Both light and darkness are emerging, are necessary, are luminous, are beautiful. We are meant for both. Today we enter the final week of advent, a time of waiting and preparing for the ‘coming’ of the Christ into the world again and again. The coming of the consciousness and light of Christ in our own beings and in our own lives. Is this even possible? What does it mean to allow the light of Christ to emerge more fully from within? For starters we can more deeply trust that we are inherently good and that our deepest self is God as many of the mystics tell us (Catherine of Genoa and Meister Eckhardt to name a few). We can allow the fullness of our being to include all the fragmented parts that we reject or cling without mistaking all of these parts as our true identity. We can offer our hearts to be chalices both giving and receiving Divine Love, Hope, Peace, Joy, Courage, Kindness, and other substances that our collective atmosphere is so desperately in need of. It is not, however, only the light of Christ that we wait for but the darkness as well. Here in the Northern Hemisphere tomorrow is winter solstice marking the shortest day, the longest night of the year. It is a time of literal physical darkness. What does this time of year want to reveal to us? Meister Eckhart tells us that “the ground of the soul is dark.” We can lean into this beautiful darkness, surrender to it, and learn to live connected to it without getting lost in its depths. Eckhart calls God’s darkness a “super-essential darkness, a mystery behind mystery, a mystery within mystery that no light has penetrated.” We can allow the eyes of our heart to adjust in this unlit territory that they might begin to see what can only be found in this profound mystery. Cynthia Bourgeault has likened faith to “learning to see in the dark.” We are so often afraid of the dark, of what we cannot see, what is not familiar to us. Instead we can befriend it and allow it to teach us something. Let the darkness surround you, enfold you, enwomb you, caress you, tend to you like the seed is tended to by the soil. Welcome the beautiful beautiful darkness and reclaim its nature that is not so different from the light. Both light and darkness are emerging, are necessary, are luminous, are beautiful. We are meant for both.
May your mind be open.
May your heart be wide.
May your body be at ease.
May you re-member yourself.
With love,
Heather
Here are a few of the readings from this week's pauses:
Search the Darkness Sit with your friends; don't go back to sleep. Don't sink like a fish to the bottom of the sea. Surge like an ocean, don't scatter yourself like a storm. Life's waters flow from darkness. Search the darkness, don't run from it. Night travelers are full of light, and you are, too; don't leave this companionship. Be a wakeful candle in a golden dish, don’t slip in the dirt like quicksilver. The moon appears for night travelers, be watchful when the moon is full.
— Rumi
WEB
Intricate and untraceable
weaving and interweaving,
dark strand with light:
designed, beyond
all spidery contrivance,
to link, not to entrap:
elation, grief, joy, contrition, entwined:
shaking, changing,
forever
forming,
transforming:
all praise,
all praise to the
great web.
— Denise Levertov "The great task of religion is to keep us fully awake, alert, and conscious. Staying awake comes not from willpower but from a wholehearted surrender to the moment—as it is. If we can truly be present, we will experience what most of us mean by God (and we do not even need to call it God). It’s largely a matter of letting go of resistance to what the moment offers or of clinging to a past moment. It is an acceptance of the full reality of what is right here and now." — Richard Rohr
Blessed are you
who bear the light
in unbearable times,
who testify
to its endurance
amid the unendurable,
who bear witness
to its persistence
when everything seems
in shadow
and grief.
Blessed are you
in whom
the light lives,
in whom
the brightness blazes—
your heart
a chapel,
an altar where
in the deepest night
can be seen
the fire that
shines forth in you
in unaccountable faith,
in stubborn hope,
in love that illumines
every broken thing
it finds.
— Jan Richardson
"God is not distant from the universe but a sustaining presence in all of creation. God’s presence is not inseparable from creatures but present and involved with the universe while still being independent of it....The universe is pregnant with the presence of God whose creative action is at the heart of the evolutionary process. God acts as a compassionate partner, as lure toward the future and as co-creator. Indeed, God labors on humans’ behalf.”
— Ilia Delio
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