O Blessed Epiphany

O blessed epiphany that unveils the wonder present in the world.

O holy epiphany that teaches us to recognize the awe present in all things.

O sweet epiphany that invites us to come home and to find the light, word, and wisdom that has been calling us since before the beginning.

We arrive at Epiphany when things snap into place. Suddenly, we realize something that we hadn’t before: that the world is filled with grace and created in original blessing.

We are enraptured by awe in the rising and setting of the sun, the beauty of the valleys, the vastness of the oceans, the majesty of the mountains, as we gaze upon the infinite scape of stars in the heavens and in the tender moments of our relationships with one another. Throughout our lives, we encounter millions of places that open themselves up to this blessing. The food we savor, the sweet aromas that make us smile, a joke spoken that makes us laugh, a wise word said that breaks us into sudden realization that it is good.

As Julian of Norwich says, “All shall be peace.”

This epiphany is a threshold, and one that we choose to cross or close the door on, and wall ourselves off from it.

Awe at the Threshold

Awe, in its purest and clearest form, fills us equally with a sense of fear and wonder. When we gaze at the vastness of the night sky, we can feel how small we are while wondering at all that might be out there.

Sometimes that fear triggers something in us, and we fall into fight, flight, or freeze. Perhaps something in our experience has taught us that this kind of awe is not for us, or that it is something that only a certain kind of people, not us, experience. And so we fight it. We push back and argue against it. Awe is just a cascade of chemicals in the brain. We deny the wonder within it and refuse to savor it, and turn our backs and walk away.

Sometimes we are overwhelmed by that fear or wonder, and we run, we flee. Maybe because we think we are unworthy or undeserving, or because it feels like it’s just too much. We can feel overwhelmed by this awe and turn our backs on it.

At other times we freeze, and this is the most dangerous one of them all, because we can convince ourselves that we are so enraptured by it. What is there to do but embrace the stillness?

But awe, wonder, and delight are invitations to savor, to draw in, and to move into, whether mentally, spiritually, or physically. Just standing there, refusing to cross the threshold, keeps us from truly experiencing it.

Aliveness Revealed

When we allow ourselves to cross this threshold and enter into that awe, wonder, and delight, and to truly savor it deep down within us, we experience for the first time, or the next time, the experience of really, truly being alive.

Aliveness is participation in life, in the cosmos, in the world around us. It is more than a state of existence. It is not just being alive or dead. It is about entering into the vast web of experiences and relationships that are available to us.

Through them, we find meaning and purpose, not the other way around. Meaning and purpose arise from doing something that we feel matters, that we truly believe matters. As we cross that threshold and allow ourselves to savor this aliveness, we are called to continue on the path to discover life more abundantly.

The Advent Gospel of Creation Spirituality

This is the Advent Gospel of Creation Spirituality: that all things are made good in original blessing.

The cosmos is defined as much by how it cooperates as how it competes with itself. In those endless cycles of creation, complementary action, and competition, all life, all things come into being. This balance and harmony of the cosmos invites us to see the world as good. As the book of Genesis puts it, as very good.

Good, Not Perfect

When we recognize the world as good, we are not saying that it is perfect. A perfect world is incapable of change. Nothing can change in perfection. Any deviation that would arrive in a perfect system would set it out of balance and distort its perfection.

When we realize that the world is good but not perfect, that is not the same as saying that it is imperfect. Pain, suffering, and change occur within it, and that is a real and valid experience in this life.

It is hard, and it is almost impossible for us to recognize any of these things as good, because we want to live in that blessed state of pure happiness and joy where no sorrows can reach us. But that world would be hollow. It would lack any ability to grow or change. It would lack the ability to experience surprise.

So many try to craft a reason for why pain, suffering, or bad things happen to good people. They happen because bad things happen to everyone, to everything. As Jesus puts it, “The rain falls on the just and the unjust alike (Matthew 5:45).”

Rain is how the earth is renewed, how nutrients are drawn down from the sky, and how various processes are allowed to continue. It is part of the system. It is the mechanism by which the atmosphere brings itself back toward equilibrium. Sometimes that brings storms, floods, and fires, and with them, suffering.

If there were no need for the system to balance itself, and everything existed in a state of perfect harmony, nothing could grow. Nothing could live. Everything would exist in a fatalism where all aspects of existence are already predetermined.

The cosmos is good. Chemical processes can happen. Plants can grow. Animals can live. Stars can be born, live, and die. And so can we.

Because the world is not perfect, we do not have to accept any of that as final. We merely recognize it, and know that throughout our lives and our work, we can perfect what is good into something better, the new good that will need its own perfecting.

Original Blessing and the Human Person

When we recognize that we, like the cosmos, were created in this original blessing, we too were created, or born, good, not perfect.

We are each a unique manifestation of the cosmos as it is trying to understand itself. Each of us will see it differently, experience it differently, and act within it in our own unique ways. That diversity is our strength.

But more than that, we are not individuals, whole and solid in and of ourselves. We are dividual beings containing within us a multitude of persons. We see this in our actions, how we behave when we are angry or sad, in pain or in joy.

Some of us have internal editors that speak criticism to us, while others have internal daredevils that urge us to go out, take risks, and try new things. All of these things make us who we are and what we are, and they are good but not perfect.

What is good can always be made better. We do not have to end where we began.

God Who Dwells Within and Among Us

Once we recognize our aliveness and the gifts that it brings, we have seen our first glimpse of the divine.

God is not an old man in the sky, nor something foreign to us. God is the ground of being in which we live, move, and have our being. God is in us, and we are in God.

As we learn to participate with our own aliveness through our relationships with ourselves, with others, and through the connections we have to the world, we are, in fact, living God into the world.

We find God in awe, wonder, and delight, and in the art of learning to savor it. We find God in those parts of us that open up, sometimes through cracks or ruptures, but other times through mindful, deliberate action, to embrace the diversity of life and the experiences that are in it.

God is there with us in pain, sorrow, and grief as much as in joy and delight. We find God in creativity, in learning to live in these relationships in new and imaginative ways.

We come to understand that we are as much God’s child as God is our child. Through our relationships, we learn to trust the images within us, to ride them into reality so that they can be born.

We learn which passions we can follow and trust will lead us on the right path, the good path, toward joy, awe, openness, justice, and celebration.

We find God in justice and justice-making, in the path that reminds us that we can always return to the way through the act of teshuvah, repentance, the changing of mind and the returning to the way.

God is also there in our attempts to repair the world, to bring greater perfection to it, which is called tikkun olam, the reparation of the world.

Every time we find awe and wonder in this world and open it up so that it can be delighted in and savored, we are releasing that light into the cosmos so that it can rejoin the whole.

God is lived. We pray through our lives, through our words, through our actions. We are the temple of God. The earth is the temple of God. Every person that we meet, everything that we encounter, is a temple of God.

God is a verb, an action, a process that is always becoming. And through living God, or God-ing, we become co-creators of this world.

The Star and the Four Paths

In the story of the Magi, we see how we walk the four paths.

First, we see the star. The star is that awe, wonder, and delight. That invitation into the Via Positiva, the positive way, the first path. Throughout our lives, we will see many stars. Many fascinations will arise, and in them we will find awe, wonder, and delight.

The work is to learn how to savor them, how to welcome them with cosmic hospitality, and how to live with them in right relationship. When something comes into our lives and we sense that awe, wonder, or delight, we have seen a star in the heavens. That is how we feel it. That is how we know we are called, and that it is time to take the first step onto the path.

After the Magi have seen the star, they leave where they are. This leaving is the second path, the Via Negativa, the negative way. On this path, we learn how to be spacious, to open ourselves up so that we have room for all of the things that we experience, whether awe and delight or pain, sorrow, and grief.

This openness reminds us that we are engaging with a vast diversity of experiences, just as we encounter the diversity of the cosmos itself. There is not one kind of star, planet, plant, or animal. There are many, and each is different in its own way.

In this second path, we learn to let go and let be, so that grace may flow in, around, and through us. Without that spaciousness, we cannot savor fully, and neither can we grieve and heal.

When the Magi arrive where the star has led them, they offer gifts. In the story, these are gold, frankincense, and myrrh. In our lives, this is learning to trust the images within us so that they can have life in this world.

This is the Via Creativa, the creative way. Here we learn to use imagination not merely for daydreaming, but as a tool for understanding, for giving rise to new metaphors and new ways of seeing.

Creativity is the gift that we give. Through this mutual indwelling, we come to know that we are as much the child of God as God is our child, and through our actions, words, and thoughts, we are birthing God into the world.

This is not a burden. It is recognition of a process we have always been living.

The Via Creativa invites us to bring the savor we learned in the first path and the mindfulness we developed in the second path into compassion. There we learn to live imaginatively, mindful of the real world we inhabit, and with compassion for ourselves and those with whom we live.

After the gifts are given, the Magi return home by another way. This is the Via Transformativa, the transformative way.

As we develop savor, mindfulness, and compassion, we stretch outward into the world and move forward already changed. Through imagining relationships as they could be or should be, we may see ways we need to correct in ourselves or in our society.

Here the arts of teshuvah and tikkun olam come into play. The fourth path teaches us justice-making in celebration. When we imagine something better and change our minds and our ways to live it, justice enters the world more fully.

Those things we have savored, made room for, and imagined into being must be celebrated.

A Word to the Weary and Wounded

Life can distract us from this recognition and blind us to seeing it. We can work so hard that we no longer have the energy to look up. Illness can wear us down and leave us tired all the time. Circumstances can leave us lonely and wounded.

Many of us come from religious traditions that did real harm and trauma to us. All too often, we have accepted other people’s stories that we are not worthy and do not deserve good things.

I know those feelings well. They give birth to hopelessness, fatigue, and isolation that are hard to move through. It is like walking through a dense fog, unable to see the path ahead or behind because the cloud is so thick.

We are not failures for feeling this way. It does not mean we are unworthy or undeserving. It means we have been ground down by systems of control and coercion that have dominated our lives and prevented us from living on our own terms.

I am here to tell you, from experience, there is a different way.

What the Way Is and Is Not

The way is not a system of rules that must be followed. It is not a threat that if you do not follow it you will be forever lost. There are many paths that lead back to the light.

None of them bring healing and restoration immediately. All any of us can do is invite others to look up and see the light.

Ask yourself, where do you find awe, wonder, or delight? It could be as simple as your favorite chocolate. It could be as profound as a hike to a secret place in nature. It does not matter.

All that matters is that you know where awe, wonder, and delight live for you. That is enough.

Whether we are lighting a candle or a bonfire, we are still bringing in the light. Through that light, we can see where we are and the path before us more clearly.

Just as the world is good but not perfect, the way is good but not perfect. Each of us has our own unique first step onto the path.

The First Step

The first step on the path is simply seeking awe, delight, and wonder that we can savor. That is enough.

The way meets us exactly where we are and does not ask us to go somewhere else right away. First, we must see the star in order to follow it.

When you are ready, place yourself where awe, wonder, or delight may arise. Start small. Savor it. Taste it.

See that the Lord is good. See that the world is good. See that life is good.

Once you recognize original blessing, even in the smallest thing, the path is open. Grace is everywhere, filling the cosmos and stirring it to action.

You may find it in the arms of our Blessed Mother Mary, or in another way. But you will find it.

Then you will have taken that step into the greater, wider world. You will hold the Divine Child in your arms for the first time and perceive original mind, even if only a glimpse of that mindful compassion at the root of all being, that place of joy and mystery.

In time, you will feel the presence of the Holy Spirit, that animating force within us that calls us to seek wisdom and to grow and nurture it.

The seed of the Tree of Life is planted in all of us. All we must do is tend it and help it grow. As it matures, we will find life and find it more abundantly.

A Blessing for the Way

Blessed be the One from whom all blessings flow.

Grace upon all who wander this earth, with mindfulness and compassion to guide us.

We will one day learn to walk without walking and enter the paths more fully, walking all four as a great spiral dance toward a better and greater world to come.

O blessed wisdom, enliven our minds so that we might see the glories kept hidden from us and just beyond view, so that through awe, wonder, and delight, we may learn to savor this life, opening ourselves to it and all the diversity it contains, so that through imaginative relationships, we may bring justice and celebration to the cosmos.

Amen.

The Child Who Calls to Us

When we think about the Christ child, a myriad of images might dance through our minds. The sweet baby in his mother’s arms, a divine child surrounded in a halo of light. A smiling child. A crying child. A child in fear and confusion as his family runs to seek refuge in Egypt.

None of these is the right image, and none of them is the wrong one.

We will gravitate to the image that speaks to us most in the moment. When I say that the Christ child is the child of healing, the first image that comes to your mind probably tells you more about what needs healing in your life right now than anything else.

It could be a traditional image that you grew up with, a Christ child that has been interpreted in your own ethnicity, or a child who tries to reconstruct life in first-century Palestine. Whatever image comes to mind, our goal is to seek revelation from it and to understand why that is the one that is calling to us in this moment.

For example, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my devotion to the Infant of Prague. And so that image of the Christ child, crowned and holding the orb of the Earth, while bestowing blessings upon its inhabitants, is quite clear in my mind right now.

Sitting With the Image

Whatever image arises, sit with it. Look for your connections to it. Does it remind you of an experience from your past or something that you have seen lately?

This is how revelation happens. It is in understanding the relationship between the images that we cherish and hold dear and the world around us. Without that relationship, the image itself is meaningless.

As we sit with this image, we are connecting both to it and to the ground of our being. We are learning to be, to live God, to live Christ. We are learning that intimate relationship where everything is interconnected and all things derive their meaning from those connections.

The Interruption of Isolation

Now ask yourself, what would it feel like to hold that child? Are you allowed to hold him? What would it mean for you to hold the Christ child in your arms right now where you are?

If something arises within you and tells you that you either could not, cannot, or do not deserve to hold that child, that you are not worthy to even be in the presence of that child, interrogate that.

The thought might not be that clear. It might just be a fear or worry, a freezing in place that prevents you from moving forward. It often manifests as a coldness in the body, a chill, a static freeze that holds us in place.

That interruption in the flow is what isolation feels like.

Isolation is the misconception that we are somehow separated from the whole. We find excuses. This is to magnify it and give it strength, even though none of us is ever truly alone. Each and every person is a vibrant ecosystem, living and breathing together.

But isolation speaks up and says, “Oh, but that’s not what I mean. There are no other people around me.” Then go somewhere where there are people. Isolation speaks up again and says, “Oh, but I don’t have any connection with those people.” So I still feel alone even in the crowd.

Maybe we don’t feel alone, but we feel ostracized, pushed out to the outskirts, and not welcome or invited in. That sense of isolation breeds loneliness within us.

I could tell you that no one is ever alone, that we are all interconnected in God and that there are a myriad of spirits around us at all times. But that is empty comfort when we feel alone and isolated.

The kind of isolation that is so prevalent these days is born from us putting walls up to protect ourselves and others doing the same, so that no one is letting anyone else in. That lack of trust is the root of most loneliness and isolation today.

Turning Inward Without Blame

When we encounter this sense of loneliness or isolation, it’s easy to externalize it and blame other people for it. I’m not saying that society cannot be cruel and isolating, that people cannot be standoffish. There is an element of that in the feelings that we have.

The problem is we do not have control over the feelings and actions of others. We cannot make others change. Change comes from within.

What we have to do is examine within ourselves what qualities are there that are keeping us separated. It may be a trauma from our past that needs to be healed, or a fear of what would happen if we were our true selves around others. The causes of this internal isolation are too numerous to list.

Since we cannot control others, but only affect ourselves and our immediate surroundings, we need to find what we can in ourselves to change, to transform. Not to conform to the world or the expectations that are put upon us, but those flaws in our thinking that cause us to believe that we are unworthy of relationships or that we do not deserve to be happy.

The better we become at eradicating words like “deserve” and “worth” from our minds, our vocabularies, and our ways of thinking and being; the more readily we will be able to connect to others.

Trust is born within. We must first learn to trust ourselves and then expand that circle of trust as we learn to negotiate relationships with the world that are healing and nurturing.

God as Child, God as Verb

In the Creation Spirituality tradition, we not only believe but practice this idea that God is as much our child as our parent, our loving mother and father. This is the heart of mutual indwelling.

In order to trust that image, we have to test it. What would it mean for us to hold the Christ as our child or to be held as his?

To this, we apply effort. We try it out. That seed of faith is born in us, but it will either fall on dry soil or it will find a place to root. It’s through effort and trying it out that we can start to learn.

In the midst of that effort, we bring our mindfulness to it, noticing what changes and what doesn’t change, what needs to be changed, and what needs to stay the same. We concentrate this experience down to its most vital essence.

That concentration is the core of that energy that we have expended through effort and our mindfulness pushing forward. In the end, we achieve wisdom.

That wisdom might be that the effort we put into the thing we had faith in didn’t work. And so we gather again, find a new thing, and we plant that seed of faith, apply that effort, mindfulness, and concentration, and gain more wisdom. Because knowing what doesn’t work helps to narrow down and focus us on what will.

Carrying the Child Into the World

When we imagine ourselves holding the Christ child, we ask ourselves what would that mean in our lives. Not just in a visualization. What would that mean in real care and concern for the world and those around us?

How would that change how we react in our lives?

As we start trying those things, and we see which ones work for us and which ones don’t, carrying the Christ child becomes lighter, more real. We open ourselves up to a new vulnerability to that experience so that we can welcome it in.

Life flows through those vulnerable moments. Trust teaches us who we can be vulnerable around and when the right time for that vulnerability is.

Compassion, Mindfulness, Justice

As we break free from this sense of loneliness and isolation, compassion is born in us. Compassion is this fellow feeling that we have for others who walk the way.

It is not pity. It is not concern. It is a knowing that we share this life in common, and so what happens to others happens to us. We can see this most readily in our trusted relationships.

Compassion softens our hearts, and we see its lack more acutely in more places in our lives.

Mindfulness, which is one of the engines of this change, this transformation, opens our eyes so that we are clear in the present moment, not relying on memories of the past or prognostications about the future. We are here in the present moment, in the eternal now, living.

From mindfulness and compassion, justice-making arises naturally. Our sense of right and wrong has become relational, and injustice is anything that interrupts that flow of relationship and does harm.

Now we have opened up to the world, and we see our interconnection with it, and how all things depend on each other and arise together.

The Ripples of God-ing

In holding this precious child of light, we learn that life is as much a product of what we do as we are a product of it. Through the process of living and being, we live God and live Christ into the world.

God is a verb that mutually interacts, where both sides are the subject and object of each other.

As we set this image down to walk into our ordinary lives, we realize how everything arises through dependent origination, that through this endless chain of cause and effect, the whole cosmos is made.

Every cause, every action that we take with deliberate intentional care, filled with compassion, mindfulness, and justice, changes the course of everything as those little ripples spread out and cause greater change.

Everything is interconnected. None of us is above another. Even those who seek to isolate themselves from the world are still dependent upon it and enmeshed in the great chain of being, where each and every one of us lives in this web of interactions.

This transformation focuses our attention so that we’re looking for those ripples, where we can cause them and where they’re affecting us. We feel it in our bodies, and we work it out through our hands, our words, our actions.

Once we are healed by the Child of Light, then we see that we are a part of this great seamless whole.

What then can we do but care for one another?

The World as Scripture

In the wonderful song Word of God by Leslie Fish, the chorus sings, “Man wrote the Bible, God wrote the rocks.” The real power at the heart of any spiritual tradition is to learn to read that word written into the stone, into the trees, and the wind blowing through the grass, and the song of birds, and in the life that we are living.

In the first path, we learn to behold it with awe, wonder, and delight, and how to savor it. In the second path, we learn how to make space for whatever may come. Here in the third path, the way of creativity, the Via Creativa, we learn how to read the world through our imagination. We learn how the world speaks and how we can interpret it for ourselves.

Our imagination has so many more uses than just daydreaming and telling beautiful stories. It is a way of learning through finding the right words and images to express the relationships we have with ourselves, with the people and creatures and things around us, and with the whole vastness of the cosmos itself. It is in our imagination that all of our relationships live. After all, that’s where the stories we tell ourselves and the stories we accept roam free.

Throughout our day and throughout our lives, we modify and we change those stories. Sometimes we even feel trapped by them, telling the same story to ourselves over and over again in a way that’s not helpful. In learning to see this imaginative process as a way that we both interact with and glean insight from the world, it becomes a powerful tool, a spiritual technology that we can use to reach out and see beyond what our words can touch. This is exceedingly helpful the more complex the relationship is that we’re trying to wrap our heads around.

Carl Sagan, in trying to get us to understand our relationship to the cosmos, said, “We are made of star stuff.” That image grounds in our bodies our relationship to everything in the great vastness of space.

In the early Church, Clement of Rome used the image of the phoenix to help us understand resurrection and the life of Christ. It is an image that we have lost, but one that has so much power to it and reveals many wonders that we should take a look at again with fresh eyes.

When you think about the phoenix, many images might arise within you. To many of us, it’s a mythical bird or creature that we encountered in a fantasy novel or movie. When Clement invites us to see the phoenix as part of this great Christian mystery, he is opening us up to realize how we can read the mysteries of the gospel.

What preconceived notions arise when you think of the phoenix? What does it embody? What does it mean? Just its very nature, a bird that burns itself to ashes to be reborn again from them, that image of the phoenix is the gospel story in brief. Even more than that, it is the mechanism by which life and creativity flow.

What if we allowed ourselves to see that bird of fire rising from its nest yet again, deep in our mind’s eye, deep in our hearts, that place where we tell ourselves the stories about our lives? What would it mean for us that the phoenix is there? What could the phoenix teach us about how we live in this world and how we relate to it? Could it even possibly help us to understand where we are in our own life cycle, and if we are about to fly from the nest or burn to ash to rise again?

The Phoenix in the Early Church

When we think about the early Church, especially in the time before it gained imperial sanction, and even in the time afterwards, there is a difficult imaginative practice happening. The gospel was born in the Galilee. It then spread out into Judea and the surrounding areas. Much of those places shared a common mythos, a common language family, and a common set of metaphors and ways of understanding the world.

When the gospel permeated Europe, it met a bunch of new challenges. The ideas of Aristotle and Plato, and the Neoplatonic thought that was rising at this time, and the Middle Platonic thought that was everywhere. This is why we see so many varieties of Christianity in the second century and those that follow. These were all attempts to take this intrinsically Jewish understanding of life, how we should live it, and the person and figure of Jesus Christ, and translate it into something that could operate within this Greco-Roman way of thinking.

This work of translation required more than just changing the words from one language to another. It required them to be able to sustain the embers they contained within an environment that was very different, in a landscape of the mind that did not have the same things growing in it. Instead of conforming their thoughts and attitudes to the one that had been presented to them, they planted it in new soil so that it could evolve and change into something different, something that could live in this new mindscape.

They did this through syllogism and argument, through apologia. They also did this through the use of metaphors that helped them grasp ideas more easily. You can really see the difference in this translation style when you look at the form of Taoist Christianity that arose in China, as it did the same practice but with a whole different mental landscape to grow in.

In both of these streams, mythology and symbolism were necessary tools of the creative imagination to glean understanding in ways that they could understand within their own cultural framework. We still do this today.

For Clement to call on the image of the phoenix evokes the symbolism of what it means. The bird that lives, dies, and is born again is a natural fit for the Christian message. It also sets our minds to think that this is not something close to us, but something a bit more exotic and elusive. The phoenixes, after all, live in the Arabian desert.

