All posts by amclaughlin2014

Member of Community of Grey Sisters of Pembroke; Masters Degree in Religious Communication, Loyola University, Chicago; Author: Called to Egypt on the Back of the Wind (2013) Planted in the Sky (2006) both published by Borealis Press, Ottawa Canada www.borealispress.com Retreat facilitator: The Wooing of the Soul (2013) The Sophia Salons, beginning in February 2016, offer journeys to one's own inner wisdom for small groups of women. For information: amclaughlin@sympatico.ca
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Brigid: Midwife for a Planetary Rebirth

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by Dolores Whelan

Reflecting on the turmoil present in the world today it is clear to all, but those steeped in denial, that all is not well. It seems that something ails us humans; something that causes us to live in ways that disrespect our mother, the living earth, and all our relatives. We ask what is it in us humans that creates such a restless world where there is little sense of belonging, nurture or home and which causes so many of the species with which we share this planet to suffer?

Artwork by Andrea Redmond, an artist living in Donegal, originally from Prince Edward Island, Canada

The exclusion of the Feminine energy in our naming and understanding of the Divine is reflected in a corresponding absence and valuing of feminine energy in all aspects of life in western society. The devaluing and exclusion of the feminine energy over the past centuries has created a distorted story about life which has resulted in a world whose shape and vibration create disharmony.

So how do we find our way back to a more harmonious way of life? If we know what is missing and what ails us, it may be possible for us to make the journey back towards wholeness and health.

In times of great danger and challenges, cultures often seek the wisdom for the journey ahead in the stories and myths that sustained them in an earlier time. However as Poet Nuala Ni Dhomhnail suggests this requires an understanding that “actual myths and stories themselves soar way above any uses to which they may have been put to already and can and must be retranslated by each generation in terms of their own need and thus liberated into a new consciousness.” (1)

At the present time there is a wonderful re-emergence of aspects of ancient spiritual traditions by people all over the world. The reconnection and embodiment of these ancient spiritual traditions, myths and stories has the potential to release the spiritual power needed for us to become agents of transformation within our society.

At this time many people are becoming aware of the wisdom of the feminine. As this happens, the absence of genuine feminine energy present in most institutions, both religious and secular, throughout western culture, becomes obvious. To include the presence of the divine feminine energy in creating a world whose shape is more wholesome requires a fundamental reclaiming of the essential role of the feminine in all aspects of life. In order to create change within the physical world and in our society it is necessary to change the dreams and stories held within the imagination of a society.

My own journey over the past 25years has been primarily within the Celtic spiritual tradition. This tradition has emerged over many millennia and continues to evolve. It includes the wisdom of the megalithic, the pre-Christian Celtic and the Christian Celtic traditions as they met and engaged with each other through the ages. I believe the rekindling of the flames of this tradition, which have lain dormant for many centuries, “like coals under the smooring awaiting a new kindling” holds a key to the recovery of the wisdom needed to create a more sane society.

“God is good and he has a great mother!” a statement sometimes heard in Ireland, reflects an important truth at the heart of the Celtic spiritual tradition, one that honours the presence of the divine feminine and understands that even God emerges out of the feminine energy of being-ness. The Divine Feminine is present at the heart of this spiritual tradition and plays a central role in both Celtic spirituality and Celtic culture. There are many goddesses within Celtic mythology; however Brigid, as both goddess and saint, occupies a central place as representative of the Divine Feminine within Celtic tradition.

Reconnecting with and re-membering the spirit and archetypal energy of Brigid, in both her Goddess and saint manifestations, is an essential task of this renaissance. Brigid, although normally associated with the maiden and mother aspects of feminine energy, is also expressed in the cailleach form, as indicated in the prayer “Molamid Brid an mhaighean; Molamid Brid an mhathair; Molamid Brid an cailleach” (Praise to Brigid, the maiden, the mother, and the crone).

These three different, but related manifestations, the maiden, the mother, and the cailleach, or crone, together create a divine feminine trinity. Each aspect of this trinity occupies a different role within the life, death, and rebirth continuum. The Feminine energy is both the harbinger and the birther of new life and is the destroyer of life that has been spent. It is experienced at the thresholds of life and death and rebirth.

In the past 20 years there has been a new awakening of the importance of Brigid and her place within our lives and our world. Her Feastday at Imbolc in now celebrated in many places in Ireland and all over the world. There is an understanding perhaps it is time for us individually and collectively to recover the qualities that Brigid embodied in her lifetime, marking her as a woman of true spiritual power.

Below: The Shrine of Brigid in Faughart , Ireland , believed to be the birthplace of Brigid of Kildare( Photo, February 1, 2018)

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Solace for Our Bleak Midwinter

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In JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Gandalf has just revealed to Frodo that he must accept responsibility for a ring of power left to him by Bilbo. Gandalf continues, “This is the Master-ring, the One Ring to rule them all. This is the One Ring that (the Dark Lord) lost many ages ago, to the great weakening of his power. He greatly desires it– but he must not get it.”

Frodo sat silent and motionless. Fear seemed to stretch out a vast hand, like a dark cloud rising in the East and looming up to engulf him. “I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.

“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us. And already, Frodo, our time is beginning to look black.”

Remove the wrappings from Tolkien’s tale. Its heart speaks to us. Fear “like a dark cloud rising in the East” engulfs our planet with a series of climate crises, wars, disasters. We hear ourselves echoing Frodo’s words: “I wish it need not have happened in my time.”

Gandalf’s wisdom also echoes: All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.

