The center of your being is the very Pulse of the Divine, the Energy of Consciousness
and the Presence of God.
If this is indeed so, what are the implications? What are the consolations to be had? What does it mean for the self-realization process? The Christian mystics, rooted in the Incarnation of Consciousness spirituality shed a powerful, penetrating and illuminating light on how to embody the fullness of who and what they were…
This means much more than seeing the light, much more than drawing close to the light, much more than following the light be it in a teaching, person or insight. It is a beckoning from within for you to awaken to your Self as the Light. In a sense it is to become the light that is your destiny. In a world where the metaphors of light and dark are still at play you are called to reframe the understanding of what it means to be light—to pioneer a paradigm that is not for or against, that is not polarizing or divisive but rather is illuminating in each word and each step.
Many poems of the Christian mystics come not so much as a reflection or postulation but rather as an utterance of a direct experience that has come about through the surrender to the call of the Lover. The words themselves come from within the place of transformation that required nothing less than the death to everything that is NOT the Lover.
John of the Cross said so well in his poem Dark Night,
‘On that happy night-in secret;
No one saw me through the dark-
And I saw nothing then,
No other light to mark
The way but fire pounding my heart.
That flaming guided me
More firmly than the noonday sun,
And waiting there was he
I knew so well-who shone
Where nobody appeared to come.
O night, my guide!
O night more friendly than the dawn!
O tender night that tied
Lover and the loved one,
Loved one and the lover fused as one!’
When I was just 21 years old I learned that the church of my own baptism was called, ‘St. Therese Little Flower,’ it was such a surprise to me since she came into my life just one year before. My sister had taken her name for confirmation but even as her sponsor I didn’t know who St. Therese was…and yet here, all my life, she has been there with me, for me. Entering the church of my baptism so many years later was quite a dramatic experience. There was a striking image of her, it looked like carved stone but perhaps it was clay. The piece was hanging on the wall and was her in full habit, looking toward the one below and holding in her hands a cross covered in flowers. She was holding as if to bestow it reverently upon anyone wishing to accept it. I knelt before it, taken up in the presence of my Beloved and aware of Therese’s presence as well. A yearning for union with God fired up in great proportions within me and I looked upon this image saying without words, ‘I long for union like you enjoyed.’ The statue came alive and Therese looked at me full on—-‘I gave up everything, will you give up everything?’ ‘Yes, yes, there is nothing but this Love for me,’ I responded. She then revealed to me three areas where I held attachment so that I could see simply what needed to be surrendered.
This seems to me an example, not a literal one, but a symbolic one, for each one of us.
We can spend our lives devoted to a ‘Light,’ we can spend our lives following a ‘Light,’ and not yet fulfill our call to BE the LIGHT. That level of surrender yields the greatest happiness for we become fully alive. It opens to us a path like John speaks of above where darkness itself is no longer dark.