In many ways, when Clement brings up the image of the phoenix, it is a way to help himself and his readers understand that this wisdom, this energy that they are importing into their lives, is something foreign and exotic, while simultaneously trying to bring this new wisdom into its own set of metaphors to plant it in this new soil. It’s trying to plant this little seed to remind us that the story did not arise in our own context and thus we should return to the original image.

The metaphor speaks to the process of what is going on. We collect in the nest what we can, what is available to us to help us to understand. Then, when the fire comes, what we don’t need anymore is burned away, and what remains is incorporated into the new bird as it rises out to start collecting again. The phoenix not only helps to explain the gospel message but shows the process by which we incorporate it into our lives.

Christ and the Phoenix

When we connect the image of the phoenix to the life of Christ, the metaphor opens up, and we see that it’s attached in two distinct places. We see the phoenix being invoked by the Church Fathers with the Incarnation and also with the Resurrection.

The phoenix bursts to new life in both of these scenes because this is the revelation that these are both the same. The birth of Christ, while a momentous moment for our faith, is not the first time God has indwelled the world. God has indwelled the world since the very beginning.

The Resurrection, then, is not the true revelation of God. It is the process continuing. Because life, as a certain character says, finds a way. Even through calamity, through pain, through suffering, and even through death, that energy, that life, that one unifying existence that we find in Christ finds a way to continue and breathe life into the world again.

We see the phoenix again and again, bursting into new life. That’s the same process we see in deep time and in our own lives, as we are renewed over and over again, becoming new people at various stages of our lives. All creation participates in this divine renewal of incarnation and resurrection and the great span of life that stretches out between them.

Sometimes these fires erupt in us without prompting. Maybe it’s through a momentous life change. We all experience them in puberty, when the child in us is consumed and the teenager is born. This is not a moment. It’s a process. It is a fracturing that happens again and again as we undergo these changes.

The teenager will, at some point, be consumed back into ashes so the adult can rise. That adult will go through many changes. There are many changes that I have skipped over because there are too many to name. This process of change is the process of life itself.

We live within it. We bear it in our souls. We can also consciously cooperate with it through our imagination and creativity, allowing us to bring the changes, to collect and build the nest, and cause the fires to bring new life in us.

Via Creativa and the Pattern of Renewal

This is how the Via Creativa, the creative way, helps us to learn and to understand, to have access to things that sometimes are beyond words.

In Path One, we gathered all that we found to savor. In Path Two, we made space within us. But here in Path Three, it is time to arrange them and build that nest, so that when the fire comes, all that is no longer needed is burned away, and we incorporate all that is new into ourselves.

This could be in telling ourselves new stories, in producing new art, in conversations that we have one with another, or through deep actions in meditation. In truth, it doesn’t really matter which path you take, as long as the stories are constantly being renewed and refreshed and allowed to breathe and have their own life.

The art of the Via Creativa is to learn how to learn through this imaginative process. We’re not making things up. We are finding ways to interpret the relationships that we have, even the ones that are hard to speak about.

That’s why we have an almost infinite playlist of love songs. Love is a relationship that is hard to put into words because it sits and lives just beyond them. So every experience of love tells its own story. It exists in this divine imagination within us so that it can breathe and have new life.

This is also how relationships are harmed. When something enters the story that was unexpected or unwanted, what happens next is heavily dependent on how we reinterpret it into the story. Does the person that we learned this new thing about become something that is discarded when the fires come, or is the relationship reforged in a new way that recreates and renews both people in it?

That is the difference between a relationship that endures hardship and one that fractures because of it. It is all about how that relationship exists within the imagination, in the story that we tell ourselves. That does not mean that one outcome is right and the other outcome is wrong. There is no universal rule that can be applied here. It really does depend on all of the constituent components and how they are arranged and brought together.

So it is with all of life. It’s in this burning forge of our imagination that we tell and retell these stories, either connecting ourselves and rooting ourselves further into stories from our past, or cutting them off and letting them die away and telling new stories going forward.

Sometimes it’s simple and easy. Other times the stories are rooted in so deep it is hard to get them to let go. But once we realize that our imagination is this vibrant way of knowing, then we can use it to the best of our ability, feeding it all that we can that is true and good, to help what arises next will be better.

The Nest of Myrrh

When Clement describes the phoenix as gathering frankincense, myrrh, and spices to build its nest, it’s bringing the most fragrant, powerful, pungent spices, the ones that can be savored. This is a reminder of our work in the first path, to find what brings awe, wonder, and delight, and the things that we can savor.

Arranging them in the nest reminds us that the nest has a hollow in it. So we are reminded of our work in Path Two, to find an open and spacious place where whatever arises can come. These two stages are vital if we want to truly embrace this creative power.

This is what it means to be willing to trust our images enough to birth them into reality. That trust is a kind of final gut check, that we have gathered everything that we need. But it’s also a trap if we’re not careful.

Notice that qualifier there. Everything that we need, not everything that we want or everything that we could have. We will build another nest later. We don’t have to have everything now, just enough to trust that the process will work.

Learning that kind of trust takes trial and error. It takes experimentation. But if we never allow the phoenix to burn, never let our imagination try to reach out and tell us what all of this is trying to say, then we will never learn if we have gathered the right things and strengthened within ourselves the skills to gather what is needed in the moment.

This is not surrender. Surrender happened in the Path Two. This is not consent. Consent happened in Path One. This is trust. Trust in ourselves that we have done what we need to do, and trust in the cosmos that it will not lead us astray, as long as we are following truth and compassion and justice. Those guide stars will help us to find all that we need to gather, so that when the fire comes, what arises will be stronger and better for it.

The Phoenix as Creative Practice

William Blake calls Christ the Divine Imagination. In the Via Creativa, we are called to be co-creators with God in this world, to come to see God as both our child and our mother.

When we practice this art of the phoenix in the Via Creativa, what we need to realize is that this cycle is always at work within us. It names both our desires and our fears.

Our desires and yearnings, the things that call us out into trying to find meaning in relationships, are the very drives within us to gather the materials for the nest. Our fears, those things that block us, are those concerns of, “Have I built the nest properly? What happens if something goes wrong with the fire?”

We can see this action all throughout our lives. Think about the first time you looked at somebody and you wanted to have them in your life, whether as a friend or as an intimate. You sought out examples. How do you talk to somebody that you don’t know? How do you get to know somebody you don’t know? How do you get them to know you better? In this, you built the nest.

You might have worried that you didn’t have enough information. What would even happen on a first date? What would we even do if we decided to go hang out? What would we talk about? What if they say no?

The fire comes in once you have the courage to strike the match, to actually go up to them, to talk to them. It really does feel like you’re burning from the inside, all that anxiety and energy just burning and boiling within you. The excitement of possibility and the fear of rejection. But you committed, and you did the thing.

Now the fires have burned, and the new phoenix is born and sees what world it has stepped into. Like all things in this world, it’s one where consent matters. You did your part in telling the story. Now it’s their turn to either yes-and or no-but. That sets the story going forward.

We can see this in other parts of our lives too. That job that you want to apply for. That school that you wanted to go to. These are all little fires that burn within us, where we go through the same process of gathering in and then taking that step through the threshold where everything will change. Nothing will be the same on the other side.

After all, what happens if you go to your dream destination and it doesn’t live up to the hype? You can only learn that by going.

This kind of creative process never really ends in failure, though it often feels like it does to us. That doesn’t mean that we made a mistake, and we’re not being punished for doing something wrong.

We have to understand that the mythic storytelling that is the nature of all relationships in this cosmos is akin to improv. It requires consent from all parties to participate. While it can feel hard to do, we have to recognize the agency of the other to say no. After all, without consent, there is no relationship.

Not getting what we want can hurt, but the knowledge is better than the eternal yearning that would prevent us from going out to seek something different, something new. After all, the point of this life is to be ever renewed, like the cosmos itself is.

When disappointment, grief, or endings arise, we enter back into Path Two, where we have made space, where we know that pain is a real part of our lived experience, and we sit with it, tend to it, and help it to heal.

An Invitation to Rise

I offer you this image and practice of the phoenix, not to give you one more thing to do, but as a way of seeing something that you’ve been doing all along. It is a way of naming a relationship that we have with our lives and seeing its constituent parts.

I invite you to try it on. See if it works for you. If it doesn’t, that’s fine. Find one that does. There are many ways to imagine the creative process.

This is one that I have found particularly useful in my own life because, well, that fear of striking the match and getting the fire started is one that I experience regularly.

Practice in the Via Creativa is all about learning your relational models. What maps onto your experience best, and how can you use those relationships, those mythic images, and metaphors to help you see more clearly the way you are living your life and how you can improve it and make it better, to find life more abundantly.

A Prayer for the Fire That Renews

O blessed Christ, who burst forth like the phoenix at the first flaring of the cosmos, and again and again throughout time, who arises in Bethlehem to our Mother Mary and repeatedly reveals your glory throughout your life, and even in your death, burial, resurrection, ascension, and the sending of the Holy Spirit down upon us, which is envisioned beautifully in the book of Acts as tongues of fire.

Open our eyes so that we may see this process of birth and renewal as it is constant throughout our existence. Help us to live with it in peace.

O blessed Word of fire, awaken within us a light that cannot be dimmed by this world or by any of the experiences that we have within it, an eternal flame that always seeks truth as we live it out in the relationships that we have with ourselves, with one another, and with the cosmos.

Blessed Artist of Resurrection, help us to see the possibility of new life in every ending, and the way that life can go on when everything feels still and empty. Help us to see the world always new and renewed with the eyes of a child, never complacent and never bored by the endless wonder spanning all that is around us.

Names and the Power of Relationship

Names have power.

Think about when your parents were mad at you and they said your full name. You snapped to attention because you knew you were in trouble. Think about the nicknames and other things that your friends call you, and only your friends. Think about the names you call yourself in the quiet hours of the night when no one else is there to listen.

Names have power, but that power is a strange magic.

Names define the relationship that you have with others. What you tell someone to call you, and what they actually call you, and that you allow, shows how familiar you are with each other. When they deviate from those agreed-upon terms, it shows a change in the relationship. Maybe a temporary one, but maybe a permanent one.

We don’t often consider the relational power of names. But the topic is inescapable as we meditate on the Most Holy Name of Jesus.

When Names Become Tools

In social settings, we can see how people use the power of names to forge or sometimes even force relationships that they wouldn’t have normally. When you want to talk to someone across the room, it’s not uncommon to ask those around you, “Hey, what’s their name?” That’s because, in using their name when you first meet someone, you are exercising a certain power in the relationship. You’re saying, “I already know you. You should know me.”

That is using a name like a tool.

In many magical traditions, names are used in this way, where the simple repetition or invocation of a name grants a certain amount of power and control over that entity. Some traditions go so far as to say that everything has a secret name, and once you know that secret name, you have complete and utter control over them.

In the ancient Near East, names functioned in a similar way. To place the name of a deity upon an object was to invite the presence of that deity there. If you placed the name on a stone or an idol, you were inviting the presence of the deity to be there, and thus exercising a certain degree of control over that deity by doing it.

To take the divine name upon yourself would be to invite that deity to indwell you and to give you the right to access its power and domain in this world.

We see this in the angel that was sent to guide the Israelites. The angel had the name of God upon them and thus could act in the person and power of God. We see this in the Temple and the Ark of the Covenant, which also operate with the reverence, power, and authority of the divine.

So when we receive the commandment not to take the name of the Lord in vain, we are being told not to misuse the divine name. To be careful in how we are representing the divine or trying to utilize it in our lives.

Instead, we substitute names like Adonai, HaShem, or HaMakom. This act of restraint shows our reverence for the One named and invites the relationship that we are seeking with Them.

The Name Given, Not Taken

We see this logic of the Name appear several times throughout the Gospel stories.

When the angel meets Mary, he bestows it upon her: “HaShem is with you.”

We see this at the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist, when a dove descends and the voice cries out, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”

That relationship of father and son is the way the divine name was communicated in the Davidic kings and in the line of Omri. The stories do not present Jesus taking the Name, but being given it. It descends upon him because of his life of faith and the way that he interacted with all who were around him.

Through that life, Jesus reveals what it means to bear the Name.

In the high priestly prayer of John’s Gospel, Jesus says that he has shown us the Father so that when we see him, we see God.

John 17:21-23

21. that they may all be one; even as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be one in us; that the world may believe that you sent me.

22. The glory which you have given me, I have given to them; that they may be one, even as we are one;

23. I in them, and you in me, that they may be perfected into one; that the world may know that you sent me, and loved them, even as you loved me.

To Jesus, to bear the divine name was to be a mirror of the divine.

If we are going to take up that Name, we must have the same hospitality and grace and blessing that flows from the Holy One.

Jesus makes this clear in Matthew 25, where he tells us what it means to actually live in the kingdom: to take care of each other, to heal one another, to make sure everyone is safe, secure, fed, and homed, and not left lonely.

The radical message of Christ was that the kingdom of God is already here, not alone, but wherever two or three are gathered in his Name.

Paul and the Name Embodied

Paul gives voice to this mystery when he tells us that the Name given to Jesus is above every name, that is HaShem, so that when we hear the name of Jesus, every knee should bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is HaShem.

Philippians 2:9-11

9. Therefore God also highly exalted him, and gave to him the name which is above every name;

10. that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those in heaven, those on earth, and those under the earth,

11. and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

This is the Name embodied.

The holiest Name, the Name God uses for God’s own self, is given to Jesus. And so when we say the name Jesus, or take on the name Jesus, or hear the word Jesus, the Name of God indwells it.

This is not a statement about domination. It is a call to recognition.

It is an invitation to see the indwelling Name inside the One we follow.

We do not bow because we have to. We bow because in this moment we see that God is in Christ and Christ is in God. The holy Name that animates the universe, the Holy One, HaMakom, is the kingdom spreading throughout the cosmos.

Empire twisted this language to say that people should bow to them. But what Paul is really doing is helping us see like Moses before the burning bush.

This is holy ground. Take off your shoes. Touch it. Let that ground of being flow into you, around you, through you.

You are standing in the presence of Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh.

In the presence of Being itself, what can one do but bow?

What Becomes Impossible

Once we see the Name of God indwelling Christ, we learn not to put too much faith in pastors, churches, or anything that claims ultimate authority.

Christ is our teacher and our high priest. We bow before the cosmos itself, before the One Life flowing through all things.

Grace does not require an earthly intermediary. It abounds in all things as it always has since the beginning of the world.

Blind obedience no longer makes sense. Groupthink dissolves. In-group and out-group dynamics lose their power.

Christ is the One who sustains and maintains the universe, through whom all was created. And as such, that divine wisdom prevents us from seeing anyone as other than ourselves, because we are all in that One Life.

We were all made from one flesh. We arose through a marvelous process of evolution, mutually growing and changing together. Diversity is the point and purpose of life itself.

Uniformity and conformity become unthinkable.

We learn to live in a new relational way, recognizing mutual indwelling and the grace that exists between all of us.

Prophetic Sorrow for a Broken Name

I grew up in evangelical Christianity, where I was taught to fear God, not to stand in awe.

There was no wonder in the relationship I was encouraged to develop. I was taught original sin, that I was intrinsically broken and flawed. That use of the Divine Name, clinging to authority and control, has harmed society in ways we are not yet ready to quantify.

I remember my great-grandmother receiving letters from a televangelist, written in the prophetic voice, claiming to speak in the Name of God and Christ, telling her that if she did not give more than she had, she would go to hell.

Misuses of the Name like this have brought trauma and pain where there should have been wonder and awe.

These preachers of death corrupted a message of love and solidarity and turned it into a system of fear, greed, and control. It is easy to understand how people lose faith entirely.

I lost mine for a while.

Only when I found the right relationship with the Name did I begin to come home.

The Name as Refuge

That return began when I learned that everything is prayer, that our entire lives are living temples, that God is not standing over us but dwelling with us.

The Holy Name is Being itself.

Deuteronomy 6:4

4. Hear, Israel: Yahweh is our God. Yahweh is one.

The word one is Achad, which means one, unified, or without division.

In time, I became fascinated with the Mughal Emperor Akbar and the movement he founded, Din-i-Ilahi, “The Way of God.” At its heart was a simple confession:

Your Name is a fortress, and you are its foundation.

There is no God but God.

The Name is Being itself. I Am That I Am. Being is the fortress in which we live, and God is its foundation.

I still find myself praying these words, especially on the Feast of the Holy Name. If they resonate with you, I invite you to take them up yourself. If they do not, I invite you to meditate on what it means for a Name to be a fortress and a foundation.

Blessed is the Holy Name HaShem, which resides in the Holy Name of Jesus, which resides in the hearts of all who believe and follow him.

This is what it means to be a true tabernacle of Christ in the world.

Apocalypse as Unveiling

Apocalypses are powerful times when everything changes. In modern usage, the word has come to mean a disaster, a terrible thing that befalls a person, a place, or a culture. This hollow image robs apocalyptic spirituality of its true power and intent, and instead places it in the path of doomsayers who whisper of the end of days and demonize those that they despise.

An apocalypse is an unveiling. It is a moment when our eyes are opened and we see the world as it truly is. It is like an epiphany, but an epiphany is an answer to a question, whereas an apocalypse is merely being able to see clearly in the moment.

The most famous apocalypse, the Apocalypse of John, is a revelation of what is actually going on in the Roman Empire under Nero and the persecutions of the church, and the dream of the world to come when the kingdom is fully lived on earth as in heaven. It is a work of catharsis, revenge, and hope, where everything is unmasked in a way to reveal the spiritual dimension that would go unnoticed because of the pain and pressure of the moment.

In the Protoevangelium of James, we meet another apocalypse, one that opens us up to the mysteries of the world, and shows us how we can use apocalypse and apocalyptic spirituality to help us see through the veil to the underlying beauty beyond.

Joseph on the Road

In this legend, from later in Christian history, Joseph is imagined as an old man who already has two sons. They are forced to travel to Bethlehem with Mary, who is very great with child. We do not have any of the familiar trappings of the Christmas story here. There is no inn, there is no family. In fact, they do not even make it all the way to Bethlehem.

Like Rachel, Mary goes into labor while they are on the road. In a panic, Joseph finds a cave, a place where he can take her, where she will be safe, and then rushes back out to find help.

This depiction of Joseph shows him as older and wiser. That is not so much for Joseph’s benefit as it was the need of the patriarchal society around them to insist on Mary’s perpetual virginity, a flawed doctrine that this story returns to again and again. But in the midst of its retelling and its colonizing propaganda, there is a moment that shines through, because the power of the incarnation, of the Gospel itself, cannot be contained even in the cages that are built for it by Empire.

Walking and Not Walking

Joseph narrates his run from the cave, and there he says something profound: “I was walking and was not walking.” This is the nature of the way and what we are constantly seeking to do in our own lives.

When we are walking and not walking, we have become one with the flow of the path. We are one with the action, united and indistinguishable from it. It has become embodied within us. This is what we mean when we use phrases like “living God” or “living Christ”: that these ideas, these facets of our belief, are so well rooted within us that they become our lived reality through which we act in the world.

When Joseph walks without walking, he is entering a state of mindfulness where his mind, heart, and spirit are united in the actions of his body. The intent is clear and focused. He has to go and find help for Mary. He has to find the resources he can to support the fragile life of the child about to be born. Everything is clear and united.

As we learn to walk the path, we cultivate this mindfulness within us, so that our actions flow from us rather than having to be instructed or told to happen. An easy way to understand this is to think about how, in a comedy or sitcom, when someone is acting and told to just stand there, they start obsessing. What are my hands doing? What are my legs doing? Are my hands in my pocket? What is my posture? What am I doing?

They are overthinking an action that they do regularly throughout their daily life. If they would just stand like they would stand, then it would be easy. In other words, stand without standing.

When we first learn any art or practice, our mind runs through the instructions over and over again. We check ourselves to make sure that we are doing it right, and that is part of the learning process. The moment we realize we have actually learned it is when we do not have to think about the instructions. We execute them. We do not have to think about what the next step is, we just go there.

That is a level of mastery and self mastery to which we can all aspire. When walking the four paths, especially here in the Via Positiva, we learn to just walk, walk it, one and the same, without having to remind ourselves to stop and look for awe, wonder, and delight. And when we are in that pure moment of walking without walking, the world can open up to us.

When the World Stills

As Joseph walks without walking, the whole world stills, not just his mind. He looks up into the heavens and sees the pillar of the sky. Like the Shekinah of old that guided the people through the desert as a pillar of smoke by day and a pillar of fire by night, he sees it there still in the sky, bridging heaven and earth.

The birds are still in the sky, neither flying nor falling. The animals are frozen in mid action. People who are standing up are in mid stand, and those who are sitting down are still sitting. The river itself does not move.

This is the moment of pure mindfulness where the apocalypse happens. Revelation comes to us in these still, small moments where the world drops away, all of our cares and concerns fall by the wayside, and we are purely there in the moment, able to see the wonder and experience the awe ever present around us.

The cosmos is not doing anything. And neither, honestly, is Joseph. He is present in a way that reveals the cosmic wonder and spectacle happening around him at that moment in time.

Mutual Care Enters the Vision

To Joseph, the entire world is frozen, congealed in this moment of spectacle, awe, and wonder. But he sees Salome coming towards him. She speaks to him, and he responds and tells her of his great need.

His eye is drawn to her because she is there to give the care that they need in the moment. The moment itself opened up and his eyes were clear to see not only the spectacle around him, but the mutual care embedded in the community as Salome approached and offered to be of aid.

Joseph learns in this moment what Jesus would teach one day, that we should be anxious for nothing. For God takes care of the birds and clothes the plants with such radiant splendor. How much more will God take care of us?

This is not waiting for a handout from the universe. Joseph is actively engaged in going to seek help, and God, who exists as an intermediary between the two in the presence and mindfulness between these two people, connects them so that he finds the need that he has answered in Salome.

We do not wait for God like a divine vending machine, but instead actively participate within that presence so that presence may call to us what we need. It is through action, prayer, pure mindfulness, and intention that we are able to live in this mutual care.

Nothing had to change in Joseph when he saw Salome approach, or when he heard her voice. She was the answer to the prayer of his heart, someone to help him usher a new child into the world.

The Cloud of Unknowing

Joseph invited Salome into the great walk without walking that he was doing, and as they returned to the cave, her eyes are opened. But unlike Joseph, who saw the splendor, the Shekinah, the glory of God in the sky, she sees the great cloud of unknowing in the cave.

She cannot see Mary or the midwife. She cannot see what is happening there, only the great unknowing. We like to forget these days that unknowing is a revelation in and of itself. It reminds us to let go of our preconceptions.

In the story, Joseph tells Salome that the Savior is being born. He announces the gospel to her and she, though intrigued and welcomed into the mystery, cannot fully understand what was said to her. She sits with the mystery as it is, mystery.

This is not a failure on her part, nor is it a flaw in her character. She has not forgotten to do some spiritual or mystical practice that would have opened her eyes. At first, we always perceive the mystery, the great cloud of unknowing that reminds us of all that we have to unlearn to get back to that beginner’s mind where we can see clearly, where all of our preconceptions are washed away and we can see the world as it really and truly is.

To see that original blessing and original grace that was always there, but clouded either by life experiences, stories we have been told, or dogmas that have been placed upon us to hide it from our view, takes mindfulness to even perceive the cloud of unknowing and to receive the revelation that it has to offer us.