To decide that will require wisdom as well as courage. Yet we also need a sense of hope, as well as sources of solace…. This I wish to offer especially in one area of our current darkness: the depredation of our planet, Gaia. And for this I turn to poets who, as Teilhard de Chardin has written, also serve us as mystics and philosophers. To find hope in Gaia even in the midst of our suffering, it’s good to remember the words of Kahlil Gibran in The Prophet: When you are sorrowful, look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

The poet Alfred K LaMotte reminds us that even now Gaia has delight to offer us, to sustain us:

YOU ASKED

When you asked,

How can I face

such a dark world?

the answer was all around you.

The wands of pine

in rain-laden breeze answered,

bell-throated, blackbirds

ringing over the wetland

answered, stars

floating on a still pond

answered, dancing

snow of milkweed,

pearl-eyed mushrooms

seeing through midnight

in the forest answered:

This world is not the seat of sorrow.

This world is sunlight

playing in a risen mist

over the fountain of beauty.

The seat of sorrow is your heart

aching, thirsting

for its own illumination.

But the healing is easy.

Turn your gaze around

and see into your source.

You are that fountain, that

refraction of prism’d beauty.

Listen to the raindrop fall,

how it finds its way home,

as fallen things do,

to the hidden spring

under pungent green moss

where it was born.

Even the raindrop answers,

Yes.

Jude Currivan in “The Story of Gaia” describes a mystical moment of beauty and wonder during a solar eclipse:

On August 1, 2008, together with some fellow travelers, I climbed one of the high peaks of mount Huashan, located about 120 kilometers from the city of Xian in China, to witness a total Solar eclipse. Across from me was another of the five summits of this sacred mountain.

With their rocks delving deep into Gaia and their peaks reaching high to the heavens, mountains have held spiritual significance for millennia, inviting pilgrims to undertake journeys of inner and outer discovery and revelation.  Indeed, the Chinese phrase for pilgrimage, h’ao-shan chin-hsiang, means “to offer respect to a mountain.” And from ancient times this particular massif, carved from a single huge block of granite, and the precipitous and dangerous paths to its crests have held especial meaning, offering hard-won opportunities for insight and guidance.

Its five-peaked shape spreads open like the lotus after which it’s named – symbolizing a flower that rises from its roots in mud, through water, to open its blossoms to Sol. Representing purity of heart and mind, the lotus and thus the mountain embodies the sacred seat of Buddha, as attested to by the many shrines and temples adorning its flanks and heights.

After a spectacular cable car ride to near the top of the peak and a steep climb to its crest, we arrived in the late afternoon of a beautiful, warm late-summer day. In the pale blue sky above the mountain, Luna in her fullness was slowly but inexorably extending her shadow over the disk of Sol.

One small cloud was visible in an otherwise clear sky.  But as the eclipse continued to proceed to its few minutes of totality, when Luna completely covered Sol, the arc of their combined path, to my consternation, dipped behind the cloud.

After journeying so far to witness one of the most glorious of cosmic phenomena, it seemed that I was destined for it to be out of sight and only to sense its occurrence.  So, I closed my eyes, aiming to attune with the coming few minutes of totality, when Gaia, Sol, and Luna perfectly aligned.

With my conscious mind having surrendered to whatever I might experience, I had no further expectations. A few moments later, though, I heard clairaudiently a message to “open your eyes.”

When I did, I literally began to shake with emotion and tears began to flow down my face. My gaze took in an amazing scene. Across the valley beneath me and upward to the pointed mountain peak beyond, the disk of Sol was now exactly covered by that of Luna. Fully clear of the small cloud and with no sunlight to reflect off Luna’s face, the total eclipse created a perfect circle of utter blackness against the backdrop of bright sky.

Of itself, this incredible sight is one of the most extraordinary phenomena of our Soular System. Yet, in a further miracle, the eclipse appeared almost impossibly poised: perfectly balanced, exactly and only for its few minutes of totality, on the very tip of the mountain.

This trinity of Sol, Luna, and Gaia experienced uniquely, only at this precise moment and at this exact vantage point, and shared only with my fellow travelers and a few young and local Chinese people was, as yet, the most wonder-full sight of my life.

It was as though the galaxy had sent an emissary to remind me of the vast black hole at its center and even, perhaps, as a sense of connecting to its sentience through the totality of the eclipse.

I watched this miracle in silence, along with the world around us that also seemed spellbound, as, in their cosmic dance, Sol and Luna, majestically sashaying together, slipped behind the peak. Moments later, now hidden from our view, as they silently parted to go their separate ways until their next communion, the sky behind the mountain crest before us exploded into light.

Solar eclipses as seen from Gaia certainly appear like nothing else in our Soular System and may be exceedingly rare or even unique throughout our galaxy and even entire Universe. The striking image of what black holes might look like when seen up close, may be nearest to this celestial phenomenon that occurs with awe-full regularity a few times every year. It’s a vision that on a profound level inspires in me a sense of the “black whole” of no-thingness and yet al-thingness.

Let us set our hearts to find what we are called to do with this, our time. And let us sustain our courage, our joy with the beauty that still exists on Gaia.

Madonna Rising

Someone is Coming Ashore

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If you grew up Catholic in the years before the Second Vatican Council, chances are Mary was at the very heart of your faith. You prayed the “Hail Mary” many times daily; you sang hymns to Mary as you walked in May processions carrying flowers to decorate her statue; in every trouble and doubt, in every dark moment of your own life, you turned to her as to a mother whose love for you was unconditional. You probably knew by heart the “Memorare”, a prayer to Mary that says, in part, “Remember…Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to your protection, implored your help or sought your intercession was left unaided…”

At the call of Pope John 23rd, 2600 Roman Catholic Bishops gathered in Rome for the Second Vatican Council in the mid-1960’s. Believing they were restoring a balance, they invited Mary to step from her throne, and guided her gently to a place among the faithful, the followers of her son, Jesus. The “excesses” of Marian devotion were curbed… and then what happened?

