Easter love

"For, lo, the winter is past. the rain is over and gone;

The flowers appear on the earth;
the time of the singing of birds is come."

Song of Solomon 2:11

The last few days in Portland have been nothing less than a miracle.  The sun is brilliant, warm, inviting, gorgeous, drying up winter's puddles and wetlands and forcing the cherry blossoms into bloom. The birds waken the sleepy morning, arousing the interest of various neighborhood cats, including our two.

The long dark winter is indeed past, as is Lent's lingering fast and darker tempest.  Almost on cue, all of nature is reflecting the new life, promised and exemplified by our Lord's own rising from his earthly life into his eternal life.  His death would offer tangible proof of his teaching.  He overcame death, which clearly breaks the hold the powers of control have over us.  The single one tool of control used to oppress us is that death could somehow be final, lights out, fini.  But death is only a threshold from this limited existence, darkened consciousness, fear-based and oppressive place, into a place of infinity, of light and beauty, love and joy. 

At Jesus' cross examination by Pilate, he is asked, rhetorically most likely, "what is truth?"  Pilate, as too many other power brokers in our world, searched for truth somewhere in the limited realm of the intellect, where it cannot be found.  Truth is love and only found in love, especially by lovers - those who love all of life.  Real life is love.  God's power is love, a love which we do not really know, but which is hinted at by the love of a man and woman. 

As in Solomon and Sheba's awesome love, larger than life itself really, is a kind of heiros gamos of the gods.  God is both male and female, bride and bridgroom.  The ancient symbols of God, stemming from time before time of the Star of David, indicate the ancient Jews knew this.  The symbol is a merged, overlapping, male and female tetrahedron.  Love is freed, loosened and abounding now on the earth. 

The bridegroom has returned to heaven.  His job is done.  Now, fear cannot imprison our sweet, precious hearts and minds and souls.  Death is no more.  This reminds me of the comforting and powerful final message, words of great hope and promise, from the Book of Revelation:

"Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,” for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” Rev. 21: 1-4

There never was death, we only thought there was.  There is only life and love and in that awesome awareness is a power beyond anything we've known yet, but which we are finally grasping. 

The world isn't out of trouble yet, but maybe today - on this gorgeous, sunny Easter - we can entertain, meditate on and hold onto a vision of God's love embodied in Jesus' resurrection which we honor and celebrate today, and ideally, everyday.

Recreating the Future

I looked into his tired eyes, wrapped in shadow, tinted by an old wound, one he faintly remembered yet one which still had the power to cast its shadow over his life. Young, in his mid-20s, not yet to college, he was about 1,000 miles from his mother and his home, chasing a dream - as young men are prone to do. He shared his discomfort with his current job and lightly touched on a dream he occasionally dared to stretch his imagination around, but only just a bit. It was something he'd always wanted to do. But, that dream was aborted time and time again as he diminished his own ability to find work once he'd attained all the education he needed to pursue it.

The young man's father had died when he was five and he only barely remembered his dad. He had older brothers and sisters and his mother had deeply loved his father. That was all he told me about his father. His mother, who he described in loving terms, sounded like an artistic, creative loving woman, who cares deeply about her son, enough to give him the loving space to follow his dream - even to the west coast. She had been an English teacher, following her own creative literary dreams, when her husband died. Family financial pressures forced her into a business career which she greeted kindly while wistfully longing for her former life in the classroom, among ideas and words and a home with her husband and children. Those days were gone now, never to return. Even more than 20 years later, she had never remarried.

But, why the dark circles, the sad eyes? I wondered. Is it that this gentle, proud and brilliant young man didn't know who he was? I wondered. He couldn't see his own genius as he pursued an illusive other, a dream that drew him further and further away from his origins and his self.

Was he a modern-day Don Quixote chasing his own Dulcinea? What in a man does an illusive woman represent? What unrealized aspect of his own self, is she? Whose love is he really seeking, longing for? I wondered. Why does anyone do that? What is it we really seek and don't find, that propels the endless odyssey? What could stop the pursuit? What could end the fruitless pursuit and set this dear young man back on course with his dream, a path he must resume?

What causes any one of us to seek and never find? Is it possible to find the source of that unfulfilled longing and somehow, through our creative imagination, rewrite that moment in our own personal history, that moment when that initial wound was created, and somehow steer ourselves back onto the course that would allow us to realize success in finding/attaining what we really seek and need for our lives?

How long are we to be in the wasteland before we lose confidence in our ability - or even value the dream at all - to achieve what we need for our lives to be successful in drawing out of us our creative talents which themselves allow us to open our hearts to our true selves? The longer in the wasteland, I think, the harder it is to correct the fallacy that we have invested in believing about ourselves that we are somehow unable or not good enough to have what we really want and need, which, in this case, is this young man's dream to be a computer game designer.

While the pursuit is indicative of our own illusive search for meaning in this life, it has a negative affect on one's ability to achieve their dream. The longer it hangs out there, unattainable, yet teasingly present, the less we believe in our ability to fulfill our longing. Even my playful cat will eventually give up on catching the laser light from his toy. He'll try again and again to catch it, but eventually he gives up and goes back to sleep. Is it like that with us?

Gnosticism, Jungian psychology and South American Shamanism would point us back to that moment in our lives when we were disconnected from our source of emotional sustenance, when a fragment of our essential self - our soul - was left behind. We don't need to have had an abusive parent to have been cut off, although for others that will do it. The death of a father is certainly the most powerful event in anyone's life. I will never recover from the death of my own father. It still breaks my heart. I loved him so much and he was the catalyst for so much of who I am. For a boy to lose his father is the greatest of wounds.

If my young friend could go back to those early years and realize again his own father's love, allow himself to crawl up into his dad's lap, and show his father his dream for his life now, his desire to pursue a creative career and listen to what his father would say to him. In the deepest part of his soul and imagination his father's wisdom is there. He can draw on it in his imagination. It is into the imagination that our departed parents do really speak, in real time, yet in a past setting. What would his father say to him? Could he feel his father's love and his father's wisdom and would that comfort his longing soul? What would his father say to him about his relationships with women? How would his father affirm him and show him, even in a lingering glance, how much he loved his mother? Would his father's glance point him in the direction of his own heart for another?

I truly believe that our present is molded out of our memories of our past. If we can revisit those memories and rewrite them in our imaginations, can we change our present? If, by rewriting them, we are able to open our hearts now, hearts which were once closed due to a traumatic childhood loss when we were too young to know what was happening and those around us were too grief stricken to help us, can we experience the awesome power of real love, of God's creative potential and power in our lives, to achieve our dreams and fulfill our heart's desire in our lives?

That question lingers in my heart and mind as I listen to the young man. I may suggest it or I may not. I may wait until he wants to find the answer to his life, when the endless quest no longer opens up a vast inner world of longing. When he is ready, he will find the answer. That answer can be found. God has promised that one. And, is it possible that his long lingering journey, away from where the wound was first experienced, is his own personal dark night of the soul in his search for himself? How long do we linger in the desert? How long do we odyssey, until we find our way back home? Long enough. 40 years? 40 days? As long as it takes.

In the meantime, wisdom listens and loves and hopes and sends light for his journey. Blessed is he who seeks, for he will find and be found.

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.