The Light That Reveals Form

Once Salome sits with the vision of the cloud for some time, it breaks open into bright and dazzling light that fills the entire cave. The cloud did not change. The light is as blinding as the cloud was, but now she can see the radiance within it.

Salome has moved deeper in her mindfulness in the moment and is no longer just stuck in the awe of the cloud, but is now getting to glimpse the full wonder and glory that she could not perceive before.

This light is common in most mystical traditions. It has many names, but the one that we use is the Taboric Light, because it is the same light that shone atop Mount Tabor at Jesus’ transfiguration. This light is the radiance of the One Life, the living God shining between and betwixt all of the people and things and from the place itself.

This light is HaMakom, the place where God is. This is also the light in which Jacob wrestled the angel. It is the light that opened up and revealed so many things to Daniel, Isaiah, and Ezekiel. It is the light that resonates with the song of the angels: Holy, holy, holy. The earth is filled with Your glory.

Then the light dims and Salome beholds the mother with the Christ child at her breast. Again, nothing has changed. The Madonna and Child, the brilliant light, the mysterious cloud of unknowing, these are all three ways of seeing and beholding the same mystery.

The light does not recede, but reveals form. The cloud is not gone. The mystery remains. Through this great apocalyptic vision, Salome has seen the mystery, the presence of God, and the mother and child, all one and the same.

That is how the apocalypse works. We behold the mystery. It opens to wonder and reveals presence. That is the cycle of apocalypse.

The Via Positiva and the Unveiling of Wonder

This is the power of the positive way, the Via Positiva. We walk this path any time we encounter awe, wonder, or delight. When we greet these with hospitality in our hearts and mindfulness, and allow them to open and unfold, they go through these same three stages.

They open us to mystery. They reveal unseen glory. And then they show us that mysterious presence that has always been there without our notice.

We can do this today. You can do this right now.

What is your favorite fruit? An orange, apple, mango? Sit with that fruit for a minute. Really look at it. If it has to be peeled, as you peel it, smell the fragrance that arises from it. Ponder all of the things that went into making that pleasant aroma and that delightful sight.

Enter into its mystery. Where it came from, the ground that nurtured it, the air that gave it rain, and the hands that picked it, and all those involved in bringing it there before you. Sit mindfully with all the many things that it took, from the fiery heat of the Sun to the coolness of night, to the rain, to the soil, to all of the things that live in the soil to bring the nutrients to the roots of the tree, to carry it up so that the tree could flower, and the insects that it took to pollinate the flower, and all the care and time that it took for the fruit to grow, ripen, and mature, and all the hands that it passed through just to get to you.

Do you not feel a certain sense of wonder in that miraculous journey? More often than not, the difference between the miraculous and the mundane is the way we receive the event.

Go through this process again when you taste it. How it makes you feel, the things that it is bringing to your life, both emotionally and physically. You are eating sunshine and rain and life that has been forged, going all the way back to the very first fires that flared forth at the moments of creation.

That is just one way to enter this wonder, to experience this awe, and to have a moment of apocalypse.

In all of the others, the process is the same. You open with awe and enter the mystery, and you sit with the mystery until it opens you in wonder, and then through that wonder, experience the presence of what is truly there.

This is the power of the Via Positiva, the great positive way that grants us this apocalyptic way to unveil the glory of the world.

Let Me Tell You a Secret

Let me tell you a secret. It is a marvelous secret that has not been hidden from the world, but is so amazing that many cannot hold on to it. It slips through our fingers like so many grains of sand, and escapes our minds because it is too big for us to hold it all inside. Nevertheless, it is true. It is a wonder beyond wonders that awakens us to our lives in this world and the mission that we have been called to.

This isn’t a secret for a few, or for the chosen, or for those who have achieved some level of enlightenment. It is a secret because the tender devotion that we are talking about is so intimate within us that sometimes we can’t even see it’s working.

This is the secret of Mary, the mother of God, and how she brought Christ into the world, and how she can help us to bring Christ into the world again and again and again.

Do not worry and do not be afraid. You don’t have to be special or worthy to receive this secret. This is not a secret for the chosen, but for any whose hearts are open and who wish the tree of life to grow strong and proud. It is the whispered hope to all who hear the call of our Blessed Mother and run to her arms, knowing that no one who has ever run to her has ever been turned away empty.

Mary, Matrix of Creation and Tree of Life

Our Blessed Mother Mary is at the same time that sweet and tender girl who heard the voice of the angel, and the fierce mother longing to protect her child and take him away from the crowds that she knew one day would turn on him. She is the one who is present at all of the major turning points of Christ’s life, and even beyond through His ascension and the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

Mother of God, she is the matrix of all creation, our own Divine Mother who helps us to be formed into the image of Her Child. As the daughter of God, she, like us, is a child in this world seeking wisdom and truth, meaning, purpose, and life.

In her was grace, and she was not alone in that. For that original grace that flowed so freely from Mary’s Immaculate Heart flows through us as well, though if we’re not careful, we can dam its flow and slow its progress.

Mary is the very tree of life upon whom the fruit of life did grow: the Christ, the one who creates, maintains, and sustains the cosmos. As our mother, she cares for us and helps us to raise that tree strong and pure so that Christ may come into our own lives and be born into the world to bring change, renewal, and redemption to all.

She is also the tree that we tend with our tender devotion, bringing compassion, mindfulness, and grace into the world so that the ground may remain fertile, the roots watered, and the limbs protected from the winds that batter.

Living In Mary: The Positive Way of Original Grace

When we learn to live in Mary, we are not just imitating her but taking on her spirit. Her cosmic hospitality that she demonstrated at the wedding at Cana. There she coaxed Christ into performing His first miracle so that people might enjoy the celebration.

To live in Mary is to learn how to trust again in the original blessing and original grace that the world is made in. Nothing is born broken, tainted, or damaged. Neither is it born pure, clean. All things are created good and blessed by the Creator for that goodness. Life intervenes, and through various chance and purposeful encounters, it flows out into the world.

Living in Mary means that we remember to bring out our best even at the end, that we provide that cosmic hospitality that invites other people to savor the delights of the world. As the psalmist says, “To taste and see that the Lord is good.” We sing with joy in the wondrous cosmic dance of the seasons and the many joys that arise throughout them.

Grace is ever-present. But like water, if we do not drink it, we are not hydrated. If we do not receive grace, if we do not pick it up and take it in, then we feel its lack. We collect grace in awe, in wonder, in delight, and through savoring them deep down within and finding such great joys in the life that we live.

Living With Mary: The Open Way of Spaciousness and Consent

Living with Mary may be the hardest spiritual act most of us will ever undertake. When we live with her, we see her fear and terror at the crowds growing around her son and all that that might portend for the future. We live with her in the pain of His crucifixion, as she stands there and watches the life drain from her beloved Son. We cradle his body with her as she holds him, still and cold, after the cross has done its work.

After savoring so much delight in her, it is difficult for us to surrender to this sadness and grief that often fills the world. We want to set them at odds with each other and say that they are opposed to each other, cosmic opponents fighting in the glorious battle for the fate of the cosmos. This is not so. Pain, grief, and sadness are a very real part of the world.

We receive them through the great spaciousness we learn by living with Mary, that open-heartedness that takes everything in to ponder it within. Sometimes, like Rachel, we refuse consolation and endure the grieving process, surrendering to it fully.

The Open Way, the Via Negativa, teaches us something more. It reminds us that when we are open, we allow people and events in our lives to enter through consent, not coercion. That they must want to be here, and so sometimes we have to let them go. At other times, events are out of our control, and all we can do is surrender to them and live with them.

We must accept the pain and fear that comes our way, but not allow it to lead us to self-erasure. With her, we learn to listen and to ponder all things in our hearts. That letting go and letting be sometimes means going into the secret hidden places within so that we can find the solace, the strength, the courage to stand up again.

In making space for the many sorrows of the world, we are opening ourselves up, so that with the great well of all delight and wonder that we collected, inner compassion can be born. Compassion reminds us that we live together, and only in that mutual care and indwelling can we all find peace, hope, safety, security, and blessing.

Living By Mary: The Creative Way of Tending the Tree

As compassion arises within us, its cousins, mindfulness and creativity, come along and join in the dance. Here we learn to live by Mary. In our devotion to her, we are tending the Great Tree of Life.

Mindfulness opens us to the present moment, allowing us to see things as they are, fully and completely without blinders. The openness that we have cultivated allows us to accept even the things that we do not want to hear or know, but are still true.

Compassion reminds us that we are not in this alone, but are able to act in solidarity together to tend the soil to ensure that it is enriched with compassion so that the roots can grow strong and firm and the tree does not fall over in the winds.

Our creativity teaches us how to find new ways to discover delight and new ways to savor it. New ways to see awe and wonder in all that is, and to make a spacious home for when pain arises.

We tend the tree by Mary because she shows us the way. She told the people at the wedding of Cana, “Whatever my son tells you, do it.” In the Magnificat, her beautiful prayer, she reminds us of the works of justice making that we are all called to do in toppling down the thrones, bringing the high low, and raising up the poor, the orphaned, and those who are in need.

By her wisdom and strength, we learn to tend the garden so the tree may grow strong and the fruit of Christ arise upon it.

Living Through Mary: The Transformative Way of Teshuvah and Tikkun

As we continue to tend the tree, we learn to live through Mary in the Via Transformativa, the transformative way. Here we practice the arts of teshuvah, the returning again and again, not just to the way but to alignment with the world and to ourselves.

Teshuvah is the pruning that we do upon the tree that removes the suckers from the branches so that the fruit may grow strong without its energy being diverted in other ways. It is not about guilt or shame. It is about learning when we are diverting our energy into things that are either not productive, good, or healthy for us, and returning back to the way that brings life and life more abundantly.

When the fruit has grown upon the tree, we invite others into the feast, the great celebration that comes as we share the fruit with the world. This could be in little ways, like helping those that we find in our lives go through troubles and travails. It could be giving money to a person or bringing them a meal. It could be helping someone find a place to live or someone to care for them.

In all of these ways and more, we share the fruit of the Tree of Life. This is tikkun, that glorious ability deep down within us where we become that font of original grace, bringing restoration and healing to the world to come.

In every act of mindfulness, in every act of compassion, in every act of creativity and justice-making, we are bringing repair and healing to the cosmos.

Through Mary, we find the strength in the heart to stand up when we need to stand and to ponder when we need to ponder, to celebrate in times of great joy and to mourn in times of sorrow. We do not do this alone, but with our community that we find along the way.

In this way, we live fully in this mutual indwelling, where we find ourselves simultaneously the mother of God and the child of God. We are the child, ever growing, maturing, and perfecting ourselves into the image of the divine Christ. And as mothers, we continue to tend the tree because the fruit does not grow once, or what use would the tree be? The fruit continues to grow as new flowers blossom, and they are pollinated and they mature to ripeness to be shared again and again with the community and the cosmos.

In living through Mary, we, like her, become a font of original grace, helping others to see the blessing that has always been around them and to wash away anything that has blocked the path so that the waters of grace and life may ever flow.

The Secret Given Back

Now you know the secret of Mary, the secret of the Mother of God, that she is our matrix that forms us into her beloved Christ child, and the Tree of Life that, growing within us, produces the fruit of life which is that same child.

Devotion to Mary, our tending of this miraculous tree, reminds us of the mutual indwelling that all things share in this cosmos. Everyone, everything has the seed of this tree rooted within them. It only needs to be watered and cared for to grow strong.

Blessed Mother, seed of the tree of life, matrix of the cosmos, font of original grace. Open our eyes so that we may see and our ears that we may hear so that we may be enraptured by the awe, wonder, and delight of this world, savoring it deep down and opening us up so that we may have the space for the tree to grow within us and under its shade to live through the many trials and tribulations that we meet in this life.

Help us to nurture our mindfulness and creativity so that as compassion arises within us, we can transform it and interpret it into many wonders that we can share. Give us the courage and the strength to step out in justice making and celebration so that we can share the fruit that we have grown with the world, that the world may be made better by it.

Through constant returning, we heal ourselves. Through repair, we heal the world.

In the name of your beloved Son, our Son, and our God.

Amen.

Presentation and Fulfillment

Luke 2:22-24

22. When the days of their purification according to the law of Moses were fulfilled, they brought him up to Jerusalem, to present him to the Lord

23. (as it is written in the law of the Lord, “Every male who opens the womb shall be called holy to the Lord”),

24. and to offer a sacrifice according to that which is said in the law of the Lord, “A pair of turtledoves, or two young pigeons.”

Only eight days ago, Mary gave birth to the child she cradles in her arms. Together with her husband, Joseph, they make their way through the strange city of Jerusalem to head to the temple. Today is the day prescribed by the law for Mary to be purified and the child to be presented before the Lord.

The streets are filled with strangers as the young couple and their child make their way through the city. Before they enter the temple, Mary enters the mikveh, a ritualized bath that washes her clean of ritual impurity so she can enter the temple. They perform their duty, their religious obligations.

As Mary enters the temple carrying the child in her arms, her thoughts linger on the mikveh as she ponders it in her heart. The words of the angel echo in her ears when he called her full of grace. They rang in her ears then too, as she stepped into the cool water.

Hail Mary, full of grace, HaShem is with you.

She smiled in that moment, realizing that she was stepping into HaMakom, the place where God is. God is within all things, and all things are within God. As she stepped into the water, she reconnected with the original grace that was always within her. It had not been taken away, nor had it been tarnished. These waters were a reminder of that indwelling grace and the original blessing of all creation. In those waters, she felt life, and she pondered all of these things in her heart.

Simeon and the Long Work of Waiting

Luke 2:25-28

25. Behold, there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon. This man was righteous and devout, looking for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was on him.

26. It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he should not see death before he had seen the Lord’s Christ.

27. He came in the Spirit into the temple. When the parents brought in the child, Jesus, that they might do concerning him according to the custom of the law,

28. then he received him into his arms, and blessed God, and said,

In the temple itself, an old man named Simeon waits. When he was younger, he was told that he would not die until he saw the face of the Messiah. He is old now and wanders the outer court of the temple, watching for families bringing their newborn children in, hoping he will see what he has waited so long for.

Anna is also in the temple, her heart full of expectant waiting, knowing that someday soon something amazing will happen and she needs to be here to see it.

Through the gates into the temple, a young family enters. From different places amongst the crowd, Simeon and Anna see them, and their hearts weep. Deep down, they know this is the moment they have been waiting for. In this moment, the yearnings of their hearts break open into an electric expectancy. The air crackles with life and possibility.

The sight of the Holy Family awakens so much joy and sorrow in Simeon’s heart. As he makes his way through the crowd, he thinks about all those years he spent waiting for this moment. Here it is, right before him, the face he had longed to see. He greets the family with kindness and joy and asks if he can hold the blessed child.

In that moment with that sweet baby in his arms, his mind opens and he sees the truth he had known all along. The same life is in him that is in this child. But this child’s life will be different from his. His life was one of preparation, and this child’s life will be one of action.

Joy arises first within him as he smiles at the sweet child’s face. Then sorrow overshadows him, as he thinks of what will happen as this sweet baby grows up and faces the power of Herod and Rome. In this moment, he understands everything. He is holding the child that holds him.

From the strength of this mutual indwelling, he knows that justice will enter the world with this child’s actions and be fortified by those who believe, act, and follow the way.

The Blessing That Tells the Truth

Luke 2:29-35

29. “Now you are releasing your servant, Master, according to your word, in peace;

30. for my eyes have seen your salvation,

31. which you have prepared before the face of all peoples;

32. a light for revelation to the nations, and the glory of your people Israel.”

33. Joseph and his mother were marveling at the things which were spoken concerning him,

34. and Simeon blessed them, and said to Mary, his mother, “Behold, this child is set for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and for a sign which is spoken against.

35. Yes, a sword will pierce through your own soul, that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.”

Then Simeon proclaims his blessing over the child. This child will be great and will do many wondrous things. He looks at the sweet face of Mary and says that a sword will pierce her heart.

He knows the trials and tribulations that will befall this child, the same trials and tribulations that face anyone who brings light and life into this world. Many are persecuted for righteousness’ sake because the world does not want to abandon its greed, its fear, and its lust for power.

He knows her love for the child and for her people and knows that in the days to come, that love will be a two-edged sword. It will cut a way forward for her and her family, but it will also pierce her own heart. She must be ready and open, so that when those troubles come, she will not freeze, but know when to stand up and when to flee.

Anna and the Courage to Speak Publicly

Luke 2:36-38

36. There was one Anna, a prophetess, the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Asher (she was of a great age, having lived with a husband seven years from her virginity,

37. and she had been a widow for about eighty-four years), who didn’t depart from the temple, worshiping with fastings and petitions night and day.

38. Coming up at that very hour, she gave thanks to the Lord, and spoke of him to all those who were looking for redemption in Jerusalem.

As Simeon speaks to Mary, Anna speaks to the child, to Mary, to Joseph, and to all who are seeking redemption. They are living in dark times. Rome has conquered their land, and a client king rules them with greed, fear, and lust for power in his heart.

They seek rescue, relief, someone, something, anything to come and take them away, to take away their oppressors and to help them find the peace that passes all understanding.

She speaks to the expectations present not just within her or the Holy Family, but in the crowd. She speaks to the hearts of everyone who can hear her voice. That deliverance has come.

Words That Awaken, Work Yet Unfinished

The eternal Word is incarnate in the Child. Original blessing and original grace tangibly walk amongst them. Simeon has seen it and foreseen the travails to come. Anna has spoken it and declared it in the moment.

Words have power. Spoken words, the very living words that flow with breath into the world, have power and might behind them. Words alone can shake the heart and awaken wonder.

But words alone cannot manifest the great change in the world that is needed.

All of the hope and expectations released in this moment, the long-awaited redemption of the people, have yet to fully come. Expectation prepared them for this moment. But now, it is here, and the future is unresolved, unfinished.

The world still waits for action to be taken, not just the actions of this child, but for the people to rise up and claim their place. The thrones of kings have not been toppled, and the people are not taken care of yet.

To know the good is not to do the good. To know the good is to understand what you have to do to prepare for it and to take action through it, toward it. Anna and Simeon speak a new hope into the world, and that hope must be grasped and followed and used as fuel to get us to a better world.

Expectant Waiting and the Via Creativa

Simeon and Anna waited in hope for the day that they knew would come, and in that time, they honed their skills so that they would be ready and prepared for it, so that they could speak that hope aloud for others to hear.

The power of expectant waiting is not in the action itself. The action is quite simple. We sit and we wait in hope. It is the component parts that make it difficult and that teach us the discipline we need to have in life.

In order to sit, we have to be calm, at peace, not in a state beyond conflict, but in a spacious open heartscape that allows us to rest and recuperate. Hope is not just a dream for the future. It is an animating force that awakens us to our real possibilities.

Each of us is going to have a slightly different hope. Some will want to be writers, others restaurateurs, some parents raising a family. That hope, nurtured in this expectant waiting, as we sit in the very presence of that original grace and blessing that flow through the cosmos, recognizing that the one life is in all things and through all things, takes on life and helps us find a way to move forward toward it.

In these times of expectant waiting, we are formed not into our ideal selves, but into better and better versions of ourselves, as we listen for the still, small voice to guide us, to teach us, and to help us move forward. To live is to grow and evolve and change, and it is in these times of expectant waiting that we give ourselves the time and space to grow.

Mystic, Artist, Prophet

Each of us is called to be a mystic, an artist, and a prophet. In expectant waiting, we learn how to perform all three roles.

The mystic receives, taking in the joys, wonders, and delights of the world while also recognizing the suffering that is there. The artist translates that into ideas and images we can understand and finds new ways to express it in our lives and in the world. The prophet speaks and brings those new words and images into the world so that they can heal us and others.

This alchemy, this self-change, this cycle of becoming is the one that we are called to in life and the one that we see in this story. Anna and Simeon lived their lives as mystics, receiving wisdom and understanding, and internally as artists, recreating that world and that speech so that they would have words when they were needed and necessary. When the time came, they spoke as prophets to this young family the words they needed in the moment.

In all things, they lived in right relationship: the mystic receiving, the artist translating, and the prophet speaking. This is the wisdom we need to develop in our own lives.

The Courage to Speak

We see in Anna and Simeon the courage to speak as prophets. This courage is not an innate feature within them. It is not a virtue they hone within. Courage is the strength of the heart grown and developed through delight in the wonder and awe of the universe.

It is the spaciousness we keep open within us that allows us to behold the diversity of life and to make way for suffering and pain. Courage is the power of the Via Creativa that rises up within us and gives us words to act.

When we know that we act in this world as the mother of God and as God’s child, that we co-create the cosmos together with the Living Word, all delight and sorrow meld within us into this creative compassion to speak into the world, knowing that we are inextricably part of it.

The courage of the prophets is the one that knows the wonder and joys of life and wishes to sustain and protect them. It is the wisdom of the one who has seen suffering and sorrow and wishes to prevent and heal it. These twin desires to preserve and heal are the engines that give courage strength. Through the creativity we find within us, that strength takes form and comes out as the prophet.

The Sacred Now

Throughout Advent, we have been a people who are waiting. In our prayers, we sit and we wait. In that expectant waiting, we open ourselves to hope, to compassion, and to all the things that will guide us forward and fill us with newness of life.

At Christmas, we celebrated the arrival of the Word, the Light, the Logos into the world. We have seen its activity in the world and in us, and we know that it continues to move through discourse and right relationship, through speech and art and dance, in celebration and justice-making, and even in that expectant waiting that makes space for it to arrive.

We are a people who stand between speech and action. We hold our unresolved hopes near and dear to our hearts, knowing that they are the fuel that drives us forward. Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the essence of things not seen because they have yet to happen. Faith is the driver that pushes us forward, not something we cling to because we are told to.

We seek wonder and awe and savor and delight in them wherever we find them. We make space to receive difference, to acknowledge suffering, and to grieve. We are the parents of God and the children of God, and God is as much our child as our mother.

We dance forward in life to make justice and to celebrate the world to come as we bring it into being. All of this is possible through expectant waiting, where we sit or walk or stand, and in the peace of the moment and the peace of our hearts make room for the Word to be spoken, for the Light to shine, for grief to work its magic in us, so that we have the power, creativity, and compassion to move forward.

It is important to remember that we only ever live in the sacred now. Old things have passed away and drifted beyond us. New things have not yet formed and run off before us.

When we give space for that holy moment to be present within us and wait expectantly within it, the world opens. Through mindfulness we see grace, wonder, and blessing, the suffering that needs healing, the creative powers available to us, and the justice we can make.

Do not carry the past. It is what has brought you to this moment. Do not fret over the future, for it is not yet known, as it has not formed yet.

Now is the only eternity we will know in this life. Embrace it. Embrace the creativity within you, so that in all your actions you may be a font of compassion, with the courage to be you in a world that needs you.

I saw the heavens open, and Rachel, the mother of us all, whose children are more numerous than the stars in heaven, standing before the Holy One. Her arms were outstretched toward the world as she gazed upon the lives of her children: their pain, their suffering, their loss, their joys, and their celebrations.

Then I heard her say:

Blessed are you, O Holy One, in the ground that we walk and in the place that we live. For you fill all that is, was, and ever shall be, staying with your people always. Your grace flows through all things, but some harden their hearts and deny it entry. Peace be upon the earth to people of good will, and may the light ever shine as the Word resonate in the stones.