Over the past fifty years since the closing of the Vatican Council, we have seen a burgeoning of interest in the “Sacred Feminine”; a recovery of ancient stories of the Goddess; archaeological finds that create renewed interest in the time when the Sacred One was honoured as a woman; an explosion of writing among theologians, historians, cultural storytellers, seeking to understand the power and presence of “Mary” in the Christian story. I will cite a few here: The Virgin by Geoffrey Ashe; Missing Mary by Charlene Spretnak; Untie the Strong Woman by Clarissa Pinkola Estes and Truly Our Sister by Elizabeth Johnson.

Though I am no theologian, I have a consuming interest in the many aspects of this mystery. What I glimpse is this: the human heart longs for a divine mothering presence. Ancient cultures honoured a feminine divine who over millennia was called by many names: Isis in Egypt; Inanna in Sumeria; Ishtar in Babylon; Athena, Hera and Demeter in Greece, Anu or Danu among the ancient Celts; Durga, Kali and Lakshmi in India; for the Kabbalists, Shekinah; for the gnostics, Sophia or Divine Wisdom. Christianity had no “Mother God” to put in the place of the Goddesses whose worship it was determined to eradicate. Geoffrey Ashe’s theory is that Mary’s gradual ascension in Christianity was not an initiative of Church Leadership, but rather a response to the hunger of the early Christians for a sacred feminine presence.

How it came about is less interesting to me than the reality that Mary became for us an opening to a loving feminine sacred presence. Or, put another way, a loving sacred feminine presence responded to the cries of her people when they called her “Mary”, just as that presence had responded over the millennia to other names cried out in love or sorrow or desperate need.

Over these darkening days as we descend to the longest night of the year at the Winter Solstice, Mary will be our companion. We reflect on her pregnancy, her waiting, her uncertainty, the doubts of those who love her, the trust that sustains her “while she opens deeper into the ripple in her womb…” as John O’Donohue has written.

No man reaches where the moon touches a woman.

Even the moon leaves her when she opens

Deeper into the ripple in her womb

That encircles dark to become flesh and bone.

Someone is coming ashore inside her.

A face deciphers itself from water

And she curves around the gathering wave,

Opening to offer the life it craves.

In a corner stall of pilgrim strangers,

She falls and heaves, holding a tide of tears.

A red wire of pain feeds through every vein

Until night unweaves and the child reaches dawn.

Outside each other now, she sees him first.

Flesh of her flesh, her dreamt son safe on earth.

John O’Donohue Connemara Blues

Doubleday, Great Britain, 2000; Bantam Books, 2001

This is profound mystery. For Mary. For each one of us who carries the Holy within us, seeking a place of birth. We walk the dark road, with Mary, in trust.

We walk companioned by one who knows our struggles to maintain our trust in the face of inner doubts and outer calamity. We walk with one who loves us and encourages us until we are ready to welcome “the day which will be born from the womb of this present darkness.”

What mystery is “Coming Ashore” inside you?

Advent

Through the Hill Country to Elizabeth

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Advent Reflection on Mary’s Visit to Elizabeth

Mary set out at that time and went as quickly as she could to a town in the hill country of Judah. She went into Zechariah’s house and greeted Elizabeth. Now as soon as Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leapt in her womb and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. She gave a loud cry and said, “Of all women you are the most blessed, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. Why should I be honoured with a visit from the mother of my Lord? For the moment your greeting reached my ears, the child in my womb leapt for joy. Yes, blessed is she who believed that the promise made her by the Lord would be fulfilled.” (Gospel of Luke: 1:39-45)

This moment in Mary’s story is so familiar that we may miss its deeper meaning. As a child, I was taught that it was about Mary being so unselfish that her first act following the angel’s visit was to rush over to assist Elizabeth who was six months pregnant. I see it differently now. Now I know that when annunciation happens, when life is upturned with an unexpected invitation to gestate, nurture, birth newness, our hearts, like Mary’s, long for the presence of someone with whom to share the joy. Each of us experiences in those moments the absolute requirement of being with someone who knows mystery in the depths of her own being, as Elizabeth does. Would not each one of us set out at that time and (go) as quickly as (we) could to the embrace of a friend whose gaze mirrors our wonder and delight?

The Visitation

In the morning it takes the mind a while

To find the world again, lost after dream

Has taken the heart to the underworld

To play with the shades of lives not chosen.

She awakens a stranger in her own life,

Her breath loud in the room full of listening.

Taken without touch, her flesh feels the grief

Of belonging to what cannot be seen.

Soon she can no longer bear to be alone.

At dusk she takes the road into the hills.

An anxious moon doubles her among the stone.

A door opens, the older one’s eyes fill.

Two women locked in a story of birth.

Each mirrors the secret the other heard.

(John O’Donohue in Conamara Blues)

As we take this fragment of Mary’s story, holding it in the firelight of our heart, seeking for a likeness between her story and ours, what do we glimpse? How does her song resonate with ours? When have we known what it is to awaken as “a stranger to (our) own life”?

Is there not in each one of us the fragility of something so utterly unimagined, yet wholly real, appearing in a morning’s glimpse, disappearing in evening’s shadow…. that we require a mirroring presence to affirm its existence?

