshiping him in a Golden Calf kind of way.  It was learning how to see the way he was teaching us to see and then and only then could we understand who he is.  Although He now has returned to his Source, yet He continues to be as he was. 

One of the things He said to the woman at the well, "If you drink the water (wisdom from the source) that I give, you will live (eternally and authentically)."

“Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” John 4:13-14

It is His knowledge of this great truth of who He is and who we are that will open our minds and in that opening, we will become eternally conscious. It is His knowledge that is The Word.

And, even more awesome.  He said we were like him.  We are these amazing brilliant, powerful, light bodies.  That is who we really are and yet we can't see who we are.  We couldn't handle this because it challenged our worldview so heavily.  It meant everything would have to change.  We would have to grow up spiritually, open our minds and live with the power that is there - His power, given to us, by virtue of our innate creative being.  

It has been (and still is) our natural response to want to worship Him and yet in worshiping Him, as we have done for the past 2000 years, we continue the separation. We have to be careful not to commit idolatry. We must, rather, allow Him to clothe us with His power. We must open our minds and engage around the idea of who He really is, and then open our hearts - which is what he is asking us to do - and allow Him to fill our hearts with His light, power, brilliance.  Maybe it is there already and we have to open our minds to see it and that unleashes it. This is grace, an act of God to open us to receive who we really are, to remove our veils that blind us to the truth of who He is, from who He comes, and who we are, children of the Living One that fills the entire Cosmos with His Being. 

I think it is through an awakened understanding, found in the imagination, that we can embrace this idea, open our minds, step away from the world's gluttonous table, and walk with Him, listen to Him, learn from Him and then join Him in His campaign to bring the entire human race, and all of creation, into alignment with the power and light of what only is real, which is this vast ocean of intelligence. We can open our minds, unleash our power and ignite our heart light.  We will find that the intelligence of the universe, that living power is God's being of which he and we are part.  

Then, as I looked back at that vision, I saw human beings doing that.  I saw them opening their minds and as they did that, each one began to glow from inside themselves until their entire beings were transformed into that sparkling, glowing light power.  They expanded and radiated, they lifted up and were so joyous that I could feel their joy as clearly as I could see their light.  I saw that they had been clothed in power, just as he promised he would do at the end of the Gospel of Luke.

What could be more wonderful?  What could possibly be more wonderful than this?  that thought is the one that opens the door to Him and the rest you already know.  We all know this because we've all been there since the beginning and somehow we all - one by one - will remember.  It's not a religion thing.  It's a truth thing.

Universal sounds create life

These are awesome!

A forever place

A radiant explosion of sunshine brightened the typically dull January landscape in the small town in Michigan where my sister lives now.  But, it wasn't to last long. The soft welcome of that late winter afternoon sunshine was met by a piercingly cold winter wind, presumably fresh in from a dance across the great lakes.  

Alexandra pulled her blue winter hat down over her freezing ears and slipped the hood of her jacket over it, covering up her short hair in an attempt to get warm. A vague kind of longing crept over her - just a feeling really - but terribly real nonetheless. Softly, it seemed to envelope her until she found herself immersed in another time and place, another world when life was idyllic and magical.

Winters in Michigan are long and hard, as life in general has been there these last few years.  It's common knowledge that the Asian automobile industry had usurped the former throne of American opulence, home-based in Detroit. But, it seems lately every town in Michigan has been impacted by the declining economy, sadly too often leading the young men into military service just for a paycheck.  And, where there's job loss, there's poverty and where there's poverty there's crime, drugs, and every other imaginable human vice.

But on this cold afternoon, the hardness of life seemed to recede as she slipped into remembering a kinder and warmer time, that time in childhood when dreams are made, when hope was real and life was fun. Our childhood summers at our grandfather's Canadian home at Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont., were breathtaking, a gift that would remain with us for the rest of our lives. The place had always been a place of hope and healing from life's harshness, a place where new lives were begun. 

It was a magical place that held meanings for each of us in our own ways. For me, it was the beauty of the place, the endless, exquisite fresh florid atmosphere, the sense of safety and space that inspired me then as it still does today. Alexandra also loved to play by the fountain with me and hide-and-seek from the others behind the garden greenhouse, but she was especially captivated by the bell tower and dark tunnel under the old house which our mother said ran all the way to the river and had been part of the Underground Railroad. Those two images stood out in her mind on this bitterly cold January afternoon.