Mother of the Lost and the Living

In life I was barren, watching my sister give birth to tribes, and yet in time my beloved Joseph and Benjamin were born to me. In delivering Benjamin, I passed beyond seeing, giving my life to give him life, not as a sacrifice, not as a payment, but because of the pain I could not bear.

These are not my only children, for my children are all those who are lost in exile under the cruelty of empire. They are those who are lost and unseen, who carry memory of me forward, and all those who act in goodwill.

But I do not shun those who have hardened their hearts, for they are just my children who have gone their own way and forgotten the peace that could fill their hearts and lives.

I Have Seen This Before

I watched with sorrow as Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery. My heart broke when the rest of our people were taken. I cried out when they were freed and chose for themselves a king who would punish and take from them.

I held them under the tyranny of the kings of David and Omri and wept bitter tears when they were marched past my tomb on their way into exile. I exulted with Esther and Judith in their triumph, and I stood firm with my people when they returned to the land.

And again, like a river prone to flooding, I watched as empire after empire washed over the land, colonizing them and treating them so cruelly.

I have delighted in their joy. I have wept with their sorrow. I have sung with their songs and danced in their celebrations. Through it all, my children have grown and prospered, and I have found more than I ever imagined in them.

Bethlehem

I shouted for joy when the child was born to Mary and Joseph and sang with the angels when they greeted the shepherds. I watched in horror as Herod sent his troops to slaughter the children, to kill hope, to kill promise, to rob them of their lives.

No mother could avert her gaze from such tragedy and pain. I had seen it so many times before, in the fear that leads others to control the world around them, believing that life can be tamed.

How many will be slaughtered in the name of the false god of safety? How many must be sacrificed before the fearful believe that they have found security?

I cried out to the Holy One, who lived in and among those children, who felt their pain as their lives were cruelly ripped from them. Together we wept with the families.

God did not do this hateful act. It was born from the fear of empire.

A king placed a throne and decided who could sit upon it over the lives of the innocent, causing them to be slaughtered. No chair brings power. No crown authority.

In the illusions of their heart, they pretend they are strong so others cannot see how weak they are. Their might is brittle like a dead leaf. So they sharpen their tongues and their swords to go out and do violence so they can secure their place, so they can hide their true selves from the world.

They sacrifice the lives of others, believing that it makes them strong, safe, and secure, all the while sowing the seeds of their own downfall. Those who live by the sword will die by it. Peace and goodwill are far from them.

They built a gilded cage within themselves to hide away the part that speaks with the voice of God. They walled it off with malice, fear, hatred, and disgust. The word of God cried out from within them to stop, but they refused to listen.

Where God Was

The Holy One lives in the very breath of all beings, in their substance, at their root. They grow in God’s soil, and with God they find life and find it more abundantly.

God was in the soldier and in the child, but the soldier did not listen to the voice crying out, telling them to stop. God screamed with those children. God wept with their families. God struggled in the cage within all those who enacted such violence against the innocent.

But they had hardened their hearts and refused to listen.

Where was God in this tragedy and all the others?

There. In the midst of it. Screaming, “Stop! Don’t do this!”

God Stays

God does not abandon any of us, and we are incapable of abandoning God. All we can do is build up calluses deep within us to muffle that voice into silence and to prevent the light from shining forth.

The Holy One, HaMakom, the place where God is, did not move. Through the grief, the silence, and the emptiness that followed, God was there.

God aches when we ache. Our suffering is God’s suffering. Even though it can feel like being itself will yield and give way to sheer and utter nothingness, it persists.

Rachel Refuses Comfort

Over the many times I have watched my children in pain and suffering, I have refused comfort. Not because I do not deserve it or desire it, but because I do not want to abandon them in their pain, grief, and sorrow.

One day, the grieving will do its work, and it will bring its own kind of healing, even if it does not bring about full restoration.

I refuse comfort, not out of stubbornness. I refuse to be comforted because I do not want the easy and trite answers that plaster over the pain and grief of this world.

God did not plan the massacre of those children, did not desire it, and did not sanctify it as a sacrifice in the holy name.

While it is true that God moves in mysterious ways, that is because God moves secretly within the hearts of the people. God moves in the flow of life, unseen by many and only touched by a few.

The mystery is not a secret. It is like the mystery of the wind. Where does it come from and where does it go? The more we sit with the wind, the more we know, the more we understand, the more we can see it. But if we do not sit with the mystery of the wind, it remains just that, a mystery to us.

Yes, we find God in delight and savor and awe and wonder, in creativity, justice-making, and celebration. But God is not absent in our pain, suffering, and grief.

God is HaMakom, the place. Wherever we are, there God is.

To say that this pain, this grief, is part of God’s plan is to ignore that whisper within us that tells us that God yearns for life and life more abundantly.

Trite platitudes and simple comforts shield us from the reality of the world we live in. All have suffered loss. Suffering is inescapable in this world. It comes, but it also goes.

It lingers through our own attachment and aversion. If we hold on too tight or push away too hard, we overextend ourselves or we curl ourselves up into knots, and our suffering increases.

It is in the open place that it can find healing, where the wounds can be washed out, medicated, and treated. They may leave scars behind, but in time, wounds heal.

What She Leaves With Us

Weep with those who weep, for all who mourn will be comforted, but they must mourn first.

In our mourning, we must not give birth to shame and guilt for those things in life that bring us delight and solace. We can mourn through laughter as well as through tears, and sometimes with both simultaneously.

In these times of darkness, we must remember the light that we carry with us, all that we have found wonder in, delight in, and savored before.

And eventually, when the time is right, a new creativity will rise in us and teach us the compassion we need to walk forward. But we cannot rush the process.

The greedy, the power-hungry, and the fearful will steal agency to the best of their ability from us and deny us our basic right to live lives with meaning and purpose.

As long as we learn to live in HaMakom, the place where God is deep within us, we will learn that God is with us as much in the dark times as in the light.

The Spirit weeps when we weep and laughs when we laugh and makes utterances and sounds beyond our comprehension to say the things that we cannot bear to say.

The Vigil of the Night Watch

It is a dark night in the fields outside of Bethlehem. Shepherds tend their flock, constantly vigilant for any threat that may come. Their flock is more than just animals, more than just their livelihood. It is their lives. Without the meat, milk, and wool they provide, they have nothing for their families, nothing for their community.

The darkness masks the horizon. Anything could be out there.

Over time, they have learned the routine of the night watch. They tell stories, jokes, and sing songs to ward off boredom and keep their focus alive. Most nights it is the same thing. They sit around and wait, and nothing happens.

But occasionally, a threat sneaks in among the flock, and they have to act quickly. Stories are told about times when lions, wolves, bears, and other dangers slipped in and tried to take one of their flock. Occasionally one will slip away, and they will have to hunt it down and find it, because every life in the flock is precious to them.

They are filled with care and concern, but not dread. They have done this enough to know that it is unlikely they will need to take action, but they stay attentive to the moment, listening for any faint signs of trouble so they can act early to protect the flock.

The Sky Will Not Stay Closed

Luke 2:9

9. Behold, an angel of the Lord stood by them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified.

Suddenly, the heavens break open and a host of angels fill the sky. Fear grips them.

They have heard stories about such things. Legends. Tales told in the Temple and in the synagogue. But never had they imagined something like this could happen to them. The world breaks open, and they can see the forces of the divine arrayed in the heavens, and they quake with fear.

It is not the same fear they would feel if a wolf had snuck in or if thieves had come to take from the flock. It is deeper, down into their soul and in their bones. Their bodies shake.

They are mere shepherds, the lowest of the low in their society. Why would the heavens awaken to them? Why would they reveal themselves in such splendorous glory to them?

They feel unworthy and unprepared for the glory of God to suddenly break forth in their presence. They had not prepared for anything like this. They could not prepare for anything like this.

When the soul is struck with awe out of nowhere, there is nothing, no watchfulness, no attentiveness, no mindfulness that can prepare you for that mystery, both fearful and tremendous, that seizes the soul.

This is mysterium tremendum et fascinans.

“Do Not Be Afraid”

Luke 2:10

10. The angel said to them, “Don’t be afraid, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy which will be to all the people.

“Do not be afraid.”

Those words shake within them like grass in a thunderstorm.

In that moment, they realize that all of their fears about being worthy mean nothing. After all, who is worthy to see the heavens open? Who has earned the ability to see the grandeur of the world in all of its splendor and glory?

They abandon their fear that they do not deserve this gift. After all, no one deserves any gift. That is why it is given freely.

There, in the face of the unfiltered glory of life pouring forth in the form of the hosts of heaven and the voice of the angel, they surrender all of their care and doubt, their concerns that they did not deserve to witness such splendor and that they had not been worthy of it.

If they had not been worthy, they would not have seen. If they did not deserve to hear, they would not have heard, and yet they did both.

They did not behold the glory because they were pure, but because they were attentive.

Their vigilance allowed them to see what was open to them because of their care and concern for their flock, for each other, for their families, and for their community. Their lives were dedicated to this intimate care, and that did not make them deserve this. It did not make them worthy of this. It made them open to seeing this, to receiving it.

Others who did not have their attention on the preservation of life and community might have passed by without a hint of the glory seeping into their consciousness.

Notice that the angel does not quiz them about their beliefs or their faith, does not ask if they have done anything morally dubious. The angel simply appears to these caretakers of the flock, the home, and the community, and proclaims the good news.

Peace on Earth Among People of Good Will

Luke 2:14

14. “Glory to God in the highest, on earth peace, good will toward men.”

Peace is not the absence of struggle or strife. It is the openness that allows for life to go on. Peace is that place where we live, where we take care of and tend to the needs of one another.

When the angel says, “peace on earth among people of good will,” the angel is stating a fact, not making a proclamation.

Those of goodwill seek to help one another. They intervene in strife and struggle. They make sure that their neighbor is fed, clothed, and taken care of. Those of goodwill are living the gospel without even realizing it.

Goodwill sees another in need and does whatever is in its power to serve that need. A people of goodwill forge an amazing community where everyone is looking out for each other.

And in that field of goodwill, peace can grow.

Peace is the harvest we reap from stability and care. Peace is not an emotion, even though we can feel it. Peace is the end result of living in a situation where we know there is no need for fear.

Why is there no need for fear? Because the goodwill of our neighbors can almost be taken for granted, because we know that we are all looking out for the community. Because when one of us prospers, all of us prosper. And when one of us suffers, all of us suffer.

Understanding that balance is the cornerstone of goodwill.

Through the care of their animals, their families, and their lives, the shepherds were taking care of themselves. This is the act of goodwill that brought peace among them, that allowed them to be attentive in the night with the courage and the knowledge that they had each other’s backs and thus could survive any threat that came their way.

That solidarity and mutual care is the cornerstone of peace, and it all arises from a heart filled with goodwill.

They Go

Luke 2:15-16

15. When the angels went away from them into the sky, the shepherds said to one another, “Let’s go to Bethlehem, now, and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has made known to us.”

16. They came with haste, and found both Mary and Joseph, and the baby was lying in the feeding trough.

The angels inform them that a new child is born, and once they have sung and faded back beyond the sight of the shepherds, immediately the shepherds pick up everything, trusting that their flock will be okay, but knowing even more so the vulnerability and care needed by a newborn.

They did not get up and go so much to worship the child, but to ensure that the child had everything that it needed and that anything they could provide, they would.

Not every mother is capable of breastfeeding her child. In the ancient world, when a mother could not provide milk, goat’s milk was used instead. If the child needed sustenance, the shepherds could provide it. If the child needed a warm blanket to sleep, the shepherds could provide it.

They had moved beyond the fear at seeing the angel in the heavens and worrying that they were not worthy to receive such revelation and not understanding what they could have done to deserve it, since worth and deserving have nothing to do with the revelation of wonder, and had surrendered to the wonder itself of the moment.

A child was born. New life had entered the world.

According to the angels, this child was the anointed one, the Messiah, and the name of God had been placed upon him.

Filled with the sense of wonder they had received in the vision from the angels, they ran to the child’s side and wondered at the sight of the Holy Family and the possibilities that stretched out before this child and the life not yet lived.

In that moment, all of their expectations danced within them.

They had heard stories of a messiah. They had heard tales of many who had come and gone, succeeded and failed over time. Could this child really be the savior the angel promised? Could he save them from the oppression of Rome that colonized their land and the tyranny of kings that extracted wealth from them?

That was so much weight to put on any child.

But in their wonder, they realized the words of the angel: peace on earth to people of goodwill.

The task of bringing the glorious world to come was not on the shoulders of this one child. It was upon all of them.

They had to be the people of goodwill. Only when they were a people of goodwill would peace reign and their people be free.

Re-Illuminated from Within

Luke 2:20

20. The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen, just as it was told them.

In this glorious experience, they realize how much life is worth tending.

Holiness is not rare. It is everywhere in the cosmos, but it goes unnoticed.

In their fear of being unworthy and not deserving the glory of God, they denied themselves the wonder ever present among them.

In getting through that fear and passing through that fear and embracing the sheer terror of knowing that the whole world is filled with the glory of God, the cosmos itself is vibrating with that glory, they embraced the wonder underlying all things.

They re-illuminated their lives from within.

They saw the wonder not just outside of them, but within them.

They were not pretenders to this glory, to this holiness. They were the living embodiment of it.

They were shepherds, caretakers, people of goodwill.

If only everyone saw the world like this.

Awe is the beginning of wisdom.

Once you embrace the fear of the great, tremendous vastness of the cosmos, and the wonder at your intricate, intimate inlay within it, the glory breaks forth.

We are not small. We are a stitch in the tapestry of life, and if that stitch is pulled out, the tapestry may unravel.

Once we realize that, we realize that this is true for every stitch in the tapestry, not just ours.

This is true holiness.

When you see the great fabric of space-time and realize how intimately woven everything is together, you see that through this vast web of interconnectedness all things are made and all things are changed.

In this wonder and awe, the urge to be shepherds and caretakers arises within us.

We must do everything that we can to save all life.

To be a people of goodwill is not to be perfect. It is to act out of that goodness in our own hearts, connecting to that original grace of the cosmos and recognizing the original blessing in all things to work toward our common good.

It is the solidarity we feel with everything that is, was, and ever shall be, and the mutual care we live into the world.

Initiation into Wonder

Some of us have this revelation when we look up at the night sky and see the vastness of space stretched out before us. Others when they see the great mountains for the first time, or feel the water running past us in a river, or when our toes touch the ocean water and we understand the great vastness stretching out before us.

In that moment of awe, fear of our smallness and our vulnerability arises within us, as does wonder at the vast interconnectedness of all things.

Once awakened to this wonder, through attentiveness, mindfulness, and compassion, we cultivate our own goodwill.

We enact that goodwill through our interaction with the world and everything and everyone within it.

Thus we too are initiated into holiness like those shepherds so long ago.

Take a moment and remember a time when you were awakened to this wonder. When awe and terror filled you, and you saw your small, fragile place but were engaged by the wonder of it all.

Do not stop at the fear. Press through it.

This is our initiation into wonder, where we learn to savor and delight in it.

That wonder is the seed of goodwill within us, beyond the resistance of fear and control.

We enter that contentment, that peace that passes all understanding, as we practice living a life of goodwill daily.

Philippians 4:7

7. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your thoughts in Christ Jesus.

This wonder reshapes our entire life and gives us the hope that drives us forward to the world to come.

We do not have to wait for peace to be declared. We manufacture it.

Through every kind thought, action, and word, we spread that peace into the world. With every act of anger, hatred, and jealousy, we tear it down.

To truly live lives of goodwill, we dedicate ourselves to spreading that peace, that mindful compassion, that attentive solidarity, that mutual care as far and wide as we are capable in our lives.

That might just be between you and your cats right now. Between you and your neighbor. No matter how small the start.

Matthew 17:20

20. He said to them, “Because of your unbelief. For most certainly I tell you, if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will tell this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.

Everything starts small.

But it builds and it builds and it grows and it evolves and it changes and it learns.

And one day, it fills the cosmos.

The Idol That Cannot Withstand Pressure

When many of us think of the Holy Family, we think of a figurine set out for the Christmas season. A beautiful porcelain sculpture of a radiant and calm mother cradling her child in her arms, and Joseph standing strong and firm beside her, often with his arm around her, cradling both her and the child.

This image carries a lot of weight within it. It speaks to a structure that is being placed upon us in the way we are to perceive this family: holy, sculpted in perfection. They are not real. They are otherworldly beings whose perfection can only be knelt to or idolized.

The problem with an idol is that when pressure is applied to it, it breaks.

Cracks in the Porcelain

As you are either gazing upon or imagining that perfect family, cracks appear within it, and light shines forth. The world is opened, and a new reality unfurls before you. You see a young girl with her first child, an untested, fresh husband, and a first-time father.

They live in a client state of Rome, colonized by an empire that only cares what it can extract from them, and nothing for them as individuals or for the lives that they live. They live under the reign of King Herod, who cares only for his own grandeur and nothing about the little people that make up his kingdom.

Just to get to this moment, they had to overcome so much. The weight of all of those pressures bears down on them, and heat ripples the air like heat from a pavement in the summer sun. In this moment, they could be consumed by the fire around them, or transformed into something stronger, something new.

The Crucible of the Holy Family

Mary: Original Grace and the Courage to Say Yes

Mary is the embodiment of original grace. That Yetzer ha-Tov, that inclination toward good, that welcomes and invites all into her loving arms. This grace is for strength. Though it is not naïveté, it is the understanding that together we are stronger. Together we can accomplish more than we ever could alone.

She embraces all things and ponders them in her heart. Her voice whispers softly, but when it needs to be strong, she proclaims the downfall of kings. Grace and blessing flow through her, and they are her strength. In that grace, in that blessing, she has found freedom and liberation, and that has given her the strength to say yes to the cosmos, yes to life, yes to the mysteries she is called to walk through.

Joseph: Skepticism, Fear, and the Weight of Responsibility

Joseph stands at her side. The Yetzer ha-Rah, the inclination to evil. Now, this is not evil as moral failing, but that inclination toward separation and toward thinking of self.

When Joseph found out that Mary was pregnant, fear arose within him, and he thought about setting her aside quietly. But he did not lose his compassion. He did not want to disgrace her in the eyes of the community, and he did not want harm to come upon her.

The controlling legalism and shame of the community he lived in drove him toward casting her out, but in his heart, he was open to change. That openness came through the voice of an angel who told him about the miracle they would bring into the world.

Even in his skepticism and fear, Joseph was open and listening. He carried the weight of the law, of the empire, of the threats that were upon him and his community constantly, and yet he had the spaciousness within him to wonder if things could be different.

It is that skepticism, that inclination toward individuality, that allows him to see through the legal constraints placed upon him, to see through the shame that tried to control him and move him to cast out his beloved. Without this, there would be no Christmas story. Mary would have been cast out, and she likely would have been stoned for having a child out of wedlock.

His skepticism both threatened the Holy Family and, in the end, preserved it.

Christ the Middle Way: The Bond That Holds

Joseph does not abandon Mary, not because an angel told him not to, but because he had faith. Faith is not something that you believe. It is something that you hold on to, a hope that drives you toward a better future. Faith gave him the courage to act.

Jesus, this holy Christ child, is the glue at the center that holds Mary and Joseph together. Through Mary’s grace and acceptance of the angel’s message, the Christ child flowed into her body. It is through Joseph’s skepticism, paired with the courage to become the father of that child, that allowed him to be born.

Jesus, here in the heart of the Holy Family, is the Cosmic Christ, the one who holds all things together. He is the light that shines into the darkness that the darkness could not overcome.

Jesus is the middle way, the new way between the grace of his mother and the skepticism of his father. He is the way that carries us forward and through. He is the Logos, the Word, the discourse, the conversation that Joseph’s skepticism does not close out and that Mary’s grace invites.

He is the way, the truth, and the life. The way to move forward, the truth of what was happening in the moment, and the life they could share together in a world that had so much threat and danger allied against them.

The Fire of Control

The Holy Family was formed in this crucible. The fire that lit around them was the system of control they lived within. This was the control of the law that told them how a family should be put together, which they had the courage to walk in the light and leave to the side.

It was the moralism that should have controlled Joseph’s heart and prevented him from being open to caring for Mary and Jesus. It was the colonization around them that wanted them to see that they were nothing but a cog in a machine meant only to serve its interests and bring glory to it.

The fire was the desire of Herod to be the preeminent one, the only one to receive glory and honor. These flames burned around them and added pressure to the crucible.

The fire did not consume them. Instead, it forged them into something new, something beyond its control.

The Same Fire Still Burns

These fires still burn in the world today. Wherever there is fear, there will be those who seek to control it and to control others through it. Where there is greed, there will be those who seek to hoard wealth and deprive others of its bounty.

As long as we allow life to be seen as a ladder that can be climbed rather than a circle that emboldens and protects us all, there will be those seeking to climb over others and kick others off the ladder so they can feel certainty in their position higher on the ranks.

Through embracing our own internal grace, we open ourselves to compassion, so that we see we are all together in this, that the fear in us is shared by others, and that we do nothing by combating fear. Fear must be driven out. Fear cannot abide where love is strong.

In our skepticism, we learn not to take everything at face value. When someone tells us that a thing is so, we look into it, we seek, we test its fruit, and we see what it bears in our lives.

Something that harms any one of us harms all of us. Something that controls any one of us controls all of us.

In grace, we learn to identify with our fellow wayfarers in this world, those who walk with us on two, four, and many more legs, those that fly through the air or swim in the sea, the stones, the rivers, the mountains, and the stars themselves.

Our skepticism and grace remind us that anything that tries to control any of these tries to control us. A system of control binds the controller as much as its victims.

Whenever we find ourselves thinking, “This is the only way,” or “We must do this for the greater good,” we have bound ourselves to a system of control. There is always another way.

The most insidious thing about control is how it worms its way inside of us, making us think its thoughts.

Forged into Light

In the heat of this crucible, we, like the Holy Family, can burn away the impurities that rise and shed off as slag and forge a new material that shines forth with a radiance that casts out the darkness.

We embody blessing and compassion, yet always question and remain open to new possibilities. These systems of control cannot grab us. We build a better world to come from new materials that displace the old.

In their fire, we are forged into something stronger, something new, something outside their system of control. And when we realize we do not need them anymore, they fade away like ashes in the wind.

A Benediction for the Children of Light

Blessed are the children of light, who are the mothers of it, who shine with an inner radiance that is compassion and life. Blessed are those who endure the fires of the world to be stronger and changed, ever questioning why a thing must be as it is. Because nothing must be. It only is.

Blessed be the light ever shining in all things, the eternal Word resonating throughout all creation. Let it fill us and flow through us, ever emptying out into the world from its inexhaustible well deep within.

Blessed be the world, born anew in every moment, living in the echoes of all that has come before.

May the incarnation ever live within us. May the light and life ever break forth from us, and may we never leave that holy Word, which is the discussion, the discourse that makes all things possible.

May the light fill the world and bring love and compassion everywhere it goes, driving out the darkness of fear and control before it like shadows before a searchlight.

May we find that peace that passes all understanding, where we come to know that the way we walk and dance and sing in this world brings it to life, and to life more abundantly.

John is an interesting figure where myth, metaphor, and reality do a dance.