In this experience we are at the heart of our calling to provide the inner space for newness to gestate in preparation for birth. Each of us knows the need to nurture this newness in times of solitude. Yet we know also the absolute requirement of being companioned by others if our hearts are to remain open, nourished, and (as Hildegard says) juicy!

Each of us, like Mary, is walking a new path, one whose gifts, ecstatic joys, shuddering griefs, are as unknown to us as Mary’s were to her. But I believe Elizabeth would bless each one of us as she did Mary:

Yes, blessed is she who believed that the promise made her by the Lord would be fulfilled.

Advent

Waiting in Advent Darkness

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Advent was once my favourite Liturgical season. The weaving of a wreath that smelled of fir trees in winter forests. The candles whose shared light grew steadily with each week. The mysterious darkness of earth and heart, as both awaited the radiance, the wonder of Christmas. Enchantment.

There came a dark November day when I knew I would not gather the evergreen boughs that fell to the earth from generous trees near my home. I would not purchase four candles (three purple and one rose-coloured). I would not spend four weeks awaiting Christmas. These symbols no longer held meaning: the four weeks of Advent were meant to represent the four thousand years that humans awaited the birth of Christ.

It was the Irish priest-writer Diarmuid O’Murchu who pointed out that paleontologists estimate human life on this planet was conscious at least six million years ago, and that timeline keeps getting pushed back…. Cosmologists, most notably the luminous Teilhard de Chardin, acknowledge that there is a form of spirit/light/consciousness in all that exists on the planet, including rocks. That takes us back to the beginnings of our universe, more than thirteen billion years…

Further, as O’Murchu suggests, the earliest conscious humans expressed in artwork and ritual an awareness of a power in the universe that held them in love and light in all earth’s ages before the coming of Christ…

So what place can the four weeks of Advent have in this new Universe Story? The allurement of the Universe as the expression, the visible Presence of Love in our lives, was/is so powerful that I gladly relinquished the lure of those dark weeks of Advent. Disenchantment.

And then I began to fall in love with the Winter Solstice. I discovered that this amazing yearly time (which for our ancestors only became evident in earlier dawns and later sunsets after a few days) was the reason why the early Christians chose December 25th to celebrate the Birth of Christ. Celtic scholar Dara Molloy, author of The Globalization of God told me when I visited him in Ireland that it was the Celtic Christians who also suggested June 24th, a few days after the Summer Solstice, the time of the waning of the light, for the Feast of John the Baptist. Hadn’t John said of the Christ, “He must increase and I must decrease”?

Slowly, over recent years, the beauty, passion and power of the Christ-story are being rewoven by many among us on the loom of our new knowledge of the Universe. Bruce Sanguin has done this with clarity and poetic elegance in his article, “Evolutionary Cosmology”:

The season of Advent is an affirmation of the dark mysteries of life. In these four weeks, we enter into a deepening darkness, a fecund womb where new life stirs. Before the great Flaring Forth 13.8 billion years ago, there was only the empty dark womb of the Holy One. We have a bias against darkness privileging the light in our tradition. But most of the universe is comprised of what scientists call dark matter….for the universe to exist in its present form, and not fly off in all directions, the gravitational pull of the dark matter is necessary. Creation needs the dark in order to gestate.

Advent is a season of contemplation and meditation in which the soul, if allowed, falls willingly back into that primordial darkness out of which new worlds are birthed.…

When Mary uttered those five words, “Let it be to me”, she was assenting to the descent into the sacred mystery that angels announce in the seasons of Advent and Christmas. We are called to trust this descent into darkness, making ourselves available as the ones through whom a holy birth can happen.

To go deep into the Season of Advent is to trust that there are galaxies of love stirring within the womb of your being, supernovas of compassion ready to explode and seed this wondrous world with Christ-shaped possibilities

Are we willing with Mary to consent to the birth of the divine coming through us? Are we willing to actually be a reconfigured presence of the originating Fireball, prepared to be centre of creative emergence – to give birth to the sacred future that is the dream of God? Are we willing both personally and in the context of our faith communities to birth the Christ?

So bring on the Christmas pageants….and when that cardboard star-on-a-stick glitters above the baby Jesus, think of it as your cosmological kin winking at you and settling over you as well, lighting you up as a sacred centre through whom the Christ waits to be born.

Re-enchantment.

We wait in darkness, and we do not wait alone,

as poet Jessica Powers writes:

I live my Advent in the womb of Mary

And on one night when a great star swings free

From its high mooring and walks down the sky

To be the dot above the Christus i,

I shall be born of her by blessed grace.

I wait in Mary-darkness, faith’s walled place,

With hope’s expectation of nativity.

I knew for long she carried me and fed me,

Guarded and loved me, though I could not see,

But only now, with inward jubilee,

I came upon earth’s most amazing knowledge:

Someone is hidden in this dark with me.

Brian Swimme

Part Three: Our Journey Towards Radiance

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(based on the teachings of Cosmologist Brian Swimme on the Powers of the Universe, illustrated with insights from Jean Houston and from the writings of poets and mystics)

Homeostasis: Here what has been developed is sustained, maintained… The goddess Sarasvati in India plays only one note on her long-stringed instrument; body temperature stays at 98.6F…. We may reach a level of sameness in our prayers and practices, our work and relationships, the structures of our lives, our liturgies…. but if kept too long, safety leads to stagnation. We reach a plateau as the urgency subsides, the joy fades into the commonplace; what seemed wonderful becomes the everyday, the expected. Our lives slip into the “nothing-happening” of an Austen novel, and we may not even notice how dull it is. The universe gets bored with us. That was Dorothy’s life when we first meet her in the Wizard of Oz. Grey skies, grey land, grey telephone poles.The only thing really alive was Toto; then he was taken away.

