The Orgasm of God
"Between God and the soul there is no between." -- Juliana of Norwich
"The eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me. My eye and God's eye is one eye, and one sight, and one knowledge, and one love." -- Meister Eckhart
"The soul is a breath of living spirit, that with excellent sensitivity, permeates the entire body to give it life." -- St. Hildegard of Bingen
A Love Affair to Choose
A love affair is striving for your attention,
Ready to shred what's left of your heart...
If you can answer the riddle of "enough"?
Look around: wildflowers are jumping out everywhere.
And your soul: what of it?
Is it not yet ready to breathe in the smothering scents?
This moment
Has never before existed in the imagination of Love:
Surely you are ready to expose your neck?
Only One could have brought you Home!
Only One would rend the fabric of the Universe for you!
Walk into the Garden and see for yourself...
Where We Begin
Who are you? Who am I? How we answer this most fundamental of questions essentially determines the quality of our life: confronting the certainty of death, there is nowhere to hide: "who am I"? Perhaps our instinct for life is our greatest treasure -- at least for awhile... until the questions begin to require answers... If -- and this is a very big "if" -- the instinct for life is merged with, reconciled with, the certainty of death, then there is the possibility of living on the distant edge of time: where timelessness becomes increasingly real... this is the indie reality of the mystic-activist...
Begin with your body: begin with that first breath: imagine the nothingness of Nothing surrendering to the in-fill of air: and becoming another Incarnation of the Divine Consciousness... a "sublime unit" of the One Love... This new life is the fullness of soul and the most radical revelation of all: infinite value, meaning, and purpose merge in this Person: this is the root of Beauty: expressed as Art, Literature, Music, Justice, Mercy, and Compassion: and lived as Wisdom... All of our playing and striving should be directed to this liberation and empowerment of Divine Wisdom: in each of us as Persons...
Culture is the collective expressions of Persons: everything we think, say, and do creates for us our "culture": if we are violent, racist, greedy, sexist, and classist evidence of this will be visible in our culture. This shouldn't surprise anyone! Reading a newspaper, scanning the news on the internet, and listening to the conversations in our break-rooms (who's recording the conversations in the FOX News break-room?) simply proves the point. That we in the United States might not be as bad as many "else where's" is small consolation for many of our roots grow deep in soil informed by Christian faith: "Love one another as I have loved you" begs a significant difference from most of our cultural and economic practices and political policies...
The business of culture, religion, and politics is an "Onion-like" parody of bliss: "We long-ago settled with our conscience for the safety of the semblance of an actual life"... This, of course, is a treachery to the soul and the soul itself becomes a parody of the technocrats dream: production and consumption with no questions asked or answered... Image replaces touch and religion condemns both... Experts study scriptures and statistics to "educate" the masses... Justice becomes a word of annoyance and liberation? Well, liberation becomes a feminist curtsy to powerlessness... They call it both salvation and democracy: but we all know that when it's all done and decided, it's all about reaching the Super Bowl and our fantasies of celebrity nipples... "Please pass the chips and dip..." So much -- and so little -- for "divine incarnations"...
The Golden String
"I give you the end of a golden string,
Only wind it into a ball,
It will lead in at Heaven's gate,
Built in Jerusalem's wall." (William Blake)
We have slipped and slid from our pagan awareness, confirmed in a perhaps weird way by early Christian / Celtic thought, from a natural contemplation of wholeness -- of a Divine Integrity -- into the spiritual fragmentation of "progress". Neither tribe nor community could contain the anti-miracle of unlimited profits: the accumulation of which is the single driving force of everything pretending civilization (democracy) and religion. Gratitude has become a miser's charity and justice a rich man's penny... both spinning the wheel of prayer and salvation: meanwhile, the ice that made this Planet so delightfully habitable is rapidly melting...
Meanwhile, again, to live: actually means something! We are filled with sight -- but see virtually nothing! Does one visit the Grand Canyon to close his eyes and smell the hole in the ground? Yet that is precisely our current predicament -- urged on by vapid journalism and vacant faces in the halls of power: no one breathes because we dare not live! Awareness begins when one perceives the symbol behind the transient: the material is meant as a seduction: and the seduction as an annihilation of the notions and opinions that facilitate separation... "In the beginning there was the Poem": a language of initiation into Mystery: and Goddesses and Gods appeared: fertility and fields resplendent with mercy and possibility both: a Unity of Imagination that found blessing in the play of work, tribe, and sacred sexuality: Nature and the Human existed as the Orgasm of God... and the angels of our thrusting bodies, our calloused hands, and trusting neighborliness fashioned the very stuff of our dreams -- not of "more", but of a relaxed satisfaction... a holy contentment that was the radiance of social harmony...