There were those in the early church who claimed to have been taught by him, lending credibility to the idea that there was a historical John. Yet stories of him persist in ways that make him something more than a historical figure limited to a particular time. John was an apostle, possibly even the beloved disciple. He was one of the sons of Zebedee and the brother of James. John is also the name of a lineage, a collective tradition within the faith that brought us the epistles and the gospel that bear his name.

John was in the inner circle, one of three disciples brought in close to Christ to be with him when he prayed. He is also a mystic figure who has appeared in visions throughout Church history to guide and teach those who sought wisdom and understanding. There were early Christians who claimed to have been taught by him directly, and there were later saints and poets who encountered him not as a memory but as a presence.

What if I were to invite you into a world where John is the mystic who walks between the worlds, someone to whom Christ promised he would not die until he saw the kin-dom of God on earth (Mark 9:1)? What if John is an inhabitant of the other world, where the spirits live, fully alive and engaged with the life of the believer? What if he is not confined to a single century but moves calmly in the shimmering in-between?

What if I told you that John is the apostle of love we encounter when we speak about love and live in a way of love? What if he is the guide who helps us see the Word, the Light, and the Life in all of creation, helping us to perceive the deep pattern woven through the world?

John is not something or someone we are required to believe in. John is the embodiment of a relationship we have with the divine, and the one through whom we can encounter that holy life that lives in all things.

The Sons of Thunder

John and James are described as being the sons of Zebedee, which we are told means sons of thunder. We can see this energetic zeal throughout the stories, where John is always excited, always ready to speak, always ready to give an answer. He carries an intensity that is almost electric.

He has the audacity to ask Jesus what he must do to sit at his right hand in heaven. This is not the question of someone who lacks devotion. It is the question of someone overflowing with passion.

The passion we see in John can easily be described as the passion of the converted. Those who grow up within a faith often do not experience it the same way as those who come to it later. For the convert, everything is new, fresh, and radiant. Things others might take for granted crackle with lightning and light. The imagination is ignited, and the whole world seems alive with meaning.

I often feel that this is what we are encouraged to cultivate within ourselves when we are advised to maintain a beginner’s mind. We are not meant to believe that we already have all the answers or that we fully understand the stories and practices handed down to us. We are meant to approach them again and again as living realities, always questioning, always discovering something alive and moving within them.

John exemplifies this radical belief, this radical faith. When I say radical, I mean rooted deeply within. He is constantly trying to pull up new nutrients from the ground of faith, from the very source of it. We see this energy carried throughout the tradition that bears his name.

In a way, as we spoke of Mary embodying original blessing and original grace, John embodies the four paths. He carries awe and wonder. He learns emptiness and letting go. He stands at the foot of the cross. He holds God as child and as mother in the way that he takes Mary into his care after the crucifixion. He encourages us always to hold the divine child within us, to see the world through love, wonder, and awe.

He is a prophet of justice and justice-making, and one who celebrates the beauty of this world, reminding us again and again that God is love, and that whoever knows love knows God, and whoever does not know love does not know God.

In this way, John is the archetypal wayfarer, the one who walks all four paths, and the tradition that bears his name embodies that same energy as it moves out into the world.

The Poisoned Chalice

There is a traditional story about the Apostle John that tells us that those who wished to stop his preaching and teaching poisoned a goblet in hopes of killing him. As John lifted the chalice in blessing, a serpent appeared in the cup, composed of all the poison that was within it, slithered out, and fled. John drank from the chalice and was unharmed.

From the thunderous zeal of his youth, John had matured into someone who could separate light from darkness, life from death, truth from error, and that which sustains us from that which does us harm. The epistle of John tells us that love casts out fear, and in this moment we see fear running from him.

It was not John’s fear that fled. It was the fear pressed upon him. The fear of those who were so threatened by him and the message he carried that they sought to poison him. But his love was stronger.

In that love, the light of God shone forth, and the darkness could not overcome it. The poison fled from the cup. Anger, hatred, bigotry, and all the vices we sometimes glimpse in the young son of thunder are gone here. A great change has occurred within him, one so powerful it affects the world around him.

This is how we embody Christ’s teaching of being salt that preserves the world and light that shines within it. John matured into a mystical love, a compassion for all of creation, born from learning to see that within it is God, and that we are within it as well.

God is the one in whom we live, move, and have our being. Loving the world as a child, we care for it and wish it to prosper and grow healthy and strong. Seeing God as our mother, the one who cradles us and nurtures us and gives us life, we learn to live in harmony and balance with her, and to exhibit that same love for all those around us.

In the burning light of that love, darkness cannot prevail.

John is the only apostle for whom we do not have a martyrdom story. He either lives to a ripe old age or is taken into the other world, where he still wanders, waiting for the kin-dom of God to be made real among us. This transformation is the one we are called to as we learn to walk the four paths in cooperation with the Light, co-creating the world.

The Quiet Making of a Mystic

John reminds us that you cannot be a zealot for love. Zealotry requires a hardened certainty. Love requires a soft touch and a malleability that allows us to accept the world as it is, so that we are not broken by it when it does not conform to the shape we want it to take.

Through living mutual love, agape, and compassion for the world, we are changed in ways we cannot always imagine or even see. Mindful compassion is a kind of superpower. It transforms from the inside out.

Compassion does not send us out to uproot everything and force something new into being. That is what the young son of thunder would have done. Compassion instead recreates us. In recreating ourselves, we recreate our relationships. Those relationships invite others into change, and through that change a great flowering flares forth.

This is not the trite saying, “be the change you want to see.” It is embody the change you need. Through embodiment, every action we take and every relationship we hold is transformed.

If true love casts out fear, and God is love, then when we pour that love into the world we are pouring divine power itself into life. In the first path we experience awe and wonder. In the second, we open ourselves to spaciousness, pain, loss, and grief. In the third, through the union of the first two, creativity is born, and that creativity is compassion.

Sharing our stories, our art, our food, and our lives together is the heart of the creative act. From this, the fourth path arises naturally, bringing justice-making and celebration into the world.

John stands at the creative nexus of all four paths. Via Creativa is his beating heart. He calls us to see deeply, dream boldly, and act as co-creators, holding God as both child and mother so that justice and celebration may arise.

Reading the Luminous World

In the tradition that bears his name, John learned to see the world as a luminous manuscript. Through compassion, our eyes are transformed so that we can see divine light breathing through all of creation. Everything then has something to teach us.

Trees and rocks, rivers and fish, animals and birds, clouds and stars all whisper their truth. Through love, compassion, awe, and wonder, we learn to read them as beautiful text proclaiming the glory of God, the love of God, and the creative capacity of the divine flowing through all things.

The veil is pulled away. We see the world as it is, luminous. Not through prediction or threat, but through pattern and illumination. We can see light trapped or refracted. We can see truth buried in lies.

In the prologue to John’s Gospel, we see this most clearly. In the beginning was the Word, the discourse, the Logos. It was with God, and through this mutuality all things came into being. When we live through compassion, we learn to see that discourse alive in the world. We see co-creation flowing through care and relationship.

The Walker Between Worlds

St. Columba saw John as a fellow walker, dwelling in the other world, hidden in God. We wrap that mystery up and call it the other world, the reality just beyond our seeing, like the ocean beyond the waves. John is a current within that ocean.

That wisdom, that vision of compassion, continues to flow. John walks with poets, seekers, and saints. His hand guides theirs. When we are afraid or overshadowed by darkness, that current enters our lives and reminds us that love casts out fear.

In some ways, John resembles a bodhisattva, constantly with us, encouraging compassion until all things are brought into harmony and the world is healed. He awakens us to a world not of competition, but of cooperation and giving. A world where we pour ourselves out, trusting the endless stream of life flowing through us.

He is the guardian of the contemplative path, offering aid and comfort as we continue the work.

The Chalice We Are Given

Throughout our lives, we are handed many poisoned chalices that taste sweet. Some are easy to name: nationalism, bigotry, hatred, anger, conspiracy. Others are subtler.

Any cup that makes us feel greater than others, more worthy, more deserving, is poisoned. Any chalice that invites us to turn away from suffering so that we can protect only ourselves is poisoned. Words like “worthy” and “deserved” inscribe poison into the cup.

The truth learned through compassion is that no one truly deserves anything. These ideas become gates that block the path. Like John, we bless the chalice. We do not resist or deny the world. We shine light into it.

The serpent flees. Through compassionate action, word, and intention, we build the luminous world to come. Light drives out darkness by being light.

A Practice of Illumination

Your life is the chalice. The distortions you have accepted are the poison within it.

Either imagine yourself as a chalice, or raise your arms above your head in a V shape. Do not cast anything out in violence. Through contemplation of original grace and blessing, offer a blessing over your life.

Let light stream into the chalice, clarifying its contents. Notice where the light struggles to enter. These are the serpents clinging to the wine. Bring compassion to them. Make space for them to leave as you make space for light to grow.

If it feels right, ask John to say a prayer over this chalice. When ease comes, lower your arms and rest in original grace. Let it sustain you and help you grow.

Walking Toward the World to Come

As we continue walking the four paths, invite John to walk with you. He is not an authority or ruler. He does not dictate the future. He walks beside us, reminding us to live in love and to touch the light within that is the life of all humanity.

If you feel lost, ask for guidance. If you need strength, lean on him as a companion. Together, rooted in original grace, we pour our lives into the world so that a future may arise where all are healed, cared for, and none are forgotten along the way.

This is the way of John.

This is the chalice of light.

A Devotion for the Feast of St Stephen

Acts 7:55-56

55. But he, being full of the Holy Spirit, looked up steadfastly into heaven, and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God,

56. and said, “Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!”

Stephen lay on the ground, bloody and beaten, one hand reaching up toward the heavens, which had parted. He could see the one his heart desired and next to him, on his right side, he saw his Lord Jesus Christ.

Stephen was dying. He knew that his time was short. And yet he whispered a prayer that the people who were killing him would be forgiven for what they were doing.

What happened to Stephen reveals what happens when the Incarnate Word is spoken aloud in a world addicted to control. It is the consequence of certainty meeting hope. Certainty is always ready to cast stones. Hope just wants to get the job done.

This is a dark story for the day after Christmas. It sits uncomfortably close to the manger. Yet it is still a story about incarnation, about the One Life flowing through a Hellenistic Jew who had been commissioned to ensure that the poor and the needy had food, money, shelter, and care. It is the story of a man who was stoned for claiming that God does not live in buildings built by human hands, but is present everywhere in the world.

The Mutual Communion With God

Acts 6:3-5, 8

3. Therefore select from among you, brothers, seven men of good report, full of the Holy Spirit and of wisdom, whom we may appoint over this business.

4. But we will continue steadfastly in prayer and in the ministry of the word.”

5. These words pleased the whole multitude. They chose Stephen, a man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit, Philip, Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, and Nicolaus, a proselyte of Antioch;

8. Stephen, full of faith and power, performed great wonders and signs among the people.

We do not know much about Stephen before this event. In fact, we do not even know if Stephen was a historical person or a character shaped by the community to tell a deeper truth. What the story tells us, and all that the story insists on telling us, is that he was filled with the Holy Spirit.

Stephen is living this mutual communion with God, this incarnate communion, where he sees the presence of God in all of the people he is meant to take care of. The Book of Acts tells us that the early church gave everything to the collective, and then redistributed those resources to ensure that everyone was cared for.

This is a vibrant story. It lives out the teachings of Jesus rather than merely repeating them. We are here to take care of the poor, the hungry, the thirsty, the sick, the infirm, the widow and the orphan, the imprisoned, and the refugee.

The role of the deacon was not to enforce doctrinal rigidity. It was not to preserve institutional authority. It was not to ensure harmony by suppressing conflict. The purpose of the deacon was to make sure that everyone was taken care of, that the grace meant to be poured out through collective care was available to everyone.

Stephen is portrayed as a perfect example of this grace. He insists that God can be found outside the temple precinct. He insists that God can be experienced wherever he is and in whatever he is doing. And he insists that everyone else can do the same.

God is everywhere. God is the one in whom we live, move, and have our being.

In this story, we see Stephen taking care of that manifestation of the divine in all of its places. We see him defending a vision of reality that insists that God is everywhere.

God Is Everywhere

Acts 7:48-49

48. However, the Most High doesn’t dwell in temples made with hands, as the prophet says,

49. ‘heaven is my throne, and the earth a footstool for my feet. What kind of house will you build me?’ says the Lord. ‘Or what is the place of my rest?

Stephen’s speech is sometimes interpreted as anti-Semitic, and it has certainly been used in anti-Semitic ways. That misuse is a grave distortion of the text. What I actually see here is a person struggling to define the role of God in the world, and insisting that God is not contained within an edifice.

If God lives exclusively in a temple, then those who control the temple control access to God. There is no greater power over others than the ability to limit their access to the divine. So-called preachers, prophets, seers, and apostles throughout history have performed this trick in order to aggrandize themselves and to ensure their own prosperity, power, and security.

If Stephen is right, then God is not contained behind walls that others control. If that is true, then the priesthood has no power beyond what others give to it. That means any priesthood would be responsible to the people it serves, not the other way around.

Jesus said that the first shall be last (Matthew 19:30; 20:16; Mark 10:31; Luke 13:30), and the greatest shall be the servant of all (Matthew 23:11; Mark 9:35; 10:43-45). That idea is deeply threatening to power. It endangers those who have entrenched themselves in systems that grant them authority over others, especially systems that claim control over the eternal fate of other people.

When our fate in this life and the life to come is not dictated by frail human authorities who claim to have power over it, their purpose disappears. It evaporates like dew before the dawn sun. Nothing strikes fear into the elite like the loss of power, authority, and grandeur.

The Priests did not want to be ordinary. They wanted to be secure beyond questioning. They wanted to occupy a position so elevated that harming them would threaten both life in this world and life in the world to come.

If they could not contain God, then they did not possess the divine power they claimed. Their control would dissolve, and they would become like everyone else. They did not want that.

The Violence of Certainty

Acts 7:54

54. Now when they heard these things, they were cut to the heart, and they gnashed at him with their teeth.

Stephen’s death was not caused by heresy. It was caused by fear.

Certainty, when it feels threatened, becomes violent. People who are terrified that their worldview might collapse often lash out. They are not responding from clarity or conviction, but from panic.

They were cut to the heart. But instead of allowing that wound to open them to grace, they turned it into a weapon. Empire replaces awe with fear. Fear demands control. Moralism becomes a substitute for justice. Rage becomes a substitute for truth.

Stephen exposes the violence of certainty simply by refusing to stop speaking.

God is Always Here

Acts 7:55

55. But he, being full of the Holy Spirit, looked up steadfastly into heaven, and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God,

Stephen sees the heavens open before the first stone is thrown.

He sees God in glory and Jesus standing at God’s right hand before anything happens to him. He knows the die is cast. His fate is sealed. But before the pain comes, he sees the truth.

God was always there.

God is always here.

This vision is not a reward for suffering, and it is not a revelation of Stephen’s personal importance. It is an unveiling. Apocalypse means unveiling. The curtain is pulled back, and Stephen can see reality as it is, through a frame he can understand in that moment.

Everything exists within God, and God exists within everything. Nowhere is apart from him.

This reality is often obscured in moments of tragedy, fear, threat, and harm. And yet, in this moment, the veil is pulled back. The sky cannot stay closed once the Word is spoken truthfully.

The Outpouring of Grace

Acts 7:59-60

59. They stoned Stephen as he called out, saying, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit!”

60. He kneeled down, and cried with a loud voice, “Lord, don’t hold this sin against them!” When he had said this, he fell asleep.

Forgiveness is the easiest way for us to see grace.

When Stephen asks that those who are stoning him be forgiven, he is asking the cosmos to grant them grace. He can see the fear that has led to anger and hatred within them. He knows they are acting out of terror.

When we are frightened, our instinct is to fight, freeze, or flee. They chose to fight. That instinct is often beyond conscious control. Their terror had blinded them. In that moment, they are doing something that may not reflect their true nature. They may not be killers in themselves. They may simply be people so terrified that their worldview and their life’s work might be in vain that they act irrationally.

As a final act of grace, Stephen pours his life out into the world, allowing the Spirit of Christ to flow through him. He grants his killers the same forgiveness Jesus granted his own.

The question here is not whether we could do the same in such a moment. The question is whether we have access to the same grace.

The answer is yes.

When we root ourselves in original grace and recognize the world as original blessing, that same grace can flow through us. Stephen’s life shows us what it looks like to build a life that allows that flow to move freely.

In this moment of ultimate giving, Stephen is not thinking of himself. The veil has opened. He knows he is returning to the source from which he came. His concern, as always, is for others, that they might learn to live without fear, anger, and hatred.

God is love. Those who do not know love do not know God. We will be known by our love.

Stephen’s final act is an act of love. It is soul force. It is satyagraha. It is the truth allowed to speak for itself. We do not fight lies with violence. We fight lies with truth, held deep in our being, until the lies cannot stand in the light.

The Unstoppable Word

Acts 7:58

58. They threw him out of the city, and stoned him. The witnesses placed their garments at the feet of a young man named Saul.

Stephen did not have to die. Those who killed him could have chosen differently. Perhaps he could have chosen different words. But more likely, they were so entrenched in the fortress of their certainty that words alone could not break through.

And yet the Word does not stop.

The power of incarnation is that we become examples to others. It is through that example that Saul’s eyes were eventually opened. The death of Stephen reminds us that when we speak truth into a world that does not want to hear it, sometimes the darkness fights back.

But its tools are different from ours.

Darkness fights with violence, anger, and hatred. We fight with compassion, grace, and love. Those tools do not look equal in the moment. But in the long run, when we see the evils done out of hatred and the grace given out of love, grace wins the day as long as someone carries the story forward.

Violence instills fear. Love casts out fear.

In the story of Stephen, we do not see bravery. We see love. He wants others to experience the same aliveness in the world and the same grace that he does, not to be mired in the rules and structures that hold them back.

The Path of Grace

Grace is the state we are born into, and it is the state through which we can continually live. It is not easy. We are taught to fight, to stand our ground, to never allow others power over us.

Original blessing reminds us that no one is ever truly above us. We can stand on the ground of being itself and know that the world is filled with grace even when it cannot see it.

When the instinct arises to fight, freeze, or flee, grace is the other option. Offering forgiveness rather than hatred. Offering peace rather than anger. Offering solutions rather than conflict.

Grace is the harder path. Jesus said the way that leads to destruction is broad, and the way of life is narrow. Few find it. It is difficult to walk the path of grace in a world built on violence, recrimination, and hostility.

If we want a better world to come, we must first learn to walk in this grace ourselves, and then help others find that same love and compassion within themselves. Not because we share the same religion, but because it is the nature of life.

Survival of the fittest tells us who dies. Cooperation tells us who lives. Mutual aid sustains ecosystems. Without love, grace, and compassion for those who are different from us, no system survives.

Stephen lived this grace. He simply wanted people to realize that God was everywhere, and that through mutual aid and action, we can take care of everyone, not just an elite few.

Faith is the courage to live through grace in hope of creating a better world to come. Sometimes that means taking the hard road.

But if no one takes that road, we will all get lost in the woods.

It’s a familiar image. A frightened young girl riding a donkey while her husband leads them on. The Empire has forced them from their homes, and even though she is soon to give birth to their child, they have to travel. They have to move. They are refugees in their own homeland.

The couple is forced to pick up everything that they have and move to a place far away because a faceless empire demands it. Not long after they arrive, she goes into labor. Her husband flees out into the city in hopes of finding a midwife. This is their first child. Separated from their family. Finally, the young girl gives birth, and they name the child Jesus.

Not long after the child is born, they are forced to flee again from another imperial tyrant threatening to murder their child.

Many place the story in the city of Bethlehem. From this insignificant city, crushed under the boots of empire, something holy happened. God takes on human flesh. That terrified couple becomes the parents of the creator who made them.

Before anyone wrote songs about this city or the silent night in which the child was born. Before the child was seen as holy and his mother as blessed, this place, these people, were already holy. Their holiness did not extend from what they had done or because of the special circumstances of their life, but because they were already held in the One Life flowing through all things, recognizing all as holy.

To this day, this scene plays out somewhere in the world: a frightened mother giving birth to a child under an oppressive regime. Soon they too will have to flee for their lives. Yet life goes on, and the holy is there among them.

# God chooses dependence

The real power in this story that we tell every year is not that God chose to arrive in glory. Jesus wasn’t born as a king, and even the magi who came to worship him and proclaim him a king had to seek to find him because he wasn’t born in a palace. They understood the risk to seek him out. The risk that they were putting on their own life and on the life of the child, which is why they had to flee themselves to escape the wrath of Herod.

The incarnation of Christ is not a story about glory. It is a story of risk. God enters the life of humanity not in power on a throne, but in the most fragile, vulnerable position that He could. He chose to depend on a young girl and an untested father. The threat of Herod’s wrath loomed over them, and the terror that could rain down any second from the Roman Empire filled every moment of their lives.

The incarnation of God depended on so many things. The health and well-being of a young woman’s body to carry the child to term. The mercy and compassion of her betrothed not to cast her out and have her stoned for carrying the child that was not his. It relied on the help of strangers and the wisdom of the Magi not to turn them in. The warmth of the animals kept them cozy at night. If the Empire noticed and cared, it could have snuffed out their lives before we ever heard of them.

It makes you wonder how many times this played out before but did not end with a live child in the end, that did not end with the Holy Family safe and living. They were able to find the hospitality and the compassion to survive in these harsh times. The compassion of their community and strangers gave them hope. They weren’t empowered by hierarchy, but by the communion of all those who supported them through these days.

That’s the power of this story. The indwelling communion of God and Christ keeps them alive through people living God through compassion and hospitality. God did not lower Himself to save us. God entered the same fragile web of community and connection that we already live in. If that web had broken, we would never know the names of Mary, Joseph, or Jesus.

The incarnation is not God arriving in control. This is a God who entrusts themself to the world.

This is how the story is remembered. But even if Jesus were born and lived his entire natural life in Nazareth before starting his public ministry, everything I said is still true. The empire of Rome controlled and brutalized Judea and the Galilee. Mary’s own family were refugees from Sepphoris.

Every child requires this web of compassion to come into the world. For God to trust humanity so much that He would enter into this web with us is a marvelous and mysterious thing.

# Moments of Revelation

Since story is how we engage with the world, let’s continue digging into the story that the tradition has held so close to its heart for all these millennia.

## A Revelation of Wonder

Every newborn commands attention without explanation. When we look into that fresh face, we feel this awe wash over us. New life has come into the world. In that moment, we understand deep down in our bones that life is sacred. And when we see such a small thing breathing, it brings wonder into our lives.

The stories tell us that when Jesus was born, angels appeared in the heavens to shepherds who were watching their flocks, and they called them and told them where the child was so that they could go and behold this wonder. They sang a blessing over the earth, that there would be peace amongst those of goodwill. These are the ones who strengthen the web and nurture life, especially the fragility of newborn life.

We awaken to this awe in the face of every newborn child, and every morning as the sun breaks over the horizon at the dawn and as it sets into that beautiful twilight before night. As the stars fill the heavens, the awe awakens us to all the glories of life.

## A Revelation of the Indwelling God

The One Life flows through all things, from the straw in the manger that insulated the baby to the breath that warmed him. The animals heated the air. Creation did not step back from incarnation. It made room for it.

The cosmos itself bowed in as life incarnated into this sweet child. The one light in the heavens guided the Magi through a star. It told them that a king had been born, and they went and sought him, seeking that light within them. The shepherds felt the light erupt around them as a grand aurora in the sky of angels proclaiming the glory of God and peace on Earth to people of goodwill. In the Proto-Evangelion of James, it says that time itself stopped at the moment that Christ was born.