Cataclysm: For the next level of growth, of deepening, something has to wake us up, shake us up. It may take a tornado to blow us all the way to Oz…. We must orchestrate the breakdown for the breakthrough to occur. The mystics endured cataclysm in different ways: Julian of Norwich was sustained in her near-death experience by the presence of love whereas Angela of Foligno, a follower of Francis of Assisi, learned in the darkness where she lost everything that love would never leave her. For by that blessing which came with the darkness I did collect my thoughts and was made so sure of God that I can never again doubt but that I do of a certainty possess him. Trust in the darkness and loss finally brings us through to the light. Etty Hillesum, who died in Auschwitz during the Second World War, wrote: I shall try to help you, God, to stop my strength ebbing away, though I cannot vouch for it in advance. But one thing is becoming increasingly clear to me: that you cannot help us, that we must help you to help ourselves. And that is all we can manage these days, also all that really matters: that we safeguard that little piece of you, God, in ourselves. And in others as well. Alas, there doesn’t seem to be much you yourself can do about our circumstances, about our lives. Neither do I hold you responsible. You cannot help us but we must help you and defend your dwelling place inside us to the end.

Jean Houston says that the call is to “radical reinvention” in order to speciate, to become a deepening spirit of the earth for her new emergence. Like the seed, the mystic must go down into the darkness of the earth, let go of the success of walking in the midday sun of her own achievements, her own goals and triumphs.

Synergy: mutually enhancing relationships. Life at the Benedictine Monastery of Helfta was an illustration of this: four mystics lived there in the 12th century, sustaining one another in faith and love and their mystical experiences. The writings of the mystics can offer synergistic energy, the guidance and wisdom we need; now we are more deeply aware of the earth and its living beings, of the universe itself as offering shared energies to us; the bio-mimicry that teaches us how creatures on our planet survive cataclysm; the characters in the Wizard of Oz, representing heart and brain and courage are a splendid example of synergy.

Transmutation: slow but deep change over time; releasing us from old powers that hold us in check: the personal unconscious (Freud); the collective unconscious (Jung); the whole biological nature (Bateson). The universe is at work within us: we are part of the cosmological unconscious (Swimme); we are the universe reflecting upon itself through us (Teilhard). On the mystic journey, our own efforts to be still, to listen, to pray, to seek inner guidance….

Terese of Lisieux said our efforts are like a child trying laboriously to lift her feet to climb high steps until at last love scoops her up in her arms, carries her to the top…evolution of species; the ancient tale of the earth gradually being created by bits of soil being placed on the back of a turtle… we recognize transmutation taking place in us when we no longer fit into old patterns, relationships, structures. Then we must seek out others to help us to keep going.

Transformation: Sudden. Go looking for guidance in the mystics, writers and poets who have experienced this. Welcome beauty into our lives. We have within us a visionary process which is a source for the recoding of the planet. All the codings for the life of the unborn future are available in us. We are the recoding, the reset button.

After a long illness, a bout of scrupulosity, Caryll Houselander had an experience of God that removed her obsessive fears and gave her a profound peace: “It was in the evening, I think. The room was dark, and the flames of firelight dancing on the wall seemed almost to cause me pain when I opened my eyes….I had realized in a dim, intuitive way that it was not something I had done that required forgiveness, but everything I was that required to be miraculously transformed.”

Interrelatedness : a vision of caring with a sense of the whole an invitation from the cosmos to see all of life as interconnected, as did the mystics, the astronauts and now the physicists. We need an overarching vision that is so simple and alluring that we can see what the world can be…. What does a world look like that really works for everyone? This is an incredible grace and opportunity for us, born on this beautiful planet at this time in history.

Radiance: the power of wisdom: The sun gives off messages as gravitons that pull us to the sun; the sun interacts with the moon and new gravitons feed us; the earth responds with a flood of gravitons….human presence depth perception. We are frozen light…

Hildegard of Bingen, the astonishing 12th c. abbess and genius, wrote: “From my infancy until now, in the 70th year of my age, my soul has always beheld this Light, and in it my soul soars to the summit of the firmament and into a different air….The brightness which I see is not limited by space and is more brilliant than the radiance around the sun ….When and how I see this, I cannot tell; but sometimes when I see it, all sadness and pain is lifted from me, and I seem a simple girl again, and an old woman no more!”

Brian Swimme says that every being you meet holds fourteen billion years of radiance. Radiance is the primary language of the universe. We develop a container that can respond to the beauty of the other. We enter into resonance with the radiance of the universe, and that is the primary form of prayer. You become the radiance that is flooding the world.

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Part Two: Our Journey Towards Radiance

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Teilhard de Chardin (Jesuit 20th c.) This is what I have learnt from my contact with the earth… the diaphany of the divine at the heart of a glowing universe, the divine radiating from the depths of matter aflame.

Vincent Van Gogh’s painting “Starry Night” with an image of the Universe from the James Webb telescope superimposed

Last week I Invited you to consider the dreams you hold for your life as we look together at the unfolding of the Universe through the ten powers described by Cosmologist Brian Swimme.

We saw that the path of the mystics of many faith traditions reveal a surprising harmony with the scientific discoveries made in our time about the evolution of the Universe itself. Like the mystics, the Universe moves through a process that leads towards radiance.

This is our process as well, our story, and our most urgent call of this, our time on the planet.