It is now our task to remember: to re-member this ancient pre-memory... and to once again take up our habituation within its weaves and folds... Loving should be for us our daily breath: before bread, before work, and before anything else, there should be loving... Loving is the awakened dream of children become adults and giving back and living forward... Everything could be so beautiful that we live utterly perplexed: should we laugh or should we cry? The "Orgasm of God", this total self-emptying into and for another, is the Heart At-One-Ment that centers the Universe in the Endless Jolly-Folly of "I am You, You are Me, and We are All Together: One"... The great American philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, wrote: "The heart at the center of the universe, with every throb hurls the flood of happiness into every artery, vein and veinlet, so that the whole system is inundated with tides of joy. The plenty of the poorest place is too great: the harvest cannot be gathered. Every sound ends in music. The edge of every surface is tinged with prismatic rays."
The "golden string" is this steady awakening that is our birthright. Imagination and Compassion are the two hands of the Divine that have been given to us: to use! Imagination is the means to -- literally -- un-create every separation: genuine spirituality is imagining the unity of faith and the radical insistence of living that New Reality while many others continue with the old, killing and judging to spite their own failures and fears. Genuine spirituality is imagining a Planet that is Green in Reverence and Graceful Stewardship... genuine spirituality is the practice of Oneness: uniting in each person the principles of maleness and femaleness into the richness of an entirely new creation... genuine spirituality is the deep practice of forgiveness and reconciliation: the "One Love Blessing" through the needed freedom to tell our stories and to have them heard... and genuine spirituality is the integration of justice, peace, equality, and kindness into one's daily life: into every aspect of one's life, economics, politics, and culture... Imagination is the key we are supposed to use and compassion is the door through which we are meant to walk...
An activated compassion is the actual proof of loving: compassion must show itself in both personal practices and social policies. Civilization is not the endless pursuit of privilege and profit, but the cultivation of virtue and justice. Loving-in-action will un-create anger, fear, and hate... loving-in-action will un-create sexism, racism, and classism... loving-in-action will un-create the institutions of exploitation and oppression... loving-in-action will un-create both the desire and the will to profit in any way from anyone else's pain and suffering... With every breath that we take, we can become instruments of peace and beauty and fulfill our destiny to live -- right now -- as Divine Incarnations: can you imagine any greater thrill for the Holy One? Now of course, there are the "naysayers": "All this talk of divine incarnations and the orgasm of God, it is all so different, contrary, and dangerous!" But does it not all boil down to loving others as you love yourself? And maybe, just maybe, loving is, in fact, what it is all about...
Divinely Human
"God became human in order that human might become God." (St. Irenaeus) This is the splendor to which we are destined: many would argue that this is singularly possible because of the Christ-event, while still others take a more radical view of possibilities and see through the veil of mysteries to the core reality: Divine Intention is, simultaneously, within and beyond time -- therefore our "divine humanity" is right now... St. Maximus the Confessor wrote, "We remain creatures while becoming God by grace"... nudging as close as he could to the truth of our condition: we are divinely human...
Divine Intention corresponds to "Original Blessing" (Matthew Fox). Avatars, prophets, saints, and sages all point to the same essential Reality: "You are the Buddha": "You are the One whom you seek"... So the truth of our human condition boils down to this, as taught by Rev. Ellen Grace O'Brian: "1. It is. 2. We are It. 3. We forget. 4. We remember." There is Only One Reality: a "One Love Consciousness" from which all else proceeds: creation is only the illusion of separation: Human beings are an extension / incarnation of the One Love Consciousness existing within the dual nature of Limitless Love and Nature (matter): our self-identification is our life journey from "forgetfulness" to "remembrance"... Whew! That is a lot to chew on, but we will be hungry until we start!
The Christ Consciousness -- once localized in the person of Yeshua, the Poet of Nazareth -- is now the Activation Principle of the One Love working within Nature and the Human, serving to bring all and everyone to fulfillment. Of course, one could very well Name this Activation Principle the "Sophia" (or Divine Wisdom, the Feminine Face of the Divine), or the "Buddha Awakening", or the "Krishna Consciousness", or even "pet names" such as Holy Rascal, Beloved Friend, Wild Lover, or My Delight... [We are the ones who get wrapped up in our egos: Avatars are "ego-less" in that they are completely self-identified as Oneness: "names" are for our love-use: not for the opinions we might have which are rooted in our ideas of separation from Oneness.] The point being "We" are part of nothing other than a Cosmic Celebration -- or redemption -- in an evolutionary movement from Nothing to fertilized egg to birth to particular life experiences and on into the awakening of the Beatific Vision: our complete remembrance and identification, as no longer separate, but as One...
To realize our Divinely Human Being is the working purpose of our lives, and there is no better way than that of uniting sacred pleasure, contemplation, and action into our daily life experience. We want to create a "divine milieu" -- a sacred space -- in our midst: so that cooking food, washing dishes, relaxing, studying, working, playing, sexing, bathing, gardening, massaging, making art, poetry, music, raising children, political organizing for peace and justice: everything that we do will be imbued with the living spirit of rEvolution: of Transfiguration... We want to live in such a way that -- even in saying nothing -- the world around us is changed... To look and to see the ever-present Divinity of Nature and Human is to be living the Eternal Now of the New Creation...