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Imbolc 2005
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Greetings!
Salutations!
Much has happened since my last newsletter. The first newsletter below was written at Imbolc but between one thing and another has not emerged till now, hence this 'bumper' Imbolc / Vernal Equinox newsletter.
On a related theme, I want to thank people for their emails. I can't respond to all of them unfortunately. I'm working very hard on various kinds of writing for publication, as well as working as anama chara or 'soul friend' to a few individuals. (An anama chara is, in Celtic tradition, what might now be called a holistic life-coach or spiritual mentor.) Both of these avenues serve a greater good, but between them and my first priority of raising our 14 month old, I have almost no time for correspondence. I hope what I'm writing will prove useful to all of you, and it certainly addresses questions raised in emails more fully than individual responses could, so thanks for understanding!
The first newsletter below reflects on the tsunami, and some of this, (including other ideas not included here) will appear in the Beltane 2005 edition of Pagan Dawn, the UK based magazine of the Pagan Federation, along with an illustration I did with help from Hokusai. (The famous Japanese printmaker.)
The second, Vernal Equinox newsletter, looks at the idea of golden ages, why I believe we're in one, and what I feel the opportunities for us are.
The Asian tsunami provoked a huge response on emotional, material and spiritual levels. In my last newsletter, I looked at the importance of charitable gifts, especially around Christmas, when excess often rules. I made the point that the cost of a daily cup of coffee in the developed West could save a child's life elsewhere.
Having said all that at the start of December, it was really gratifying to see that donations for the tsunami victims in the UK dwarfed other recent appeals. I feel I plugged into an ongoing change of consciousness. More and more of us are examining our beliefs and actions, and trying to care for others in ways that matter. We want to 'get right' with the Divine in all creation.
I'll speak more about all this in the letter below. On the 'news' side of things, Paganism has taken a big step forward in Scotland and I am proud and grateful to be part of it. Quoting from page thirteen of the Imbolc Issue of Pagan Dawn, the magazine of the Pagan Federation, "on the 27th of October, The Pagan Federation (Scotland) was formally recognised by the Registrar General as being an Organisation suitable to nominate Approved Celebrants to conduct religious marriages. As a result, the majority of celebrants who are registered with the PF (Scotland) Celebrants database are now able to conduct religious marriages under legislation set out in the Marriage (Scotland) Act 1977, which governs all marriages, both civil and religious, in Scotland. Although not the first Pagan group to be so recognised, PF (Scotland) can uniquely provide Celebrants for almost any tradition, not just Wicca. Responding to the decision, Louise Park, Celebrants database coordinator, said, "This is a great step forward for Pagan rights in Scotland, in that we can legally perform all the normal functions of a religious body. The Pagan traditions are now genuinely on an equal footing with all of the major religious groups active in Scotland today." Many thanks to Louise for her central role in making this happen.
I am one of those who has been approved by the Registrar, so if any of you are looking to wed, I am now qualified to officiate legally in Scotland. (In America I have of course been an ordained minister in the Circle of the Sacred Earth, a church of animism fostering shamanic principles and practices, since 1995.)
My first European event is coming up in June. I'll be part of the Oneness Gathering (See www.the-oneness-gathering.com for full details).
Next, for those of you in and around Edinburgh, I have a workshop coming up and am now leading devotional services on a regular basis. With this and the ability to act as a legal celebrant for all rites of passage I feel I have at last returned to a role as a 'fully functioning' priestess on a deeper level than ever before.
Workshops are good, but they tend to be technique and goal oriented. They are work-shops after all. (Not to put you off, of course!) But devotional practice is where we get to touch base with our souls, to rest in the awareness of God/dess, and to gently explore all the techniques and ideas in a ways that allow the Sacred and the self to interpenetrate.
Devotion initiates an alchemical process of transformation. My mother always says that it's like a sponge. If you saturate a sponge with pigment, then rinse it out, some of the pigment remains. Do it enough times and the sponge wholly takes on the colour of the pigment. Similarly, worship saturates you in the Sacred. Returning again and again, you can't help but be 'coloured' by your experience.
The other nice thing is that the service will, as you'd expect, be by donation, making it accessible to anyone who can get there. I'm very grateful to the Edinburgh Shamanic Centre for providing the space for this, when, after all, they have a mortgage to pay.