The life that is in all things took a drop out of the ocean and filled the sweet child with it.

## A Revelation of Emptying

As the one life poured itself into all those there and present, so much more was poured out into the cosmos. Mary poured her soul out to the limit to give birth to the child. Ask any woman who has given birth how much strain and intensity flows through them as the child is born.

The Magi gave precious gifts. The shepherds risked their flock to go and see what the heavens had proclaimed to them. Mary and Joseph gave up everything to make the arduous journey to keep the child safe.

Emptying is not the negation of the self. It is the giving of the self into relationship. The relationship between Joseph and Mary, between them and the child, between the three of them and the divine, and between all the people that would come into their lives and themselves. God does not pour out power, but presence.

## A Revelation of Original Blessing

No one in this story required purification. Mary was found by the angel to be full of grace when he announced the child and asked if she would bear him. While Joseph required some gentle guidance, even his heart was found pure in that he wanted no harm to come to Mary, even though he could not understand what was happening to her.

We don’t have to be made worthy before God arrives. God arrives in each and every moment without prompting. God is already within everything and everyone and calls it good.

The story doesn’t tell us about the faith or the morals of the shepherds or the magi. They did not have to be worthy to come. They were called, and they came. The cosmos called out to them, and they heard. Moreover, they listened and lived God by acting on what they heard.

All of these people lived in original blessing and original grace. And God incarnated to indwell among them.

# Indwelling Communion

This is the indwelling communion of Christ. Christ was with them and within them, around them, and through them. He is revealed through their actions, which are the sign of their faith. After all, faith is just the courage to act out of that great sense of awe and wonder, openness and silence, the willingness to let go and let be, to be creative, to make justice, and to celebrate with joy.

Christ is not here while we’re over there. God did not visit us from outside. Through shared life, shared vulnerability, shared breath. We live the One Life, and the Incarnation is always present with us.

God is within us, and we are within God. Christ is within us and we are within Christ. In this mutual indwelling, we share a communion at the deepest level.

# Christ in us, the Hope of Glory

Not just now in this season, but especially now. We find ourselves asking, where is life being entrusted to our care? Right now, in this moment, in this breath. Where is life calling to be born? Where am I called to go? What am I called to do?

That is the light shining on the path before us, and the wisdom and word resonating deep inside, guiding us to live God continually and without end, living our lives as prayers without ceasing. In living with wisdom, compassion, justice, and equity, we are forging a brand new and beautiful world.

Who is being asked to make room? The world did not have to break for God to enter. The only thing that was required was a yes. A series of yeses, one after another after another, until the child was born.

Look, where are we being called to now? Where is your attention going? This is a shift within us and our attention is being called somewhere. This is not a God asking to be worshipped but a God asking to be held. In our deep and fragile human vulnerability, in a world threatened by the same forces it was back then, we with open eyes look out to see where Christ must be born.

While we celebrate Christmas once a year, Christmas is never over. It is continuing wherever this indwelling communion is honored. We are in God and God is in us. Christ is in us and we are in Christ. Forever and ever. Amen.

The Threshold of Incarnation

The Incarnation of the Light is not a one-time event locked in history; it is the ongoing revelation of the Cosmic Christ woven through all things. The Divine Word and Light shape reality, not through anything we can weigh or quantify, but in the way they kindle love, compassion, justice, wisdom, and every fruit that brings life to bloom. As we cultivate these gifts within ourselves, we join the creative heartbeat of the cosmos, helping to heal what is broken and letting the sacred Light move through us until the world remembers how to flourish again.

Mary stands at this threshold as our icon and guide. She embodies Original Blessing and reveals that grace, wisdom, and divine presence are stitched into the very fabric of creation. As we look to her as the cosmic mother who consents to birth the Holy into the world, we learn how to participate in that same sacred creativity, letting mercy, justice, and deep compassion take root in us until we become living bearers of the Light, God living through our very flesh.

Creation itself is our first textbook of faith and our oldest sanctuary. Through awe, it teaches us that everything is alive, interconnected, and shimmering with the One Life in which we live, move, and have our being. When we see the world not as a pile of objects but as a web of kin, our choices become living prayers of creativity, justice, and celebration. In that shared practice of wonder and responsibility, we help heal suffering, midwife the world to come, and step more fully into the Gospel of Becoming.

For those of us drawn to the message of Jesus, all of this prepares us to welcome the Cosmic Christ in, with, and through all things so we can co-create the world to come with him to bring the kin-dom to the world.

John 1:9

9. The true light that enlightens everyone was coming into the world.

At the precipice of Christmas, we open ourselves to the Light taking flesh. The Light does not elevate humanity above creation, but illuminates the intricate weave we are woven into.

Christ Who Empties: Kenosis as Divine Solidarity

Philippians 2:5-8

5. Have this in your mind, which was also in Christ Jesus,

6. who, existing in the form of God, didn’t consider equality with God a thing to be grasped,

7. but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men.

8. And being found in human form, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, yes, the death of the cross.

If we are going to live God into the world, then we need to understand what it means to have the same mind in us that was also in Christ Jesus. Jesus was not pretending to be God or claiming to be God but existed in the form of God. In other words, Jesus existed in exactly the same way that God exists. In our tradition, we refer to this as living God. God as a verb.

Rabbi David A. Cooper, God is a Verb, 69

The closest we can come to thinking about God is as a process rather than a being.  We can think of it as “be-ing,” as verb rather than noun…Most of our verbs are considered transitive, which require a direct object, or intransitive, which do not.  (Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi) suggests that God-ing is a mutually interactive verb, one which entails an interdependency between two subjects, each being the object for the other.

The mind that we see here in Christ Jesus is one that, while it understands that it is in the form of God, it is constantly pouring itself out, even into the form, the identity of a servant. This is the mind of absolute service. What we are doing in this world is mutually co-creating with it, pouring ourselves out in the form of our living so that it will be remade into the grand world that we desire to see in the world to come.

When we reclaim our identity as people who live God into the world, we are adopting this mindset and acting in this world through our Christhood. We are healers, those who act from a place of awe, wonder, and delight, and who, through spaciousness, openness, and the willingness to let go, utilize our creative acts to birth compassion, and through that compassion to give rise to justice and celebration in the world.

So as we take this time in the womb of the Spirit to await the coming of the Cosmic Christ, we are examining that glory, that Word and Wisdom, that Light and Life that flowed through Him as He took upon Himself the name of God.

Bearing The Name of God

John 1:14

14. The Word became flesh, and lived among us. We saw his glory, such glory as of the one and only Son of the Father, full of grace and truth.

The child of God is the one who bears the name of God within them. This has been an old tradition that we see in the Davidic line of kings. In taking on that most sacred name, one is taking upon themselves all of the grace and truth that flows through it. The name of God is being itself. That being created the world through original grace, in original blessing, with original mind and original wisdom.

When John says, we saw his glory, that glory is the name of God. In the scriptures, we often see this conflation of the glory of God and the name of God. The word here is the tabernacle of the name, and the tabernacle in which we live. This is the dwelling place of the name. When we take on the name of Christ Jesus, we are entering into that tabernacle through the narrow gate so that we too are recognizing our life in God.

That doesn’t mean that this is something exclusive to Christians. This is a state found throughout the cosmos and in every religion and culture. This is how we as Christopagans name this tradition and call it forth inside our lives.

This is the mystery revealed in the High Priestly Prayer of Jesus.

Process of Living God

John 17:6

6. I revealed your name to the people whom you have given me out of the world. They were yours, and you have given them to me. They have kept your word.

Christ reveals to us this name of God by encouraging us to live without anxiety and understanding that the natural flow flows through us, that the same spirit that gives food to the creatures of the field and clothing to the flowers is there with us, reminding us also that it is our duty to make sure that everyone is fed and given water, comfort when they are sick, visited when they are imprisoned, and helped when they are seeking refuge.

We see this mutuality in all of the teachings of Jesus. That we are comforted when we mourn, that we are here to take care of one another and to love our neighbor as ourselves, and how Jesus pairs that commandment with our duty to love God with our heart, mind, and spirit.

This is what it means to see God as a mutually interactive verb and to see our place within it. For in the process of living God, in bringing compassion, justice, awe, wonder, delight, creativity, spaciousness, and celebration into the world, we are channeling the very powers of God into life itself. We recognize that Christ is within us, around us, and flowing through us just as God is in us, around us, and flowing through us. That this energy is omnipresent throughout the cosmos.

Oneness of God

John 17:11

11. I am no more in the world, but these are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, keep them through your name which you have given me, that they may be one, even as we are.

Jesus prayed that we may be one, even as he was with the Father. That oneness comes not from all agreeing on the same things or all believing the same things. This is not a oneness born out of conformity or doctrinal obedience. No, this is a oneness that comes through our actions as mutually interactive verbs, as people who are coming together to live God into the world.

This is the process of chrismation, of deification, of our becoming Christ to this world, and in so doing, becoming God to this world. Not, as we read before: to puff ourselves up and see that we are higher than others; but to understand that we have this infinite well within us that we can pour out even unto death, a death on a cross, that we can continuously allow that divine flow to work through us for the betterment of ourselves, our communities, and our world to restore and heal it.

Philippians 2:9

9. Therefore God also highly exalted him, and gave to him the name which is above every name;

The name that was given to Christ is the all-holy name, the Tetragrammaton, the name of being itself. It is the name above every name, and it is the name that dwells within us so long as we do not take it up in vain.

Not Taking God’s Name in Vain

How does that work? Well, we’ve seen this process very explicitly put forward in Torah. In Exodus, we see God sending an angel before the people, and they are given a very particular command.

Exodus 23:20-23

20. “Behold, I send an angel before you, to keep you by the way, and to bring you into the place which I have prepared.

21. Pay attention to him, and listen to his voice. Don’t provoke him, for he will not pardon your disobedience, for my name is in him.

22. But if you indeed listen to his voice, and do all that I speak, then I will be an enemy to your enemies, and an adversary to your adversaries.

23. For my angel shall go before you, and bring you in to the Amorite, the Hittite, the Perizzite, the Canaanite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite; and I will cut them off.

This angel carries within the name of God and thus has the powers of God residing within them. This angel can forgive disobedience (sin) and not hold it against people. This angel can work in the world in the person and voice of God. That is living God.

In the same way, the divine name rested upon the angel. The divine name rested within the Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth, a Galilean who spoke to the needs of the people that were being unserved by patriarchy and empire. The same Jesus who told us to work for one another and to bring healing and restoration to the world, to proclaim the jubilee year where debts are forgiven and healing is poured out on the people and the land.

In our humility, we do not take up the name of God but the name of Christ, the one who holds the cosmos together, the one in whom the name lives. We, as living temples, carry within us the ark of the covenant, of this new covenant, that lives within us, bearing the name of God within it. And we need to be careful not to take upon ourselves this name in vain.

Exodus 20:7 (cf. Deuteronomy 5:11)

7. “You shall not take the name of Yahweh your God in vain, for Yahweh will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain.

This is one of the most misunderstood commandments of the Ten. It has come to mean that we should not proclaim the name of God in a profane way, in other words, outside of holy or sacred duties. This has led many people to not say the name of God, and some pious Jews don’t even write the word out entirely, even in English. I practice this mitzvah this way: when I say HaShem instead of pronouncing the holy name of God. But that is not what this commandment is referring to.

To take the name of God is to either invoke it as an oath or as a sign of your power and authority. In this way, taking the name of God in order to lie or to trick others into seeing us as more powerful, more high, more worthy of devotion, praise, or gifting, is to take the name of God in vain. Since the name of God resides in Christ, to call oneself a Christian and to do so when not being about the work that we are called in living God, in being this force of compassion in the world, that is taking the name of God in vain. These are examples of violations of this commandment:

• To trick people to give their wealth to you so that you can enrich yourself at their expense

• To give yourself power in the groveling of others who think that you are somehow superior to them

• To elevate yourself or the Christian community above others

• To claim that the anointing absolves pastors of all sins

• To pretend to heal others when you do not have the power to do so

• To refuse to grant forgiveness and mercy

• To refuse to care for the stranger, hungry, poor, homeless, or imprisoned among us

• To alienate anyone from the love of God

• To call injustice, hardheartedness, and the proclamation of lies holy

As those who use the name Christian, we are called to pour out that divinity that is within us, to use it through service and support, to use it to help others as we live God in Christ in the world. That giving of ourselves is not self-negation, but self-giving. It is the love that pours out from us into the world, that love which itself is God.

This is how the infinite enters our finite world. This is how the infinite works in us. It is not about pity, but about kinship. It is how we interrelate to each other in recognizing our own interbeing and mutual existence.

If my neighbor is suffering, how can I expect not to suffer? Ignoring problems does not make them go away. You cannot punish someone out of poverty or out of homelessness or out of hunger or thirst. All you can do is provide them food, water, a place to live, and a way to live in dignity.

The gospel that we live, the life that we are called to, is one of solidarity. God does not stand above creation. God has entered creation and is flowing through all things. God is the One Life within all of us. God becomes creature among creature, woven into the very ecology of breath and dust, of star and storm.

The incarnation began long before that trip to Bethlehem, before Mary even heard the whisper of the angel. The mysteries of Advent began at the first flaring forth. They have always been true. Stars have been born and died so that we could be here. They did not know that we would come. They did not know the certainty of the world before them, and neither do we. They lived their life for the betterment of the cosmos and for the delight of being a star.

This is the mystery of the season that we are entering into. The glorious truth that the cosmos has always been becoming, transforming, and transmuting throughout ages past and into aeons in the future. A new thing is always rising, and we are called to be a part of that great flow and consciously to steer it as best we can towards a good world to come. A precious future world in which all are taken care of, and there is no hunger or thirst or homelessness or need to be a refugee, a world where all are healed. But until we get there, it is our task to ever strive towards it.

Christ Who Fills All Things

Colossians 1:15-17

15. who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.

16. For by him all things were created, in the heavens and on the earth, things visible and things invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers; all things have been created through him, and for him.

17. He is before all things, and in him all things are held together.

Christ is the image of the invisible God, meaning the tangible, the touchable face, the thing made in such a way that we have access to it, but within it, it bears the divine name. As divine wisdom, this Christ is the firstborn of all creation, who played with God before the foundations of the earth. And through this cosmic Christ, all things were created in heavens above and on earth below, everything visible and invisible.

That phrase visible and invisible is doing a lot of work here. It is not just about what we can see and what we can’t see. It’s about those things that are beyond our ability to see. Thrones, powers, and dominions have been turned into orders of angels by later Christian mystics and theologians. But they are concepts. They are ideas on how we order our cosmos. They are derived from human intellect and through human work and through human culture.

This is the process of co-creation in action. It is not just the divine Christ, the image of God outside of us, but the very image of God within us that was put in us when we were born, when we were created, when the universe was new. This is the work of the One Life co-creating everything.

The Christ child’s cradle is not just a manger in Bethlehem, or the heart of the believer, but the cosmos itself. The power of the story is not that Christ is an exception, but the pattern. We, like him, share in the Word, the Life, and the Wisdom of God, and through living God into the world, co-create the cosmos. That doesn’t mean that we can say, “Let there be a star,” and a new star is formed. But it does mean we can say collectively, this king shall fall, and that king falls.

History is replete with the collective power of people to change the world for better and for worse. It is the great lie of power to say that a great man, they usually pick a man, was responsible for those changes. They may have been the spearhead, they may have been the mouthpiece of the movement, but without the movement behind them, they never could have succeeded. Even the most tacit acceptance of the authority statements of others is a deed to co-create that thing in our name. That is why we have to be careful to ever be living God and not abdicating our duty to work wonder, awe and delight, justice and spaciousness, celebration and creativity into everything we do.

Unlike how the Platonists and Neoplatonists saw the world, matter is a sacrament, and through its sacramental glory, it brings grace into our lives. When we reject that Greco-Roman layer that was added on top of Christianity, we begin to see this glory of God shining through everything. The cosmos is our actual cathedral, not the stone edifices built through labor. Life, the life of each and every one of us, is the ongoing incarnation of the light and life of God into the world.

As we’re reminded in Psalm 104, the springs run, the winds move, and the creatures sing the song of God. When we learn to sing in unison or in harmony, then great changes come. And I mean great in the way that something is large, not necessarily in the way something could be good.

All that is necessary to change the world is to get enough people to consent to those changes. That mechanism can be used for good or for evil. It is our sacred calling to do everything in our power to ensure that it is used for good.

Christ Who Reconciles: The Restoration Gospel

Colossians 1:20 - WEB

20. and through him to reconcile all things to himself, by him, whether things on the earth, or things in the heavens, having made peace through the blood of his cross.

This powerful conclusion, Paul is saying that through Christ, God acts fully to restore the entire cosmos, drawing all things back into right relationship with God, actively creating peace through the self-giving which absorbs the violent act of the cross.

The sacrifice at the cross is not a sacrifice made to propitiate an angry God. This is not a human sacrifice to pay a cost. Here, we see the cosmic Christ embodied in Jesus, going to his death and not repaying violence for violence. We see the compassion of God played out fully here, that in absorbing all of that hatred, anger, and imperial suffering into himself, the world is restored to peace.

This is framed not only as a symbolic act but as an act that is rooted deep in the being of the universe. As we have discussed, God as an interrelational verb, we can see that interrelation happening here. All of the teachings of Christ are epitomized on the cross. When he receives hatred, he gives back love. When he receives condemnation, he gives back pardon. When he receives death, he gives life. This is the transmutation of evil into good. The very restorative process that exists within each and every one of us.

Tonglen is a Tibetan Buddhist practice of compassion in which a person mindfully breathes in the suffering of others and breathes out relief, love, and healing, not as self punishment but as an act of radical solidarity. The practice trains the heart to stop fleeing pain and instead meet it with openness, allowing compassion to replace fear and separation.

Seen through a Christian lens, the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross can be understood in a similar way. Jesus willingly receives the weight of human violence, shame, and brokenness and responds not with retaliation but with forgiveness, mercy, and restored relationship. In both Tonglen and the cross, suffering is not denied or bypassed but taken into oneself and transformed through love, revealing a way of being in the world where compassion absorbs harm and gives life back in return.

This is how we bring reconciliation to the world. We see and acknowledge the true suffering that exists within it and do what is within our power to alleviate it, relieve it, and bring peace. Our work is about restoration, restorative healing, restorative justice, restorative compassion, and restorative care. We are here to bring restoration both between the human and the divine, between the human and the earth, and between humans and each other. But more than anything, we are here to bring restoration between our soul and its own depths.

When we deny our own ability to give to the world, or restrict people from giving to the world, then we are shutting off key aspects of who we are as people. All of us experience awe and wonder, spaciousness, creativity, a desire for justice, and celebration. When we close those off to ourselves and others, then we are doing harm to the life of the world.

We cannot shield ourselves from the pain that others experience. We have to engage with it and find ways to alleviate it. Ways to bring down the greed, the hunger for power, and the fear of others that makes that suffering so much worse and often causes that suffering in the first place.

Christ Who Indwells: Incarnation as a Shared Vocation

Colossians 1:27

27. to whom God was pleased to make known what are the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory;

As soon as we can realize that the message of the cross and the message of Advent are not about the Christ out there, but the Christ within us. That Christ in us is the hope of glory, that Christ is always in us, in each and every one of us, though some try to chain or imprison that Christ. Once we realize that Christ can be set free and that we can learn to live in the divine flow with Christ within us, around us, and flowing through us, we can take our place in the world.

This is not a path that is exclusive to Christians, but this is the path that Christ calls us to. We are not called to a theology or to a belief system, but to a system of transformation of ourselves, of our families, of our communities, and of the entire cosmos. We are called to free that Christ energy within us and let it flow through us to co-create the world.

Incarnation is not something that happened 2000 years ago, it is something that is happening now. Not just in this season, but in every moment of the world. Every time a child is born, Christ is born in this world. Every time love is born in someone’s heart, Christ is born in this world. Every time justice is done in this world, Christ is born in this world. In every act of creativity and wonder and celebration, Christ is born in this world. When we make space for our differences and a place to acknowledge suffering, Christ is born in this world.

The Light, the Word, it all became flesh, not just in a rabbi 2,000 years ago, but in us. This life was the light of all humanity, the Gospel tells us. This light is the life of all humanity, the Gospel tells us. It is the light within us yearning to breathe free.

When we allow ourselves to become bearers of the word, carriers of the light, and participants in the divine becoming, or to say it another way, we are agents of transformation in this world. Our lives are renewed from the inside out.

Like Mary, all we have to do is accept the invitation and say yes. Our Divine Mother is the heart beating within us, that original grace, that original blessing calling us forward. In her womb, our hearts are formed. Her fidelity is our path. In her grace, we find the Christ child within us and have the courage to raise that spirit and give it life in the world anew.

Kenosis as Our Path: Emptying as Hospitality to Love

Philippians 2:5

5. Have this in your mind, which was also in Christ Jesus,

This is the way we walk the path. It is continual self-emptying, but not ascetic self-emptying. We’re not denying ourselves. We are not denying our pleasures. We’re not denying the world. We are opening ourselves enough that we can empty ourselves of fear, not self. We are emptying domination, not dignity. We are releasing falsehood, not our voice. We’re doing all of this so that love, wisdom, truth, and justice can flourish within us and flow through us out into the world.

We empty ourselves because we know the flow of life is flowing in us and that we will always be refilled.

Isaiah 40:31

31. But those who wait for Yahweh will renew their strength. They will mount up with wings like eagles. They will run, and not be weary. They will walk, and not faint.

We are not passively waiting for God. We are actively engaging that deep strength within us that comes from the One Life. We are living our Christhood into the world. We are living God into the world. We are breaking the chains that have been put on us by the power hungry, the greedy, and the fearful, so that we can erase the mask that they have placed over us, or even the mask our own egos have built before us so that our light can shine forth.

Christ is in you, the hope of glory. Christ is in me, the hope of glory. Christ is in us, the hope of glory. Glory. Glory can be ours. The world can be made anew. Restoration can come, but we must first have patience and strength.

Becoming Light-Bearers in a Shadowed World

Open your heart to that light, that hope of glory deep within us. Allow that love, peace, and joy to flow through you. This is not a one-time name-it-and-claim-it kind of prayer. It is an invitation to an inner awakening, not to receive salvation from outside but from within. We don’t have to wait for another person to liberate us. Liberation begins as a state of mind, and through collective action becomes real, manifested into the world.

Open yourself up to that one true light shining within you. The same light that shone forth when the cosmos was new. That font of original grace, original blessing, that place where all things are made new. The word resonates in our very bones. Even without our knowing it, we collaborate with the cosmos for everything that we have become and will become. All you have to do is recognize it.

The seed of the Tree of Life is within each and every one of us. All we must do is tend and water it so that it can grow. We do that through a life of awe, silence, spaciousness, creativity, justice, and celebration. Seek out the steps that bring you these things. Delight in what you find. That delight is the light that shines on the tree and makes it strong so that our life flows ever more brilliant from us.

Light of All Creation

Blessed light of all creation that shone forth at the beginning. The one who shaped the cosmos and gave it form in wisdom and in delight. Open our eyes so that we might see.

Help us to have the same mind in us that was also in Christ Jesus, that we can live God into the world, ever emptying ourselves out since we know the font of all life flows within us and through us.