Through the dark weeks of Samhain, we’ll make a journey into radiance guided by Brian Swimme’s DVD series: “Powers of the Universe.” Like his mentor, Thomas Berry, Brian was inspired by the vision of Teilhard de Chardin. For these weekly reflections, I will be drawing on Jean Houston’s teachings as well as the writings of poets and mystics such as John O’Donohue, Etty Hillesum, Caryll Houselander, Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich and Angela of Foligno.

We’ll begin by looking more closely at Seamlessness, Centration, Allurement and Emergence.

Seamlessness:The universe is bound together in communion, each thing with all the rest. The gravitational bond unites all the galaxies; the electromagnetic interaction binds all the molecules; the genetic information connects all the generations of the ancestral tree of life. (Brian Swimme)

Jean Houston expands onSwimme’s description: All the powers of the universe are seamlessly one, trying to bring forth radiance. These powers can be understood mystically as within ourselves waiting to assist us to bring forth a world that works for everyone.

To illustrate seamlessness, Jean turns to an ancient story from India: A great ruler named Indra asked aritificers to create for him a magnificent web as large as the Universe itself. At every crossing in this web there is a jewel. As each jewel shines its light is reflected in every other jewel. Thus Indra’s Net symbolizes the interconnectedness of all that exists.

Alan Watts offers an image from nature to illustrate the concept of Indra’s Net:“Imagine a multidimensional spider’s web in the early morning covered with dew drops. And every dew drop contains the reflection of all the other dew drops. And, in each reflected dew drop, the reflections of all the other dew drops…. And so ad infinitum. That is the Buddhist conception of the universe in an image.” 

Centration: We are the gathered-in-ness of 13.8 billion years. Brian Swimme teaches that we are the Universe conscious of itself, self-aware of WHO we really are and of all that we are.

Margaret Brennan teaches: Mystics are people who come in touch with the sacred source of who they really are and are able to realize and experience that in their lives. When we have come in touch with the deep centre of ourselves/our lives we realize that we are more than what we seem to be, that there’s something deeper in ourselves than meets the eye.

John O’Donohue writes: For millions of years, before you arrived here, the dream of your individuality was carefully prepared. You were sent to a shape of destiny in which you would be able to express the special gift you bring to the world. Sometimes this gift may involve suffering and pain that can neither be accounted for nor explained. There is a unique destiny for each person. Each one of us has something to do here that can be done by no one else. If someone else could fulfill your destiny, then they would be in your place, and you would not be here.

Allurement: As the mystics did, we draw unto ourselves, are lured towards, the love that holds the Universe together; we allure all we require to grow in that love, within the calling, the shape of destiny that is uniquely ours; we ourselves can be principles of allurement.

Jean Houston advises us to have leaky margins, to be able to fall in love with everything. If fears and worries are blocking allurement, bring in an inner guide to care for them, to set you free… be aware of the negative quality of allurement: notice what you draw to yourself.

It is in the depths of your life that you will discover the invisible necessity that has brought you here. When you begin to decipher this, your gift and giftedness come alive. (O’Donohue)

Emergence: the Universe flares forth out of darkness Our lives begin to blossom with gifts that grow through our co-creative love relationship with the Holy; we begin to see what is possible as we open to joy.

Jean Houston teaches: We can learn how to work with the Universe in what is trying to emerge within us. Set up a schedule. Show up at the page, or in the listening or prayer place regularly to signal our intent to be open. We can create internal structures that are ready to receive what wants to emerge in us. Then we drop in an idea that puts us in touch with essence, creates in us a cosmic womb so the universal power can work in us, so that, like Hildegard we become a flowering for the possible, attracting the people and resources that we need.

Your heart quickens and the urgency of living rekindles your creativity. (O’Donohue)

To be continued on November 27, 2023: Part Three: Our Journey towards Radiance

Brian Swimme

Journey into Radiance

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What dreams do you hold for your own unfolding?

Teilhard de Chardin (Jesuit 20th c.) This is what I have learnt from my contact with the earth… the diaphany of the divine at the heart of a glowing universe, the divine radiating from the depths of matter aflame.

The Mystics of the Christian tradition as well as those of other faith paths show us the radiance of a life fully realized, though their paths may seem harsh, even unattainable, to our twenty-first century eyes.

The journey to fullness of life can be found in other images, other metaphors now available to us. We can follow the footprints that lead to wholeness through ancient stories, myth, poetry, and the writings of the great mystics. These are in surprising harmony with the scientific discoveries made in our time about the unfolding of life on the planet, the unfolding of the universe itself. Like the Mystics, the Universe moves through a process of unfolding into radiance. It is our process as well, our story, and our most urgent call in this time.

During the dark weeks of Samhain, I invite you to make a journey into radiance guided by the teachings of Brian Swimme in his DVD series: “Powers of the Universe.” Like his mentor, Thomas Berry, Brian was inspired by the vision of Teilhard de Chardin. I will be drawing on Jean Houston’s presentations related to the ten powers that Brian describes, as well as by writings of poets and mystics such as John O’Donohue, Etty Hillesum, Caryll Houselander, Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich and Angela of Foligno.

All the powers of the universe are seamlessly one, trying to bring forth radiance. These powers can be understood mystically as within ourselves waiting to assist us to bring forth a world that works for everyone. (Jean Houston)

Here is an overview of the Powers we shall be exploring together :

Seamlessness: The universe is bound together in communion, each thing with all the rest. The gravitational bond unites all the galaxies; the electromagnetic interaction binds all the molecules; the genetic information connects all the generations of the ancestral tree of life. (Brian Swimme)

Centration: We are the gathered-in-ness of 13.8 billion years: the universe conscious of itself; it is also important that we are self-aware of WHO we really are and of all that we are; the mystics knew themselves in the presence of the Holy: Mystics are people who come in touch with the sacred source of who they really are and are able to realize and experience that in their lives. (Margaret Brennan)

Allurement: As the mystics did, we draw unto ourselves, are lured towards, the love that holds the universe together; we allure all we require to grow in that love, within the calling, the shape of destiny that is uniquely ours; we ourselves can be principles of allurement. Jean Houston advises us to have leaky margins, to be able to fall in love with everything.