The devotional service will begin with chant in Old Irish and other ancient sacred languages and go on to a message for the fortnight (whatever the Spirits, the group's needs and life suggest). Last but far from least, we'll use chant, music and ritual to facilitate each person connecting with their 'theophanies' the particular forms the Sacred takes for them. It will be so wonderful to have the opportunity for growth and fellowship together.
I want to underscore that Animism, that is, the belief that all things have Spirit, and shamanic techniques are spiritually neutral. They're compatible with any spiritual tradition that accepts the idea of continued divine revelation and compatible with any person who accepts the idea that there are many roads up the mountain. All are welcome!
The details are below.
Some of you may find things in the Vernal Equinox newsletter that surprise you about me, particularly my connections with mystical Christianity and Catholicism. I finished writing the section about my 'New Jerusalem' experience around the time that Pope John Paul II was passing on.
I want to offer condolences to any of you who are Catholic for the loss of this religious leader. I admired his reverence for life and stance on some (though not all) issues, and I pray that whoever steps into his shoes can chart a good course of righteous action in the modern world.
Le Beannachdan,
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Events
Shamanic Chant and Devotional Practice
1st and 3rd Thursday of every month starting on 7th of April, 6pm – 7:30pm, by donation, drop in.
Draw the power and peace of Spirit into your own life through magical and meditative chant in Old Irish and other ancient languages and shamanic devotional practice, drawing on native Celtic and other ancient traditions. Each session will begin with learning and practicing sacred chants, and move on to using these chants and other sacred music in meditation and shamanic journeying. Our focus will be to come into personal, devotional contact with the sacred. No musical or shamanic experience required. All welcome!
Dán:The Art of Co-Creation
Sunday May 29th, 10:30am - 5:30pm, £40/£35 conc.
Ancient Celtic culture saw all creative acts as part of a co-creative process between human and divine realms. The Áes Dána, or 'People of Art', shamanic poets, craftspeople and magicians devoted their lives to mastering this process. In this workshop we will explore what we want to create in our lives, touch on the nature of our true will, spiritually journey to the Upper dimension of the Otherworld and work to manifest the sacred to each other in meditative practice.
Advance booking is essential as we need a minimum number of people to run the workshop. If you do decide to come at the last minute, please phone the shamanic centre the day before to be sure the workshop is happening.
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ONENESS GATHERING FESTIVAL
Thursday 9th – Sunday 12th of June
One Day Seminar
Tuesday, June 14th, 9am to 5pm
Further information for both these events:
Shambala Coaching
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Imbolc 2005
Reflections on the Tsunami
I am writing this around Imbolc, the Festival of the Goddess Brigit. Legend has it that the first wailing and mourning ever heard in Ireland was Brigit's mourning for her son killed in the Battle of Moytura. Brigit, as pre-Christian Goddess and later Christian Saint is always depicted as the soul of compassion. St. Brigit chose as her scripture verse, "Blessed are the meek." Blessed are the small, the gentle, blessed are those who were tragically swept away.
Canty, the female members of Cappella Nova, a glorious Scottish Medieval music group, performed a series of concerts and brought out a CD of chant for St. Brigit at Imbolc based on a 15th century manuscript. (See www.capella-nova.com for more information.)
The concert I attended, in St. Paul's Church, Edinburgh, was wonderful, and the music and recitations, accompanied by Bill Taylor's wire strung harp, really conveyed the tenderness and beauty, as well as some of the humour, of St. Brigit's story. She gave all the bacon for her father's feast to a starving dog once, but magically multiplied it so there was enough for the feast and the dog. Perhaps the message here is that generosity begets abundance, and that compassion for any being is rewarded.
Materially, the money donated to the Asian tsunami victims has dwarfed the amounts raised by other appeals, which hopefully indicates a trend towards caring for others in ways that matter. Spiritually, in many quarters, the tsunami caused crises of faith. Many of us felt keen emotional distress in response to the tsunami, nothing near the pain of those actively involved, and milked in some unseemly ways by the media, but none the less real for that.
Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote in the Sunday Telegraph on January 2nd that "it would be wrong" if faith were not "upset" by this catastrophe which claimed so many lives. His basic question was "How can you believe in a God who permits suffering on this scale?" Charles Moore responded on January 8th in part, that "In the Christian account, God did not absent Himself from the tragedy of His own creation, but, through becoming man, became part of it. So even if the whole thing is a ghastly mistake, it is one for which the author has paid the highest price." This is a good argument as far as it goes for Christians, but some Irish Christian and Pagan theology gives us answers that go further, allowing us to come to terms with disaster and retain faith.