Teach us to reconcile all things to each other, to ourselves, and to the cosmos. May we leave peace, love, and joy in our wake as we ever work for equity, justice, and right relationship.

O most holy light that indwells and illuminates all things, grant us the ability to see where we can be of use and where we can take refuge. Help us to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord, where justice flows like water and everyone is taken care of.

Give us ears to hear so that we may ever listen to the words flowing from the mouth of God. Life, joy, awe, silence, openness.

Give us eyes to see the light shining in all things, from the stars in the heavens above to the rocks beneath our feet, in the rivers and in the trees, and in the faces of everyone we meet, no matter how much they may have clouded it or barred it away from the world.

As the Divine Mother bears us in the image of her Son, help us to usher that life into the world. Teach us to live Christ, to live God to everyone that we meet, so that in our words and in our actions and in our thoughts all there is is life, love, and compassion in abundance.

The song of creation is the great peace beyond all understanding. Part moving with part, whole moving with whole, together in one great dance throughout the cosmos. Help us to sing the song.

Awaken our hearts so that we may become one with Christ, for he is the all in all. He is the thread of the great tapestry of life, and the light by which we see it. The gentle wind that causes it to move, and the word that it constantly speaks.

In awe, may we delight in the glories of God. In open silence, may we sit with what we do not understand and what causes pain. In creativity, may we dance, giving birth to God, who is our Mother. In justice, may we ever celebrate, knowing our part that we have played in it and will continue to play until all the world is restored to the great vision of unity and peace.

Amen.

Share

Returning to the First Textbook of Faith

Psalms 104:1

1. Bless Yahweh, my soul. Yahweh, my God, you are very great. You are clothed with honor and majesty.

It begins with awe. Everything begins with awe. Wonder. Delight. Awe awakens us to the interconnection between us and all things. Awe is the root of all of our spiritual experiences.

When we see the psalmist bless the holy name of God, we know that name is being itself. It is the foundation of existence. God is our being, our interbeing, our interconnection, that thing that binds all the cosmos together. It is the field in which we take action, the very breath we breathe.

Our ancestors connected the wind and breath with the idea that we have as soul or spirit. That unseen movement that is life at its most basic level, an unseen force that is, that moves, that animates, and that makes everything possible.

When we contemplate the deep mysteries of time, we find ourselves faced with conundrums like why does anything exist? Why did the great fountain of particles and energy flare forth? If there was nothing, we could not ask these questions. And so, as someone on the inside, it is difficult for us to puzzle out the causes. We are dumbstruck in awe both in its meaning of wonder and its meaning of fear. If things had been slightly different, nothing would be that is. All throughout time, we see these moments where life in the universe could have gone a different way, but it didn’t. From our perspective, this looks like fate; it looks like we were always destined to become. But the future is uncertain. Only the past has been written.

We swim daily in a great river of possibilities. So many things could happen, but only a few will. When we start understanding this great unfurling of time, and our deep interconnection between everything that is and ever will be, we start to see that wonder at the root of everything. That panentheistic truth that God is in all things and all things are in God, that animistic wisdom that God is in everything, the force that moves the rocks, that swirls the waters, that allows for the heat in the earth’s mantle to convect so the continents themselves move. That force, that power is contained within being itself.

When we ask questions like “why do bad things happen to good people?” or “why must the innocent suffer?” we are neglecting the broader point. Why does anything happen at all? It’s because of this great sea of possibilities, this great current of time that marches forward, chemical processes constantly changing the world around us, individual choices and actions shaping what will be in countless ways that we cannot imagine. All of this great web of life, this great web of being, of stone and star, of human and animal and plant and microbe, all moving and dancing together in what could be. And we like to pretend that we can project “shoulds” on top of it. Well, it should be this way or it should be that way, when in reality, what we’re seeing is what could be as we work together to make the world to come.

When we recognize and accept the animistic nature of existence:

• that one force is moving through all things,

• that everything is interconnected,

• and that all of our actions play off of each other in ways that we cannot understand

We become clear in that we do not deserve anything that happens to us. We do not bring things about in the way we participate in that oneness and help to drive the course in various directions. But the flow will do what it does, even despite our best intentions.

The magus in me wants to believe that I can control everything. That through will, intention, and faith, I can shape the world in the way that I want it to be. But the human in me knows that it’s not just my will, intention, and faith, but our collective will, intention, and faith. There are so many variables that I can control and that I cannot control, so many that I cannot even see or fathom that go into every moment of life. All we can do is control what is within our sphere to control. We do that through participation, through submission, and through relationship.

Animism teaches us to discern when to submit, when to participate, and when to strengthen and even cut off certain relationships so that we can get to the world to come that we desire. Animism teaches us to see that deeper web beyond our vision, beyond our regular experiences, and to not only accept that it is but to learn to live in that flow that moves both it and us.

When the psalmist sees HaShem clothed in honor and majesty, that is submitting to the very being that makes all things possible, that flows through all things. As the Apostle Paul says, “He is the one in whom we live, move, and have our being.”

Holiness shimmers from every direction. Everywhere we look, we see the majesty and the honor of God, the being in whom we live, move, and have our being. Once we right our relationship with the cosmos, we flow together with it, shaping its course as co-creators towards that world to come that is the desire of our deepest heart.

Creation as Communion

Psalms 104:3-4

3. He lays the beams of his rooms in the waters. He makes the clouds his chariot. He walks on the wings of the wind.

4. He makes his messengers winds; his servants flames of fire.

In this psalm, the wind and the fire have agency, vocation, and relationship. That is an animist position, an animistic way of seeing the world. But I’m not saying that the psalmist was an animist. What is clear from the text is the psalmist is speaking as if animism were true.

It is far too easy for us to get bogged down between poetic symbolism and animistic intent when we try to read ancient texts. What were they trying to say? What was the author’s original intention? Were they speaking from the place of believing that the winds were messengers and that the flames were servants? Or were they speaking poetically, analogizing them to these forces on behalf of the Living God? Functionally, this is a distinction without a difference. Whether or not the psalmist believed that the winds were messengers and that the flames were servants is an unnecessary addition to what is said here. In attributing agency to both the wind and the flame, as well as to other aspects of creation, like he does in the rest of the psalm, the psalmist is encouraging us to see the entire world alive with the glory of God. He is telling us that if we act as if everything is alive, then we will see the power of the Divine and the glory of the Divine in all things. For the glory, honor, and majesty of the Divine.

In practice, when I say that everything is alive, and that there is an animating spirit in all things, it doesn’t matter if that is actually true. What matters is whether it functionally helps us to interact with the cosmos and to live in right relationship with it. I can take you to a river and tell you its life story, where it begins and where it ends, how it flows. We can talk about the moods of the river as it swells in the floods and draws in during a drought. We can talk about the river in many ways that anthropomorphize it, and that is not what we are trying to do from an animist perspective.

Animism is not the anthropomorphization of other things. In other words, we’re not trying to pretend that everything in the cosmos acts as if it were human. What we’re trying to do is engage it on its own terms and get to understand its moods, its wants, its desires, its drives, its actions, and its abilities. When a gem is cut, it is important for the cutter to understand the natural lines and shapes within the crystal so they understand where it will chip and where it will smoothly move out. In getting to know the stone, the mountain, the river, and understanding how it lives its life, we are developing a right relationship with it that will allow us to live in communion with it all the better.

Everything is alive. Everything is a participant, not just a backdrop to the world. When you start to understand this, we can see how our relationship with not just the fish, but the ocean itself interrelates and interconnects with us, and how it will behave given certain circumstances. We would not poison a person, but we allow ourselves to poison the earth, to poison the rivers. We allow a different morality for the plants and the animals and the oceans and the rivers than we do with each other, and often than we do with animals themselves. Once we start understanding this web of interconnection, we feel that need to develop a proper and right relationship with everything that exists in the world.

When we pray or offer to the spirits that live within our house, this is partially a psychological exercise in and of itself, helping us to understand our right relationship with the house. But as a practical experiment, we can start to see if this actually makes our lives better. In our experience, it has infinitely helped us to stop losing things in the house, to have better pest control, and to even have better climate control within the house that we live in. Now some of that is because of our relationship with the spirits in the house and the spirit of the house itself. Part of that is because we now treat our house as a temple, as a place that is alive and worthy of respect, which makes us look for little things that we can do to take care of it.

Animism, like any spiritual action that we take, is about what we do, not what we believe. It’s the little actions that remind us to have that interconnectedness, to live in that true interbeing that makes us who and what we are. That is the message we receive when we look at the wind as a messenger, or the flame as a servant. When we embrace the luminous vision found in this psalm, the whole world becomes alive to us, full of meaning and non-human persons for us to interact with, become accustomed to, and get to know. The world is only a stranger if we refuse to have communion with it.

When we commune with the river, we don’t expect it to speak with human words, or to have human emotion, or human intellect. It has its own wisdom. It knows where its shores are, and it knows where it can run. When more water is entered, it knows where it can overflow and take new land. It has a wisdom all its own, and a language all its own. When we learn to read its moods and emotions and understand the wisdom by which it operates, we can live better with it. We can learn how to interrelate with it, how we should build our homes around it, our cities, our culture. We understand that in poisoning it, we are poisoning ourselves and all of the things that live around it. This level of interconnection helps us to feel one with the world in which we live, and not alone and isolated, as we too often feel.

The Word and Light Embodied in Earth

Psalms 104:10, 24

10. He sends springs into the valleys. They run among the mountains.

24 Yahweh, how many are your works! In wisdom have you made them all. The earth is full of your riches.

The word and light of the living God resonate in all things, as we saw before in the fire and the wind, and in the springs and the valleys and the mountains. The earth itself is full of the riches of the Divine. The Word and Light nourish everything that grows on the earth, the animals on the earth, and the entire cosmos, stirring it into action.

As we learn to see the cosmos as a great luminous field of action, reaction, choices and decisions, love and mercy and kindness and justice and equity, balance and harmony, entropy and change, transmutation, transformation, and all of the great powers of the cosmos working together to unfold itself in a great shimmering landscape of aliveness, we understand how interconnected the vast universe is.

It is popular to talk about how small we are. And we are. We are one organism filled with many small organisms on a planet that is small in our solar system, small on that planet around a small star in a rather unremarkable galaxy, in a rather unremarkable corner of the universe among myriads of countless galaxies, stars, and planets. But when you realize how interconnected and interwoven everything is, that smallness is also huge.

Billions of years ago, a dwarf galaxy flew right through our Milky Way and caused a whole bunch of stars to go nova. In that nova, the iron in your blood and the calcium in your bones were set free. That series of explosions made room for and provided the materials for our Sun and all of the planets that are here. Through aeons past, all of that coalesced, recombined, and made all of the things that we see here in this infinite dance beyond our seeing. Yes, we are a small speck on a small planet in a small solar system, but it took two galaxies dancing together in the great expanse of space for this place to come into being. We are interwoven into that dance, into those two galaxies, into all of the wonders that came from it, those stars that came before and the ones that will come after. We are part of this vast luminous web that is the light and the word, the power that flows through all things, ever striving for creation, for balance, for homeostasis.

Creation around us is our older sibling. Its incarnation both predates us and comes after us. The mountains were here before we were here, but the animals and the plants often came after. Not all, some of the trees are old and remember the great giants that once walked the earth. They remember when the first humans came in a way that we never can and never will. This light was already working in this world, creating a cradle for our life, for our existence. All of the cosmos is our Bethlehem and the place where we are is that cradle, that place in which the incarnate light shone to give us breath and words to speak and eyes to see and ears to hear.

Countless stars and galaxies and tectonic plates, animals rising and falling, plants growing and dying, species coming and going to get to us, to bring us here. Not that we are the pinnacle or the supreme, but we are the latest stitch in the weave. We are all connected and interconnected in the great interbeing of the cosmos. The light and the Word shining through us all.

The Animism of Awe

Psalms 104:2

2. He covers himself with light as with a garment. He stretches out the heavens like a curtain.

When we gaze up into the heavens, we are enraptured by all. The world seems so tiny in the vastness of space. The beauty of the nebulae, the glory of the heavens, rains down upon us every night. Sometimes, if we’re lucky and we live in the right place, we can see the auroras dancing and shimmering in the sky like magic light, a flowing river celebrating all the glories of the cosmos. It is in this awe that we take our first steps on the path of spirituality. In awe. In that fear and wonder that comes to us in these brilliant moments, we experience the great mystery of life. We see the universe and cannot help but live in awe of it.

The psalmist here is welcoming us into this beautiful world where the cosmos itself is a Divine gesture, a Divine greeting. All the light is but the covering of God, and the heavens themselves are like a curtain drawn open so that we can see the vast glory of the One in whom we live, move, and have our being. When it is closed, it casts a great mystery upon us as to what might be beyond.

In this cosmic shelter, we live, we grow, we celebrate the world, we savor the greatness that rains down upon us every day, knowing how intertwined we are with everything out there. The cosmos is a shelter cast wide, collecting all in its infinite embrace. We see the hospitality, the spaciousness, the openness that exists in all things. And we are reminded to open ourselves up, to savor what we find there, and to have the great hospitality of the universe.

Sometimes when we feel disconnected, we can just go outside and look at the brilliant blue of the day sky, the white clouds, even when they’re silver and gray, the little rings of white that circulate within them as the sun presses down to push its rays through. At night we see all the sparkling stars and the swirl of the galaxies. When we’re fortunate and we live in a place dark enough, we can look out and see the very center of our own galaxy as a great stream across the sky. In that awe, we remember that we are connected. When we are feeling lost, it is in that great wide-open and welcoming sky that we can find our connection again.

The Animism of Silence and Suffering

Psalms 104:20-21

20. You make darkness, and it is night, in which all the animals of the forest prowl.

21. The young lions roar after their prey, and seek their food from God.

Just as the One Life is found in the light, we can also find it in the darkness, in the great night of our souls, of the world, in those places with unanswered questions and unheard pleas. The psalmist reminds us that it is in the darkness that the forest is alive and the animals prowl. The lions roar for their prey and seek their food from God. That One Life living in the lion also lives in the gazelle, and it is the One Life in the gazelle that feeds the life in the lion.

Too many people who practice various forms of spirituality want to make the world a happy place. A place where there is no suffering and no pain. They actually blame the world for pain and suffering existing. They want to force and enforce their will upon all things so that there is no darkness but only light. The darkness is not the home of demons, but of life itself. It is life that makes all things possible, even the pain and suffering. To be alive is to have the possibility of pain, and in the experience of pain, all we can do is open ourselves up and allow space for it to be. Pain is no less sacred than joy.

That does not mean that we seek out pain like the flagellists and the nihilists do. On the contrary, we seek the holy wherever we can find it. In making pain, we inflict harm on the One Life and on the connections that flow between us and it. Yes, we want to relieve suffering. Yes, we want to end pain, but we do not see it as anything other than it is. It is alive in the world as we are.

Pain is often the mother of invention. We do not create what we do not have a need for when everything is well, when everything is acceptable. We do not strive to be more, to have more, to be more. It is in the experience of pain that we are driven to make the world better. It is a motivation, but that is not its reason for being. Like all the cosmos, it is because it is. And I know that’s not a satisfactory answer to a lot of people. We want it to be a punishment or a lesson. Instead, we discover that pain is just a facet of living.

Suffering, on the other hand, is often a choice. Not necessarily a choice made by the person who is in pain, but a choice forced upon them by those who are in power to hoard wealth, technology, medicine, food, and shelter. Those who are fearful and greedy keep from those who are poor and afflicted those things that could help them, because they wish to profit or just out of a coldness in their heart, not to be of aid and support to their siblings.

In this dark womb of creation, we see needs that need to be met, that need to be fixed. And so we go from caves to tents, to huts, to buildings, to skyscrapers. We see sickness in people and we discover medicines in the plants in the world and in our laboratories. It is the pain that births compassion in us. In the awe that we have for nature, and the empathy we have for those who suffer, compassion is born within us, and through that compassion, creativity is stirred. So many technologies that we have today, we would not have if there were not a pain for them to take away.

A world without pain is a static one. But a world without suffering is a compassionate one. In separating in our mind pain from suffering, we can see how the systems that we put into place can inflict suffering on people who otherwise would not be experiencing pain, or would at least have their pain mitigated in some way, shape, or form.

As we learned on the knee of the Black Madonna, here in the deep fertile night, transformation is possible. The light is present even in the darkness, showing us a way through. A way to the other side, to that place where creativity is born.

The Animism of Creativity and Activity

Psalms 104:12, 18

12. The birds of the sky nest by them. They sing among the branches.

18 The high mountains are for the wild goats. The rocks are a refuge for the rock badgers.

When creativity is born within us, we see that it too is alive. Creativity has moods. It can be shy or aggressive. It can come at us when we least suspect it, and it can hide and need to be found. Creativity is more than just music, poetry, books, and art. It is more than paintings or cooking. It is all myriad places where we use our imagination. It is the tool that helps us collaborate with the cosmos to make something new or to make something old feel new again.

The psalmist tells us how the mountains and the rocks create homes for the goats and the birds to sing. The whales sing. Insects and frogs sing into the night. Lions roar. The cosmos is filled with music. It is filled with beauty. Some choose to see that beauty is an accident, something that just happens, a byproduct of creation. With an animist eye, we see the intention that is there, that the cosmos wants to be beautiful. And we can see that desire for beauty in how it makes everything beautiful.

We have been trained and we train ourselves to encounter the world ethically. And so we attribute moral goals and ambitions to phenomena that do not have morality. A storm isn’t evil. Neither is an earthquake or a flood. They are the cosmos performing its actions. A wildfire seeks to devour all that it can. It is living in accord with its nature. From a distance we can see the flames dancing through the trees and see the awful, awesome beauty. But if it’s our house that gets burned down, we deem it evil, hateful, or uncaring.

As I said before, we’re not trying to anthropomorphize the cosmos. We’re not trying to say that the elements of the cosmos act like we humans do. We’re trying to see it acting from its own intent. The fire seeks to devour. The more that it can find to feed its hunger, the more that it grows, creates offspring, and spreads. If we do not want it to grow, then we have to cut off its food supplies. The Indigenous people who lived here before we did, did controlled burns, and they cleaned the forest. They made sure that the fuel was not there so that if fire happened it could not get out of control, it could not come after them. In our infinite rational wisdom, we stopped that from happening. In our infinite rational wisdom, we have unleashed all of this carbon into the sky to heat the planet and dry the wood and the land, so it is more susceptible to flame. If there is a moral agency in the flame, in the storm, in the flood, it’s because we did not care what we were doing and through that carelessness brought calamity upon ourselves. You cannot blame the lion for eating us when we open our gates and let the lion in.

This is why it is so important for us to understand that our creativity is both within us and beyond us. It helps us to create, but we are not the only ones creating. Everything that we do has consequences. It is the cause of many effects and the effect of many causes. Creativity helps us to see this web and learn how to collaborate with it. In coming to see that diversity of voices, of actions, of intentions and needs, we learn to live in harmony with them. And yes, that means we need to imagine the needs of the plants, the needs of the fire. Because if we don’t understand the needs of the fire, then when the firestorm comes, it will devour everything.

When we embrace this great diversity of human creativity and non-human creativity, it is a praise sung into the cosmos that helps to bring us all in line, to co-create a world to come that is better than the one that we live in. When we ignore the needs of the rivers, only looking at our need for the water, we cause more harm than good. Yes, we must weigh out the various needs and find ways to balance them. What can we do to preserve the water in the canal? What if we put solar panels over it to shade it so that we didn’t lose as much to evaporation? Then we are creating renewable energy that’s not allowing the heat, not allowing the carbon to build up so that the world heats up more.

When we open ourselves up to our imagination and allow our creativity to flow. In that flow, see the grand diversity of life within the human species and beyond us. We are able to build such a beautiful and glorious world together. When we talk about co-creation, we’re not talking about some abstract theology about how we’re just a little part in a web. We’re talking about daily practices on how we co-create life every day, every moment, every second we are alive. Together, collectively, in grander ways, we affect the world more. When we open our imagination to see all of the human and non-human actors that we are engaging with moment by moment, day by day, and learn all the ways that we can coexist with them, we turn from the solipsism that tells us it’s just about me and start to act as if it is about us, an ever-expanding circle of us. Then we will restore the world and build the great world to come we all desire to live in.

The Animism of Justice and Celebration

Psalms 104:27-28

27. These all wait for you, that you may give them their food in due season.

28. You give to them; they gather. You open your hand; they are satisfied with good.

As we open our imagination and allow our creativity to take its life through us, compassion grows stronger and seeks to go out into the world where we find justice and celebration. We find them as living entities in and of themselves. As the psalmist says, life prepares food in due season, and we gather. The open hand of the cosmos satisfies us with good things. As we’ve learned through our imagination to see that intricate web, now we are bound to protect it and to celebrate its bounty.

Justice is a living, breathing thing. When we see her, we know her. And when we starve her through prejudice, bias, and corruption, we know she grows weak. We can hear her cry. Every time someone is picked up unjustly, treated harshly, imprisoned wrongly, cast out without trial, every time corruption, greed, and the fearful, powerful, power-hungry people take advantage of her, we hear her cries. It is for us to take care of her, to build halls for her to work in, to ensure that she is well taken care of, because she takes care of us. We do not find justice in judges, lawyers, laws, or those that are entrusted with illusory power and authority. We find justice in the principles of equity and righteousness that tell us that we must take care of everyone from the poorest to the greatest. That no one is higher than another.

Hierarchy is a cage that we build around justice to prevent her from taking action. Authority is a whip that is used to beat her so that she cannot help her children. Power is the substitute for equity so that the fearful, the greedy, and the corrupt can pretend that they are doing her work. Justice does not arise with them. It arises from us.

Justice cannot show favoritism. She cannot judge unwisely. We can feel it in our bones like a betrayal of a close friend when she is twisted and bent and forced to work against us. The problem is the power-hungry and the fearful are able to twist their words to make us feel that way, even when it is not true. They turn the very powers and principles that justice is built on into something to be feared because it threatens their hoarded wealth and their imaginary power.

Justice is not a tool of control. Justice is when every being receives what it needs, not through domination, but through right relationship. When we enter into even a moment of that right relationship, celebration breaks out because they are sisters.

Psalms 104:16-17

16. Yahweh’s trees are well watered, the cedars of Lebanon, which he has planted;

17. where the birds make their nests. The stork makes its home in the cypress trees.

We can always see where the waters of justice and life flow most freely because what is there is not shriveled. It is not thirsty, it is not hungry. The poor are cared for and no one is homeless. The sick have treatment, and the refugee finds refuge. We take care of our own. This is the well-watered tree when we take care of that tree of life which has been planted by existence itself so that everyone has a home. A place to build their nest, a place to raise their young where they can flourish and grow.

Justice, equity, hope, peace. These all make us celebrate. Awe, wonder, creativity, openness, spaciousness. These all make us celebrate. Celebrate. Why? Because in these things, life is watered and nourished. In these things, life can flow freely and develop into wondrous new and unimaginable combinations.

To flourish is to worship the One Life flowing through all things. When we find that balance, that celebration flows through us. It is an unstoppable tidal wave of joy born deep down within us that cannot help but escape in hoots and hollers and screams and cries and dances and songs. Celebration is the fruit of joy, and wherever there is justice, there will be great times of celebration.

This is how we live in the kin-dom of God, not the kingdom of man.