Emergence: the universe flares forth out of darkness Our lives begin to blossom with gifts that grow through our co-creative love relationship with the Holy; we begin to see what is possible as we open to joy.We can learn how to work with the universe in what it is trying to emerge within us.

Homeostasis: Here what has been developed is sustained, maintained… The goddess Sarasvati in India plays only one note on her long-stringed instrument; body temperature stays at 98.6F…. We may reach a level of sameness in our prayers and practices, our work and relationships, the structures of our lives, our liturgies…. but if kept too long, safety leads to stagnation.

Cataclysm: For the next level of growth, of deepening, something has to wake us up, shake us up. It may take a tornado to blow us all the way to Oz…. Trust in the darkness and loss finally brings us through to the light. Jean Houston says that the call is to “radical reinvention” in order to speciate, to become a deepening spirit of the earth for her new emergence.

Synergy: mutually enhancing relationships. The writings of the mystics can offer synergistic energy, the guidance and wisdom we need; now we are more deeply aware of the earth and its living beings, of the universe itself as offering shared energies to us; the bio-mimicry that teaches us how creatures on our planet survive cataclysm; the characters in the Wizard of Oz, representing heart and brain and courage are a splendid example of synergy.

Transmutation: slow but deep change over time; releasing us from old powers that hold us in check: the personal unconscious (Freud); the collective unconscious (Jung); the whole biological nature (Bateson). The universe is at work within us: we are part of the cosmological unconscious (Swimme); the universe reflecting upon itself through us (Teilhard).

Transformation: Sudden. Go looking for guidance in the mystics, writers and poets who have experienced this. Welcome beauty into our lives. We have within us a visionary process which is a source for the recoding of the planet. All the codings for the life of the unborn future are available in us. We are the recoding, the reset button.

Interrelatedness : a vision of caring with a sense of the whole an invitation from the cosmos to see all of life as interconnected, as did the mystics, and the astronauts and now the physicists. We need an overarching vision that is so simple and alluring that we can see what the world can be…. What does a world look like that really works for everyone? This is an incredible grace and opportunity for us, born on this beautiful planet at this time in history.

Radiance: the power of wisdom: The sun gives off messages as gravitons that pull us towards its light; the sun interacts with the moon and new gravitons feed us; the earth responds with a flood of gravitons…We are frozen light… Brian Swimme says that every being you meet holds fourteen billion years of radiance. Radiance is the primary language of the universe. We develop a container that can respond to the beauty of the other. We enter into resonance with the radiance of the universe, and that is the primary form of prayer.

Teilhard de Chardin

Teilhard’s Vision: A Participatory Universe

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We live in a universe where everything that exists shines “like a crystal lamp illumined from within”, as we saw in our earlier reflections on “Teilhard and the New Spirituality” (From Teilhard to Omega edited by Ilia Delio, Orbis Books, Maryknoll NY 2014 Chapter Ten). This reality calls us to respond with wonder, awe, gratitude.

Yet Teilhard believed that much more is required from us. The same essay goes on to describe the way Teilhard saw our involvement in the evolutionary process:

(Teilhard) envisioned the evolutionary process as one moving toward evolution of consciousness and ultimately toward evolution of spirit, from the birth of mind to the birth of the whole Christ. He urged Christians…to risk, get involved, aim toward union with others, for the entire creation is longing for its fulfillment in God. (Delio and Dinges p. 174)

Beyond recognizing evolution, we are called to work towards it in ourselves. This is a spirituality that calls for immersion in the world:

… plunging our hands into the soil of the earth and touching the roots of life….a “mysticism of action,” involvement in the world compenetrated by God. (Teilhard) held that union with God is not withdrawal or separation from the activity of the world but a dedicated, integrated, and sublimated absorption into it. (p.174)

Teilhard understood the Gospel call to “leave all and follow me” meant seeing the Christic presence in the heart of matter, then working to bring that presence into greater fullness.

The world is still being created and it is Christ who is reaching his fulfillment through it….We are to harness the energies of love for the forward movement of evolution toward the fullness of Christ. This means to live from the center of the heart where love grows and to reach out to the world with faith, hope and trust in God’s incarnate presence. (p. 175)

In this new incarnational vision of the relationship between God and the universe, a relationship that spans the whole evolutionary journey leading towards the future, Teilhard offers three fresh perspectives. These are described by Delio and Dinges:

First, his love of matter and spirit is a dual commitment to God and to the world; second, his inclusion of suffering and evil in the forward movement of evolution offers a realistic approach to evil as part of unfolding life; and third, the participation of humans is essential to the process of Christogenesis, that is, the evolution of Christ in the world and the world in Christ. “If we are to remain faithful to the gospel,” he says “we have to adjust its spiritual code to the new shape of the universe….It has become the great work in process of completion which we have to save by saving ourselves”. (p. 175)

Teilhard looked at the earth/ the universe with the eyes of a mystic, with the heart of a lover.

In love with Holy Presence at the deep heart of all that exists, he could echo Rumi’s wonder-filled exclamation: “Is the one I love everywhere?” Through Teilhard’s eyes, we can learn to see what mystic-poet Catherine de Vinck calls “the fire within the fire of all things”. Once we see that fire, we know the call that Teilhard knew to put our hearts at the service of the evolution towards love that is the call of the universe, as well as our personal call within the universal call, for the two are inseparable.