First, as the Member News of the Pagan Federation for Imbolc 2005 said, Pagans recognise the power of nature as a neutral force "within the natural cycle of life, death and rebirth and so are far less likely to question our beliefs as a result of this disaster."
I grew up in a Celtic tradition that offers a further perspective. The tradition I grew up in sees everything from Gods and Goddesses to trees to each of us as manifestations of a Divine Being, One in essence, but often approached as a Trinity of Mother, Father and Creator, or through any number of Gods, Goddesses or manifestations in nature, such as the sun, moon or ocean. Obviously all Pagans don't share this view. John Macintyre gave an excellent overview and discussion of the 'spectrum' of polytheism in his letter in the Imbolc Pagan Dawn. Where some Pagans believe in individual distinct Deities and families of Deities, others believe that all Gods are aspects of one Father God, and all Goddesses are aspects of one Mother Goddess. I acknowledge that many of you reading this will have different views from my own, however I hope what I have to offer below may still be of use.
Many Pagan traditions understand creation as emanation, the manifestation of Deity or Deities in form. All traditions don't describe it exactly this way, of course. Some describe a primordial being dismembered and used to create the material world, like the dragon-like Tiamat of Babylonian tradition, or the giant Ymir in Norse tradition.
The Welsh traditions passed down by the controversial Iolo Morgannwg describe Deity descending in three bars of light. The Irish Christian theologian, John Scotus Eriugena, (d. 877) described the emanation of Deity into form in ways quite unlike contemporary Christian theologians but similar to Hindu creation myths.
These myths, of course, sprang in part from the same ancient Indo-European traditions that influenced all strands of European Paganism. (The Indo-Europeans were a group of tribes who migrated throughout Europe and Asia from around 6,000 to 1,000 years ago.)
Hindu tradition, like Eriugena's Irish theology, describes Deity pouring Itself forth into all that is. One Irish text, like the Hindu Upanishads, describes Deity as a Downward Growing tree, with a single root, "Absolute Deity" in heaven, and myriad branches, or manifestations of Deity, below.
The Early Irish tale, the Battle of Moytura, which essentially describes the war between the forces of chaos and order, also shows an 'emanationist' view of Creation. After all the Deities on the 'order' side, represented by the Tuatha Dé Danu, describe their roles in the upcoming battle, the Dagda, the 'Good God' says, "I alone possess the power you all boast of." "Truly you are the Good God!" They respond, acknowledging that they are all his aspects, and he the true source of their power. This calls to mind one of the Indian Upanishads which says, "This that people say, "Worship this god! Worship that god! —One after another — this is his [Brahman's] creation indeed! And he himself is all the gods."
The idea that God/dess created the universe from His/Herself is completely logical, and also even implied in the Judaeo-Christian creation story. After all, if there was only Deity in the beginning, what else did It have available to make the universe out of but Itself? While the logic is simple, the implications are complex.
The first implication is something that most Pagans believe — everything is Sacred. Some Pagans believe in straightforward animism, that everything has spirit, others believe that the sanctity of all things flows from the fact that they are aspects of God/dess. The end result is the same in terms of the belief in the sanctity of all beings. In this view, matter is experienced as the densest level of spirit, matter is spirit manifest.
Consequently, Deity isn't just up there somewhere, but also here with us. God/dess is compassionate in the literal sense – a co-sufferer with us in all we experience. Seen in this light, Deity makes a vast, ongoing sacrifice.
In this view of creation, life is not something God did to us. Rather, it is something we did to ourselves, since we were one with Deity when the decision to create the universe was made. Take a moment to reflect on that.
The creation of the material universe was a risk because life and death, union and loss, are part of the natural order. Massive loss of life is horrible to behold, but we are all physically mortal, so we must accept that there will be death in natural disasters and for other natural reasons. The alternative is to say that life itself is a thing which should not be. Death from natural causes has to be accepted as a part of creation, and while it can cause terrible distress, it need not separate us from the Sacred if we understand the creation process I've discussed above.
For more on the question of faith in the face of disaster, see my 2001 Autumnal Equinox newsletter in response to 9/11 (www.celticshamanism.com/autumn01.html).