Climbing up into the bell tower was an awesome experience. The old bell tower, reminiscent of a church steeple, was hung on worn, white wooden scaffolding with a huge bell suspended over equally old flooring.  The whole area, about 10 ft. by 10 ft., was protected only by a weak 3 ft. high guardrail.  Remembering the tower as an adult helps us both realize our parents' concern when we begged to go up there - a request that was rarely met. Maybe it was the out of reach nature of it made it all the more appealing to us as children.

We were never allowed to ring the bell, but we wanted to know all about when it was rung and why it was rung and if we could ring it someday.  Someday never came.  I remember the endless staircase that spiraled up to the tower.  Hot and dry, dead flies in the tightly closed windows, which had probably never been opened, sealed shut with paint a hundred years previously.

What did that bell tower mean to Alexandra?  Was it a place away?  From what did she want to escape? Was it the loftiness that offered a kind of magical experience of being up and away from the activity below, a kind of heavenly height that enchanted her? I guess it was all of that and that everything in those days was a kind of magical mystery tour. Our natural curiosity and joyous pursuit to explore endlessly, lured us into the high and low places. The radiant sunshine on this cold January day reminded her of those times. The memory kept her warm as she struggled against the wind to get home to her waiting musician husband.

But there was so much more.  It was a place where a hardworking family would come home to recover from life's heavy demands during equally hard former era. It was a time when the country was still steeped in its worst depression with long breadlines, when the unemployment rate nationwide was close to 27 %, strangely the same unemployment rate in inner-city Detroit now.  It was a time when Europe, struggling in its fight to free Jewish captives, imprisoned, tortured and gassed by the nightmare Nazi machine, beckoned American support. 

Our grandfather, who had been stricken with polio as a child yet managed to reign over the large family from his wheelchair, died just before our father was drafted into World War II, leaving our gentle grandmother doubly heartbroken.  This magical place, now silent, stilled in time, was a vibrant playground for us. As our parents, aunts and uncles gathered inside, discussing more serious events unfolding globally in the late 1960s, we danced in water fountains, climbed garden walls and dreamed endlessly.  

Alexandra's cheeks were burning from the wind when she opened the back glass sliding doors into their large old house, a house that in many ways seemed to resemble that old house back in Niagara.  It too was near water, it too had been home to so much living as her three children grew up. 

Her husband met her at the door, smiling.  A musician, sensitive to the movements of the soul, saw the distance in her eyes. He knew deeply both her strong creative, passionate nature, and his own personal artistic angst. As a musician with a strong reputation as both a teacher and a drummer, recently he has felt the oppression as a technological and litigious age bore down on him.  He found his music a welcome retreat, a place of healing and joy which transcended their life in Michigan. 

Alexandra knew there was so much more to life than the daily grind she was so immersed in lately.  She also wanted to find her own inner artist, she needed to go back and reclaim something that was left behind at that old house. In her emerging memories, even growing desire to return, the memories themselves would unchain buried dreams. Maybe the memories of the old bell tower and underground railroad even help her have the courage to explore her own creativity.

(Photo of the front of the house and the bell tower.)

Once used as a safe house for slaves fleeing the real oppression of slavery, today the old underground tunnel at our grandfather's house has been closed up - maybe to keep little girls from getting lost in there.  The memories of that dark, damp tunnel and the bell tower where she once felt as free as a bird in the large oak trees over that beautiful place, helps her reconnect to a more innocent time, a time of real dreaming, of vision, of life itself. It is a forever place.

Maybe childhood memories don't solve anything, really, but they help us reconnect to something that may have been lost, left behind and forgotten in the dusty trails of our lives.  They may signal an unacknowledged longing in the soul to grow, evolve and nudge us to greater awareness of our own creative dream-making. Maybe there are times when the memories of the past help liberate our long forgotten childhood dreams, buried by our unwitting slavery to the cacophonous demands of our daily lives, even our blind collaboration with the collective illusion that leads us further away from our truth.