Becoming Kin with the Living God

Psalms 104:33

33. I will sing to Yahweh as long as I live. I will sing praise to my God while I have any being.

When we learn to see everything as alive, we cannot help but start living in right relationship with it. We do this all the time without even thinking about it. When we apologize to our mug when we accidentally hit it on the desk, when we greet our car when we get inside it, when we sit in our chair and thank it for letting us get off our feet. This is an instinct born deep within us.

Animism is not a doctrine that you have to accept. It is not a performance that you have to do. It is a test that you can make, a call to live in life resonant with creation. This is the world that is available to us when we start to understand how we interact with each and every thing we encounter. We’re probably already doing this. In the ways that I said before, think about how you treat your favorite shirt, coat, or jacket. Your favorite pair of shoes. Maybe it’s the entertainment center or the music that you love.

We personify so much in our life just out of basic instinct. And when we personify a thing, we develop a deep and rich relationship with it. In this way, we are not humanizing them. We are embracing our own creatureliness, our own wildness. We’re feeling ourselves woven into the same fabric as the wind, the fire, the bird, the goat, the spring, the tree that gives shelter, and the river that brings life.

The light shines, the word speaks, and creation itself listens and responds. We can too. It’s often our fear or other excuses that keep us from this deep level of connection and interconnection. They keep us from acknowledging the great interbeing that exists between us and all things, how much our environment affects our health and our quality of life, and how much our quality of life affects our environment.

There is enough room in our hearts for the mountains and the plains, the rivers and the oceans, the lakes and the clouds, the birds, and the animals. That doesn’t mean that we have to change everything about how we act or how we engage with them. Pests are pests. Just because I acknowledge the One Life in the mosquito doesn’t mean that I want it biting me and potentially delivering disease into my body. But it does mean that anything I do to that mosquito affects me and the environment around me. I need to take into account what that causal chain is creatively so I can measure my actions justly.

That is true on grander scales as well. People do like living close to the water. Maybe we need to be better about building elevated homes. Learning to work with those beings that have evolved to care for the water, like the beaver. Maybe we need to understand floodplains better to decide where and how we build our homes and our lives. We can curse the rain and accomplish nothing, or we can learn its patterns and its ways and how to live best with it.

Prayer is Living God Who Breathes Through Creation

Psalms 104:31

31. Let Yahweh’s glory endure forever. Let Yahweh rejoice in his works.

The first book I ever read by Matthew Fox was Prayer: A Radical Response to Life. In it, I learned that every action I take is prayer. The Apostle Paul says that the Holy Spirit speaks through us in ways that we cannot. This is the power of prayer and what the mystics meant when they said that we should pray without ceasing.

Every action we take is a prayer to the cosmos, a whispered hope and ambition, that we are giving life to and sending out beyond us to reap back some change in the environment around us.

The good news that we have received is that through awe and wonder, openness, spaciousness, letting go and letting be, in creativity, justice, and celebration, we can walk these four paths together into the Oneness of Life where we can find harmony and balance. At any time, we can repent, which means to change our minds, to change our actions, to turn around on the path and go a different way. And in so doing, we restore the world and build a better world to come.

In this wonder, we learn to live a life filled with reciprocity, where we give and take in equal measure, and in everything, we find wonder.

May every breath you take be a blessing, and every word you speak bless others. May the life you live be in blessed harmony with what is around you and within you, so that in the end the glorious kin-dom may shine everlasting and with joy and much celebration throughout the world. Amen.

Share

Entering the Dark Womb of Advent

It is impossible to enter the mysteries of Advent without thinking about Mary, the Mother of Jesus, The Mother of God. Many these days spend their time and effort seeking out the historical Jesus and Mary, and while that is helpful to the faith, in these devotional times, I am more focused on the relationships we have developed over the centuries with the Cosmic Mary we meet in story, statue and song.

Personally, I credit our Blessed Mother with my life, and I’ve had a deep devotion to her for most of it. That devotion only deepened when I started practicing Creation Spirituality decades ago.

Mary is the Mother of the unseen Light and the unheard Word. She is far more than a figurine in the Nativity scene. She is the first sanctuary of the Incarnate Word, and the model for Living God.

I am not talking about a living god that exists somewhere in the cosmos, but the process of Living God in her mold. We are each the mother and child of God and through living in awe, openness, creativity, justice, and celebration, we live love, compassion, return and reparation into the world.

Mary models and teaches us how to live God in every moment of life through her participation in all the major events in the life of Jesus, and through The wisdom we glean from the relational apparitions that have come to us over time.

Mary the Immaculate Conception: Icon of Original Blessing

In 1858, Our Lady appeared to St Bernadette Soubirous in France. At the culmination of those apparitions, Our Lady said something that many theologians have yet to grapple with. When Bernadette asked Our Lady what her name was, she said, “I am the Immaculate Conception.” She didn’t say I’m the product of or the result of, the fruit of the Immaculate Conception. She said, I am the Immaculate Conception.

While the church gave its approval for the devotion to the visions in 1862, it has yet to grapple with the enormity of the revelation received there.

In the traditional framework of Catholic theology, Mary is born of the Immaculate Conception, which means that she, alone amongst people, was born free from original sin. This was necessary to find a way to explain why Jesus himself was not born with original sin. Personally, I think it would have been better to have taken that issue and re-evaluated the new and novel doctrine prescribed by Augustine (around the 4th and early 5th century AD) and those who came after him, but the church decided to run with it because it allows them to have that power.

The words Our Lady gave St. Bernadette at Lourdes challenge the very notion of original sin. If Mary is the Immaculate Conception, she is the very embodiment of the original blessing in which we are all born. As the Immaculate Conception, Mary is the original grace, the original wisdom, the original mind, and the original blessing through which God created the universe. In her, we find our matrix of discipleship. In her, we find the womb that will help Christ to be born within us and to help us live our Christhood in the world.

In many traditional prayers, Mary is referred to as the Ark of the Covenant and the Treasurer of the Divine Grace. St. Louis de Montfort said that Mary is the one through whom all grace enters the world, that she stands at the gate of the divine treasury and dispenses grace through her loving mother’s heart to all the people in the world. To me, that sounds like Mary as Original Grace.

The doctrine of original sin is foreign to the scriptures and unknown in the early church. It arose in the late fourth century and ended up taking over the church as a means of control. After all, if a person is born in sin, then they require an outside intervention to free them from sin, or they will be forever separated from God. If the wild, prophetic movement of the early church was going to be brought into the control of the empire, then it had to be placed on a leash. Original sin provided the rubric for them to do that.

If Mary was not born as a product of an Immaculate Conception and is in fact the Immaculate Conception, then she is a force in this universe as strong as any others, able to awaken us to the power of the divine flowing in every moment. She was a witness to all of the most important parts of the Christ story. She was there through everything from the Annunciation to His birth, through to His crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension into heaven. She was there when the Holy Spirit descended on Pentecost. She was our stand-in. She is the one who represents us in all of these stories. The one born in original blessing, the one connected to original grace, and the one who participates in all the divine mysteries.

Mary becomes not just the mother of God, the mother of Christ, and the mother of Jesus, but the mother of the Church, the mother of the faithful, and the mother of all living. Our Lady is the Immaculate Conception, the Divine Mercy, the Original Grace, Original Blessing, Original Mind, and Original Wisdom. She is the one who not only stood for us in the original stories but the one in whom we are formed into the image of the cosmic Christ who lives, who sustains, and maintains the universe, and who holds the cosmos together. She is the eternal reminder that God enters the world through blessing, not through fear.

Mary as the Black Madonna

Starting in the twelfth century, many icons and statues of Mary were made from dark wood or painted with dark skin inspired by the passage in the Song of Songs, “I am black, and I am beautiful” (Song of Songs 1:5). The woman speaking in the passage was identified as Mary talking to God. These were not the first Black Madonnas made, but it is at this time that pilgrimages to them and devotion to them begins in earnest.

“I am black, and I am beautiful” means that the sacred is often found where society fails to see beauty, and that darkness itself can be a site of divine presence, dignity, and desire. When it was written it referred to someone who didn’t have the fair skin of someone who didn’t have to work out in the sun, connecting this woman with people who had to work to live, or the poor.

In the centuries since it was written, the phrase has been connected to the Shekhinah, or presence of God, and the Blessed Mother Mary.

Mary has taken on the qualities of the Shekhinah. She is the sheltering presence who guides her children, shares the wisdom of God, and who shines with the glory of God. She is often called the bride of the Holy Spirit which carries many images of the Sabbath Princess/Bride.

Over time, Mary accrued the mysteries of earth, grief, and resilience. She is Queen of all hearts, Our Lady of Sorrows, Our Lady of good counsel. She is the sacred night in which the Light is conceived. Her darkness is not the absence of light, but the secret place where the presence, the fertile ground in which the Word roots itself. She welcomes the wounded, the weary, the exiled; she knows the underside of empire and refuses to bow to it.

Mary is the Mother of Mercy, whose gaze refuses to shame. She is Mamma Schiavona, the Madonna di Montevergine, who embraces the queer community and all those we seek refuge in her fierce protection.

Her mercy is not softness. It is the fierce compassion that bends the world back toward healing. There are stories about her striking down slavers hunting down escaped enslaved people and setting them free. Her compassion is a consuming fire that burns away what stalks to harm her children.

In her mercy, we rediscover that the Holy sees us whole even when we feel broken. In her loving arms, we discover who we were always meant to become.

Mother of Divine Grace

When we see Mary in a Nativity scene or think about her struggling under empire to get to Bethlehem to give birth to the Divine Child, we must remember that she is not journeying just to give birth to Jesus, but to give birth to us. She is the mother of Grace and all who live and breathe.

She is the fountain of grace, not as a dispenser but as a living window into how Grace works. She is the first to proclaim the Gospel while she was still pregnant with the Christ Child:

Luke 1:46-55

46. Mary said, “My soul magnifies the Lord.

47. My spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior,

48. for he has looked at the humble state of his servant. For behold, from now on, all generations will call me blessed.

49. For he who is mighty has done great things for me. Holy is his name.

50. His mercy is for generations of generations on those who fear him.

51. He has shown strength with his arm. He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.

52. He has put down princes from their thrones. And has exalted the lowly.

53. He has filled the hungry with good things. He has sent the rich away empty.

54. He has given help to Israel, his servant, that he might remember mercy,

55. As he spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and his offspring forever.”

The Gospel of Creation sings with grace. The Holy One moves with mercy toward all who live in awe. Pride unravels in that light. Thrones lose their grip. Those who have been pushed to the margins are lifted by the work of the community. The hungry find their tables filled with abundance. The ones who hoard find their hands empty, invited to begin again. This is the good news. The world is turning toward justice, and we are welcomed into that turning, welcomed into a life shaped by awe, compassion, and the fierce renewal that flows through all creation. We are not perfect in the work of the Gospel, but it is our calling to perfect that work so that everyone is taken care of and healed.

Grace is the flow of God’s life through all things. Our Lady is the beating heart pumping that grace into the whole cosmos. She is our model. She is the one who said, “Yes!” Yes to giving birth to the Divine Child in the world, the One who bears the Holy Name of God which is being itself.

We embrace grace when we live in the strength to say yes to becoming that font of grace into the world. Mary reveals that grace is woven into our bones, and is the truest nature of our being and doing.

Like us, Mary is created by God and mother of our Creator. We are called to do the same. The seed of the tree of life is planted in every heart as we are all born in the Image of God, existing and capable of doing. It is up to each and every one of us to nourish and water that seed so it might grow.

Mary is the bearer of the One who bore her. She is the model for us and how we should live our lives. This mutual indwelling shows us the pattern of reality itself: God desires relationship, cooperation, incarnation. God lives in the moments of action and hope. This is how we live God into the world.

This requires us to change the way we conceive of the world. Mary’s motherhood is not hierarchical; it is participatory. She participates in the life of the community and bares God into the world. She shows what it looks like for a human life to be in full reciprocity with the Divine.

Mirror of Justice: Reflecting the True Order of Love

The order of love (ordo amoris) taught by Mary and Christ rejects the ladder of love taught by Plato, where we have love for those closest to us and that love fades the farther out others are from us. As taught by Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas this is that we love equally everyone who is our neighbor, and everyone is our neighbor, so we love everyone equally. This is the heart of Mary and Jesus’ teachings.

Mary is the Mirror of Justice. She shows us the love that does not differentiate between ourselves and others. That compassion is the root of justice. Not retributive justice, but right-relationship justice. Living in this compassion, we do not show favoritism, hoard wealth, or allow others to suffer. In her life, the world sees how God orders the cosmos: through humility, consent, solidarity. In her presence, empire trembles because she reveals a world grounded in love rather than domination, which is why empire always seeks to co-opt her message and that of her son.

Seat of Wisdom

Mary is the seat of Wisdom. When we sit on her lap as her loving children, we have access to her deep wisdom. Too many sit on her knee and try to overshadow her so they can pretend they are important, wise, and powerful.

In accepting her quiet wisdom, and pondering everything in our hearts as she does, we access the insight available to us in every moment. She becomes the throne where infinite Wisdom meets finite flesh, the place of contemplation where we enter into the great cloud of unknowing to become wiser.

Mary invites us to become places where Wisdom rests, where compassion and clarity take shape in our lives. We are called to bear the Divine into the world, just as she was.

Ark of the Covenant

Mary is the Ark of the Covenant, bearing within her the law that is written on our hearts and the rod that blooms.

The law is simple:

Matthew 22:37-40

37. Jesus said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’

38. This is the first and great commandment.

39. A second likewise is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’

40. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.”

God is a verb, so to love God is to act in awe, openness, creativity, justice, and celebration. When we recognize that everyone is our neighbor, and love them in the same way, we fulfill the whole of the law.

The rod that bloomed is the staff of Aaron, the sign of our priesthood that blossoms as a shoot of the tree of life when we water it with our actions that keep the laws of love and liberation.

Mary is the gate to the portable sanctuary of God’s promise:

that the Sacred dwells within us, not beyond us. She reminds us that the world is sacred as is our work in it. Through her, we learn to carry holiness in our bodies, our choices, our relationships.

Let the Black Madonna Conceive the Word in Us

This is the call. Like the angel who called Mary to bear the Holy One, Mary now calls us to become:

• Bearers of mercy, living compassion into the world.

• Vessels of grace, tapping the Original Grace of the cosmos and offering it to everyone we meet.

• Reflections of justice, bring equity and right relationship to everything we do.

• Seats of wisdom, offering what we have learned to help others live better than we have.

• Living arks of divine presence, where God lives through our actions, words, and choices.

The Black Madonna guides us through the dark womb into the birth of the Light. She teaches us to trust the depth, to trust the slow forming, to trust the grace already at work in us.

Through living as she lives, we open the paths of grace, blessing, and wisdom, to those who need them, and especially to ourselves. We become the light that shines into the world and scares away the darkness that cannot overcome it. We preserve the world and restore what we can for the world to come.

Leave a comment

Word and Wisdom

John 1:1-3

1. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

2. The same was in the beginning with God.

3. All things were made through him. Without him was not anything made that has been made.

The Word is Divine, spoken and unspoken, heard and received. Words constructed our world when they are trusted enough to shape how we see it. Too many are obsessed with the belief that they perceive reality. We do not. None of us do. The best we can do is shape our worldview with the most reliable words we can find.

We can only study what we can measure, so we name measurements and set the scale of the world to those gauges. As long as our appraisal is honest and the information we glean is true, we can get close to understanding the nature of the world.

Words are divine; they shape the world as we know it and create the reality we live in, but those words can be twisted and distorted so all we see are lies masquerading as truth.

All we have are words. We cannot understand the world without them. Whatever we don’t have the words for is beyond our ability to perceive or conceive. This doesn’t mean that something is real just because we name it, but nothing can be real to us if we don’t have the words to express it.

How to Measure The Light

John 1:4-5

4. In him was life, and the life was the light of men.

5. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness hasn’t overcome it.

But what is this light? Where does it shine from and what does it illuminate?

Light is the unspeakable word, yet a reality we experience from its presence and absence. We give it words that cannot reach it: love, compassion, truth, justice, wisdom...

This Light is not the power of the sun, but we feel its light in those precious rays. We feel love so deeply we’ve developed a whole language around it. Genres of books, movies, music, and art are dedicated to it. The problem is that we cannot measure it or any of these lights we feel. We cannot count the liters of justice or mete out the meters of truth.

We can have greater clarity about the things we can measure and review than about those things we cannot. The problem is without love, compassion, truth, justice, wisdom and the other lights, our lives lose meaning and purpose.

Meaning and purpose arise from the actions we take, which cause us to feel as though we matter to causes, communities, and people we long to be a part of. In the absence of these lights, shadows fill the gaps and grant belonging and focus as a substitute for meaning and purpose. It is a hollow substitute, like giving sugar water and alcohol to people who need basic nutrients to stay healthy. While it keeps people alive, it does nothing to heal or sustain them.

Moralism is a performative substitute for justice, and membership is a mere shadow of love and compassion, but in the absence of the good life, they fill the gaps but leak through requiring an endless striving for approval to keep filling the void.

The Divine Word heals and restores through bringing love, compassion, truth, justice, and wisdom. The question is: how do we find this word and this light if we cannot measure it?

While love, compassion, truth, justice, and wisdom cannot be measured directly, we can see and experience the results of their presence. The compassionate act of feeding the hungry restores their strength and enlivens their bodies. It spreads love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Gal. 5:22-23). Refusing compassion does none of these things. Neither does denying justice, truth, or wisdom.

Light feeds, warms, and illuminates. We recognize the light by the love, joy, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control it grows in those it shines upon. The moralist only hears one word in that list: self-control, and pretends it is a prerequisite for the others. These grow together. A person who experiences no love, joy, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, or gentleness cannot have self-control. They are the garden of life watered by the word and fed by the light. They grow together, nurturing and supporting one another. The health of this garden is how we measure the presence of the Word and Light.

This is why the light cannot be overcome by the darkness. The dark defeats itself and the light scares it away.

The Word and the Light have worked in the cosmos since the great flaring forth because they are fundamental to its development and flowering.

Tending The Garden of Wisdom

Proverbs 8:22-31

22. “Yahweh possessed me in the beginning of his work, before his deeds of old.

23. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, before the earth existed.

24. When there were no depths, I was born, when there were no springs abounding with water.

25. Before the mountains were settled in place, before the hills, I was born;

26. while as yet he had not made the earth, nor the fields, nor the beginning of the dust of the world.

27. When he established the heavens, I was there; when he set a circle on the surface of the deep,

28. when he established the clouds above, when the springs of the deep became strong,

29. when he gave to the sea its boundary, that the waters should not violate his commandment, when he marked out the foundations of the earth;

30. then I was the craftsman by his side. I was a delight day by day, always rejoicing before him,

31. rejoicing in his whole world. My delight was with the sons of men.

Wisdom rejoices in the cosmos and delights in people. Wisdom is the heart from which the Word and the Light flows. Through rejoicing, with rejoicing, by rejoicing, and in rejoicing, the wise craftsman co-creates the world, and we do too.

Our calling, our good news is that the world is created in awe, silence, creativity, justice, and celebration. Everything is reconciled in beauty so it can endure and persevere. When we learn to turn our face to the light and listen to the word, we shine like a city on a hill and speak the creative words into being.

When you feel love in your heart, it hurts. It struggles within you to break free. When you tell that person you love them, you open the cage and let the light and the word free. If the love is returned, life is sweeter for it. If it is not returned, the cosmos is enriched for the love you shared.

We experience many kinds of love: familial love, romantic love, erotic love, and compassion. We may sow romantic love and reap a closer friendship or a new sibling. While we might feel heartbreak at the moment, the liberation of the word and light relieves a burden from the soul and releases the heart from its prison.

We grow in love, requited and unrequited, finding joy at its eternal hearth fire. Joy is grace with gratitude built in. We find peace not just in being calm, but in recognizing and restoring the wholeness at the root of creation. Within the spaciousness of our hearts we learn patience, which is to endure without bitterness, setting our temper aside and sublimating its fire to feed this garden with light so we don’t burn it down. Kindness is not just sweet words and actions, it is repairing the breeches rather than wedging them open further. Through our integrity and generosity we cultivate goodness. Faithfulness is not found in a creed but in our reliability and steady dependability. As we learn to use our strength wisely so that we have a light touch which does not harm but only helps, gentleness grows within us. Self-control is holding our impulses in check so we don’t react rashly, but act wisely.

This is the garden Wisdom rejoices in and tends. If we are to be wise, we tend our own garden for the reparation of the world. In learning wisdom, continue to speak the Divine Word and shine that Holy Light into the cosmos.

Living God

John 1:9-13

9. The true light that enlightens everyone was coming into the world.

10. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, and the world didn’t recognize him.

11. He came to his own, and those who were his own didn’t receive him.

12. But as many as received him, to them he gave the right to become God’s children, to those who believe in his name:

13. who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.

The Word and Light don’t always shine on fertile soil. This is why we need to prepare our hearts to receive the light and the word so it doesn’t reflect off us.

The first step is to walk the first path, the Path of Awe. When we open ourselves up to awe and wonder, we learn the hospitality of Earth, recognizing that God is in all things and all things are in God. The Divine is a verb, it is the being and doing that creates life and the world. We find God in the acts of hospitality and wisdom, not in the cold words on a page or demands of despotic leaders.

In the first century Galilee, the Roman empire crushed the ability for people to experience awe and replaced it with the fear of the empire. Fear closes us off to awe. When empire captured the Church, it replaced the awe of Christ’s Gospel with fear of hell and punishment.

Love Casts Out Fear

1 John 4:18

18. There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear has punishment. He who fears is not made perfect in love.

The Word, the Light, originates love. Fear arises in the absence of light.

When we encounter the Word or glimpse the Light, it never comes from one direction. It rises in the awe and wonder that shake us awake. It whispers through the silence and the ache. It stirs our hands into making, mending, and imagining. It calls us to weave justice and delight into the fabric of our shared life. The Gospel, the true good news, is that each of us is born of this Light. Each of us carries the breath of the Word. We are not outsiders looking in. We are kin to the Sacred, born in blessing, invited to co-create the world with Love.

The Light shines through the life within us. The Word resonates through every field, every river, every beating heart. When we choose to tend the garden of our days with compassion, courage, and creativity, we enter the great work of restoration. We heal what has been fractured. We remember who we are. And in that remembering, the world begins to bloom again.

Thanks for reading! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Share

Leave a comment

Thank you for Tips / Donations:

• https://ko-fi.com/cedorsett

• https://patreon.com/cedorsett

• https://cash.app/$CreationsPaths

• Substack:

Creation's Paths

Welcome to Creation’s Paths—a space where Creation Spirituality, mysticism, magic, and metamodern thought meet through a Christopagan lens. Join us for daily devotionals, deep discussions, and practical insights to re-enchant life.

New to The Seraphic Grove learn more

Start Here

For Educational Resource:

https://wisdomscry.com

Social Connections:

• BlueSky https://bsky.app/profile/creationspaths.com

• Threads https://www.threads.net/@creationspaths

• Instagram https://www.instagram.com/creationspaths/

#Advent #CreationSpirituality #Christopagan #Mysticism #CelticSpirituality #Wisdom #Light #ViaPositiva #SpiritualPractice #AntiImperialFaith #ChristianWitch #Paganism #Spirituality #Enchantment