I remember speaking with students at St. Andrew's Divinity School on the Druid/Christian interface in early Ireland. They were horrified by the idea of a world where God was everything, i.e., God was not wholly 'good.' I was much more horrified at the idea of a universe where some things weren't Deity, where a 'devil' God could overthrow creation! In the world view I've described above, one possible Animist response to the tsunami, this disaster needn't destroy our faith in a creation that is, by and large, a good thing.
As an Animist, I agree with Dr. Atkinson when he said that our response in these situations must be to focus on "passionate engagement with the lives that are left." The Divine in all beings calls us to eliminate unneccessary suffering, that is, suffering that is not part of the natural order, part of the necessary losses we accepted as facets of Deity in material creation. We must all physically die, but no one need starve or be tortured to death.
Millions more children die from poverty, malnutrition, abuse and lack of immunisation than died in the tsunami. There's a tsunami equivalent of child death every week or so. While it is wonderful that the donations have been so very high as far as charitable campaigns go, we must not be too self-congratulatory.
British holiday spending was around £40 billion, £4 billion on cosmetic gifts alone. Surely the divine in others is more important than our wrinkles.
Let this disaster motivate us to re-order our priorities to reduce the preventable causes of suffering in the world, so that we can all live in a sustainable, balanced and sacred way on this planet, applying a practical theology that reveres the Sacred in all beings in ways that matter.
We need to pay attention to the good things in our lives and around us. We truly have an embarrassment of riches. Really, it's not the riches themselves that embarrass us — it's what we're doing with them. Enjoying our lives is fine. What we think we need to do so may not be.
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Vernal Equinox 2005
The Paradox of Our Age
We have bigger houses but smaller families;
more conveniences but less time.
We have more degrees but less sense;
more knowledge, but less judgement;
more medicines but less healthiness.
We've been all the way to the moon and back,
but we have trouble crossing the street to meet the new neighbours.
We have built more computers to hold more information,
to produce more copies than ever,
but we have less communication.
We have become long on quantity,
but short on quality.
These are the times of fast foods but slow digestion.
Tall man but short character;
steep profits but shallow relationships.
It is a time when there is much in the window,
but nothing in the room.
His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama
I could really just leave it there, with the Dalai Lama's words. He hits the nail on the head. This age has vast material benefits, but we've only achieved the tiniest bit of what we potentially could because of our responses to abundance. First, we have little appreciation for what we have.
A while ago I read a great article in the Sunday Times by Jeremy Clarkson where he noted that, if ever a golden age existed, this is it. Of course, we make much of the stresses of modern life. A person on a chat show might bemoan the fact that they came home to find their son in a dress, but it would be a damn sight worse to find them in a sabre toothed tiger. He admitted to worrying about the length of his daughter's skirts, but realised that in an earlier age he probably wouldn't have had to because she would have died of something ghastly at four.
Right now, Téa, David and I have a bad flu. We're blessed by the fact that it's the first time Téa's been sick, but we've been to the doctors twice for eye creams, fever medicine, etc. I've been reflecting on how much more fraught it could have been in ages past. If a family lived out in the country what happened when the parents got sick or died? Did people wonder what was coming with every sniffle? (Of course, some of us do now but with less reason!)
A recent BBC television series, Tribe, focussed on indigenous peoples around the world. A South American tribe with a living shamanic culture out in the forest had an appealing life on one level, yet they were moving in closer to 'civilisation.' The reason? "So our children won't die." We in the developed west have the opportunity to have a healthier, longer-lived population than at any other time in human history. All those periods we think of as golden ages have nothing on us in this respect. For example, the average life expectancy in ancient Egypt was one.
In real terms we have more abundant food, medicine, shelter and opportunities than ever, but what are we doing with them?
Bloated Body, Manic Mind
Let's take food and health as an example. There have been a couple of great programs on television here recently, a nutritionist, Gillian McKeith, in You Are What You Eat, sorting people's awful diets, and Jamie's School Dinners, where chef Jamie Oliver tried to improve British school meals.
Jamie Oliver made the point that the current young generation, despite their opportunities, is the first generation to ever have a lower life expectancy than their parents. It's down to vile food and a sedentary lifestyle. Many British schools spend around 37 pence a meal to feed the kids, consequently they get mainly pre-formed lumps of fat, additives, starch and sugar. A doctor on the show spoke of seeing seven year olds with blocked up bowels as a consequence. Elsewhere I've read that young teens are now presenting with incipient heart disease and type two diabetes.