Teilhard shows us that our deepest call is to love, that evolution is advanced by union on every imaginable level of being. And, as another poet, Robert Frost observed: “Earth’s the right place for love: I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.”

Teilhard wrote: I merge myself through my heart with the very heart of God….God is, in a sense, at the point of my pen, my pick, my paint-brush, my needle—and my heart and my thought. It is by carrying to its completion the stroke, the line, the stitch I am working on that I shall lay hold on that ultimate end towards which my will at its deepest levels tends. (p. 176)

Nothing that lives on our planet is outside of us. We can no longer accept lines of division between religions, between cultures, between nations, between species. This universe is evolving as one. Our place within it, like Teilhard’s, is to be its eyes of wonder, its heart of love, its allurement toward union. Everything that we do contributes towards that great comingled work of the evolution of the universe, the evolution of ourselves. As we approach the Feast of Christmas, may we choose as our preparation a deeper seeing, a heartfelt listening to the songs of the universe, its joy-filled melodies, its grief-laden cries. This is not a time to look for a new coming of the Holy, but rather a time to seek the “shining of God through creation, the diaphany of God radiating through a world that becomes transparent.” (p.176)

Teilhard invites us to:

… establish ourselves in the divine milieu. There we shall find ourselves where the soul is most deep and where matter is most dense. There we shall discover, where all its beauties flow together, the ultra-vital, the ultra-sensitive, the ultra-active point of the universe. And, at the same time, we shall feel the plenitude of our powers of action and adoration effortlessly ordered within our deepest selves. (Divine Milieu quoted by Delio and Dinges on p.179)

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Sophia at Samhain: The Womb of This Present Darkness

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The call to awaken to the presence of Sophia comes at a time when much of our planet struggles with darkness. Live-streaming news gives us an immediate knowing of disasters, disease, wars, weather-related devastation that can be overwhelming.

Yet the greater the darkness, the greater is our awareness of the need for light, the deeper our appreciation for it, the more compelling our own call to be co-creators of light.

As these shorter days in autumn prepare us for the yearly plunge into winter’s darkness, we are entering into the sacred time of Sophia. Our ancient ancestors, who knew almost nothing of events beyond their immediate homes, knew about the rhythms of the earth, the apparent movements of sun, moon and stars, the cycle of the seasons, with an accuracy of observation that fills us with awe. The early peoples of Ireland were so deeply attuned to the shifting balance of light and darkness that they could build a monument to catch the first rays of sunrise on the winter Solstice. The Newgrange mound in Ireland, predating the Egyptian Pyramids, receives the Solstice light through a tiny aperture above the threshold.

Like the Egyptians and other ancient peoples, the Celts wove their spirituality from the threads of light and darkness that shaped their lives. Their spiritual festivals moved through a seasonal cycle in harmony with the earth’s yearly dance, associating the bright sunlit days with masculine energy, the darker time with contemplative feminine energy. For the Celts, the days we are entering this week, days we name Halloween, All Saints’ and All Souls’, were one festival known as Samhain (Saw’ wane). These three days marked the year’s end with a celebration that served as a time-out before the new year began. 1The bright masculine season with its intense activity of planting, growing, harvesting was over. The quieter days of winter were ahead, 1 “the time of darkness, the realm of the goddess where the feminine energy principle is experienced and the season of non-doing is initiated.” (Dolores Whelan: Ever Ancient, Ever New pp. 98-9) www.doloreswhelan.ie

We in the twenty-first century may still draw on this ancient wisdom to live in harmony with the earth as the Northern Hemisphere of our planet tilts away from the sun. We can welcome this time of darkness as a season renewal when earth and humans rest. Our energy can be gathered inwards to support what is happening deep within the earth and deep within our souls. The energy gathered in this season will be used when the winter has passed and spring has brought new life to the land and the people.

We too can accept the invitation of Samhain to release whatever is not completed at this time, letting go of the light and the activity of sun-time, surrendering ourselves to the restful moon-time, the darkness of holy waiting. Living within the wisdom of the earth’s seasons, we move towards the rebirth of the sun at the winter solstice, embracing a journey of deep surrender. This is Sophia time. Within her sacred cauldron, our lives and our desires for our planet find a place of gestation, a safe darkness where, as with the caterpillar in a chrysalis, the great work of transformation of our souls and of all of life can happen.

Sylvia Shaindel Senensky writes:

We are being called upon by the sorrowing and powerful Dark Feminine to know our own darkness and the profound richness of all dark places, even when they are laden with pain. Through her we know the mystery of existence and the sacredness of the cycles of life. We learn how important the destruction of the old ways is to the rebirth of the new. When she steps into our lives and awakens us, we can be shattered to our core, and we know, as we see the tears streaming down her face, that she too is holding us in her compassionate and loving embrace.

…. She is calling upon us, each in our way to do our inner work, to become her allies, to become the best human beings we know how to be; to allow our creativity, our compassion and our love to flow to ourselves and to all life forms on this planet…. Love attracts love. If we flood our planet with loving and transformative energy, our actions will begin to mirror our feelings. We will come home to ourselves. (Healing and Empowering the Feminine Chiron Publications, Wilmette Illinois 2003)

Let us enjoy this sacred season, this womb-time, as we curl up near the fireside of our hearts. From Sophia’s cauldron, we shall emerge in springtime in an interdependent co-arising with the earth, knowing ourselves renewed in soul, body and spirit.