Good day good people,
We are nearing the celebration of the Incarnation of the Son/Sun, or Christ light, and here in the Northern Hemisphere, having collectively passed through the threshold of the darkest night, we are witnessing the emergence of more and more visible atmospheric light. The rhythmic celebrations of these important passages of increasingly diaphanous light, which our ancestors have honored throughout time, may support us in honoring our collective work of participating in allowing light to be diaphanous through us by way of practicing creating Sun within.
I am grateful for our mutual accompaniment with this practice throughout the season of Advent. I invite us to stay living with the questions from Cynthia Bourgeault on what it might mean for us to receive these substances from the inner and outer Sun and consciously wield them, bringing them as forces even when they are not warranted by the external circumstances we find ourselves in and rather than as a reaction to life or looking to life to draw them out of us. This capacity must come from the Greater Self within supported by the Sun rather than sheer effort and willpower from our creaturely self alone. Our Whole self is needed and so is the assistance from realms and conscious helpers beyond.
May the growing Sun of these last days of Advent and into Christmastide, fill our thought, emotion, and sensation lives and shine forth through our being into all of the spaces we find ourselves in. May we recognize and nourish the growing Sun within all others. May we continue to offer ourselves as wielders of its affirming and sustaining impact within and all around us.
Advent Love, Light, and Peace,
Heather
Readings from last week's Daily Contemplative Pauses
*All previous readings & reflections can be found here*
Monday, December 16th with Catherine
Reading: "The season of Advent means there is something on the horizon the likes of which we have never seen before...So stay. Sit. Linger. Tarry. Ponder. Wait. Behold. Wonder. There will be time enough for running. For rushing. For worrying. For pushing. For now, stay. Wait. Something is on the horizon." ― Jan L. Richardson, Night Vision, p. xiii
Adapted from Cynthia’s blog post on Gebser, p.10: Jan Richardson’s words resonate with the shared intention of our practice to hold the post at this time in our world. From Cynthia’s post on Jean Gebser,- "we are experiencing the phase of the cycle now playing out: the mental structure of consciousness in its deficient mode. [What is no longer working has to give way…] The good news is that this turmoil is in fact a birth canal, and the contractions we are collectively anguishing through are indeed the birth pangs of the rising [of a new] structure [of consciousness] making its presence powerfully known.
Tuesday, December 17th with Heather
Reading: “...if we can go deep enough and begin this integral process in ourselves so that we ourselves can hold it, we have a better chance of holding, not only in our own sanity, but for the whole planet, the hope. That this is the darkness, not before the dawn, but out of which the dawn is emerging. And to not just get too freaked out by what looks like a 360 degree chaos and begin to see the light shining through it.”
“...it's not light which invades. It's not light that dissolves form, that cancels form, that incinerates form. It's not a kind of merging of everything back into an original undifferentiated light. It's a light rather that shines through everything and at the process of shining through everything, it brings forth what the thing it shines through, it brings forth that thing's true nature. But at the same time, it reveals its own true nature in the act.” ― Cynthia Bourgeault, Integral Light Shining in the Dark: An Advent Illumination
Chant: Light in the Dark, Dark in the Light, Lead us O [Christ], by a different sight (by Henry Schoenfield)
Wednesday, December 18th with Heather
Reading: “You hollow us out, God, so that we may carry you, and you endlessly fill us only to be emptied again. Make smooth our inward spaces and sturdy, that we may hold you with less resistance and bear you with deeper grace.” — Jan Richardson, Night Visions p.45
Chant: Inner Life of Being, bearing [grace, love, joy, peace, Christ] within me [us], come (John Tavener, Alan Krema and Darlene Franz)
Thursday, December 19th with Heather
Reading: “... God has no other possible revelation but ourselves, that we are the only expression of [God's] face in the area where we live and that others have the right to ask me to be Jesus Christ: In spite of all my shortcomings, I am entrusted with the mission of being Christ.
"That, I believe, is the gate of light opening out on the mystery of Jesus: that the Incarnation is continued through us and that we, that is each of us, we are Christ for others. Saint Augustine says so: 'We have not only been made Christians, we have been made Christ.' And not only Christ to live in union with him, but to bear the light and the presence of Christ to others, to be what he would be in our place, to continue the act of the washing of the feet, to be given, consumed, eaten like Christ, to be nourishment for others." — Maurice Zundel, With God in Our Daily Lives
Friday, December 20th with Heather
We focused on an Atmosphere of using some of the lines from The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air We Breathe by Gerald Manley Hopkins:
Wild air, world-mothering air,
Nestling me everywhere,
I say that we are wound
With mercy round and round
As if with air: the same
Is Mary, more by name.
She, wild web, wondrous robe,
Mantles the guilty globe,
The sweet alms’ self is her
And humans are meant to share
Her life as life does air.
If I have understood,
She holds high motherhood
Towards all our ghostly good
And plays in grace her part
About human’s beating heart,
Through her we may see him
Made sweeter, not made dim,
And her hand leaves his light
Sifted to suit our sight.
Be thou then, thou dear
Mother, my atmosphere;
To wend and meet no sin;
Above me, round me lie
Fronting my froward eye
With sweet and scarless sky;
Stir in my ears, speak there
Of God’s love, O live air,
Of patience, penance, prayer:
World-mothering air, air wild,
Fold home, fast fold thy child.
Saturday, December 21st with Heather
Reading: “When I was first taught the concept, I was taught to capitalize it. The Incarnation happened just once, in one person, a very long time ago. In Jesus alone was God’s Word Made Flesh. As his follower, my job was to trust that was true, and to persuade others that it was true as well. The Incarnation was presented to me as an article of faith. It was a unique event that involved Jesus and no one else, and the fate of my own flesh depended on my acceptance of that fact.
“Relatively late in life, I have decided that incarnation is less a doctrine than a practice, which Jesus did not come to do once and for all but to show any who were willing how God’s word might become flesh in their own lives too.” — Barbara Brown Taylor
Chant: Inner Life of Being, bearing [grace, love, joy, peace, Christ] within me [us], come (John Tavener, Alan Krema and Darlene Franz)
Sunday, December 22nd with Heather
Reading: “As women and as men, during this season we share with Mary and Joseph in giving birth to the holy. Bringing forth the sacred depends not solely on the physical ability to give birth. Although that is one way to share in creating with God, we give birth too, when we create with our hands, offer hospitality, work for justice, or teach a child. We share in giving birth whenever we freely offer ourselves for healing, for delight, for transformation, for peace. And we become, as German mystic Meister Eckhart wrote in the Middle Ages, ‘mothers of God, for God is always needing to be born.’” — Jan Richardson, Night Visions, p.74-75
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