Jamie managed to make decent food on the budget and managed to get them to eat it. When he did the results were amazing. In the first week, on just one decent meal a day, (most of the kids' home food wasn't great either) they were much better behaved, more able to learn, and none of the ashmatic children had needed their inhalers, which was unheard of.
The same went for a family with three ill-behaved children on You Are What You Eat. After a week on decent food, with no other changes, the parents were stunned to find that their little 'monsters' were considerate, loving children, and family life was all they could have hoped for. They couldn't believe it, but one 'test meal' of the old junk resulted in a 24 hour return of the 'monsters.' Makes you wonder how many families could be saved by decent grub.
It really makes a point I often stress in workshops about seeking the densest level of a problem's causality first. For example, people sometimes come to me and say they've got a metaphysical problem, such as being demonically possessed, (which is very rare and has symptoms that are hard to miss). Then, after a discussion it comes out that they sleep three hours a night and live on sausages, cakes and alcopops. That regime would make anyone feel possessed! So I tell them to sort out the body, the densest level of the soul, and then see how they feel. The recent film of the man who ate nothing but McDonalds for a month, Super Size Me, certainly made the health points better than I can.
We're doing a very good job of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. This is what we're doing with our golden age of abundant foods — we're killing ourselves with them! While some starve, we gorge on extruded poultry fat, viscera and carcass, bound with chemicals that send us spare — mmmm!
Are We Nuts?
Or am I nuts, to say that this can be a golden age?
What about ages past? They were less technical but some seem to have had more wholesome values. Even fifty years ago, children went around on their own without fear of awful things happening and community and family values were more important. My great grandfather used to say that the measure of a culture wasn't the type of things it produced but the type of humans. It's a good point.
Yet most of the ancient cultures that we look back on misty eyed, including the Celtic, didn't necessarily produce huge numbers of lovely human beings. The early explorer Posidonius didn't say "go to Britain for a cuddle," he said he had trouble getting used to all the heads in niches in the walls. Many ancient cultures had features that displease us like slavery, headhunting and rigid caste structures. More recently, as Dickens described, the Victorian age, for all its sentimentality about childhood, countenanced terrible child labour and mistreatment of children. Many cultures espouse lofty values without necessarily practicing them that much. We can't know for sure since we weren't there.
I call this a golden age because an age encompasses time, place, resources and power. I recently enjoyed the novel Jonathan Strange and Mister Norrell, by Susanna Clarke. It's about two magicians living in a kind of alternate 19th century Britain. Historical events like the Napoleonic war are still going on, but magicians with serious powers are also involved. These magicians still hearken back to the aureate or 'golden age' magicians of the past, who had access to much greater powers. A golden age in potentia is one where we have access to great power. Power, as (I think) Jonathan Horwitz said, is the ability to transform any energy. Power is an alchemical ability, and appropriately enough, alchemy is all about transforming dross into gold.
Our age is the space we inhabit, the resources available to us here and the power we have to effect change. In this space we have all the medicines, knowledge and skills we need to create what could be a close approximation of heaven on earth, with a sustainable population using technology, common sense and spiritual insight to live rewarding lives in healthy families and communities. In this space we have all we need.
We have a greater power than ever, so our age could shine more brightly gold than any other. Western medicine and systems like the Chinese and Ayurvedic can be used to create greater health than ever before. Psychological knowledge is also increasing, giving us much better ideas about what promotes happiness and good relationships. Organic farming, renewable energy resources, recycling, new building and manufacturing technologies can give us 21st century comfort with close to 1st century environmental impact. (Learning to be a bit less cossetted wouldn't go amiss either, of course!)
The internet means that potentially we could live in small sustainable communities spread around the globe and still have access to more knowledge than the great library of Alexandria held, enjoying the benefits of a metropolis without having to live in one. We can also stay close to friends and family and enjoy a great deal of cross-cultural enrichment without using all the resources to drive and fly around all the time.
But first we have some alchemical work to do. We have some quite vile substances to turn into gold, and the process of doing so will be legislative and political as much as overtly spiritual. We have to get control of international systems like "free" trade (which costs us plenty) and the internet. We must develop and enforce internationally agreed laws that would, for example, make servers legally liable for any child pornography made available through websites they host. (I feel very strongly about this for several reasons, a minor one being that the discussion board on my website was shut down because we couldn't stop child pornography ads being placed on it.) The way the internet is used by hate groups and pornographers stands alongside the 'turkey twizzler' (a deep fried extruded spiral of reconstituted turkey "meat") as another way we've twisted our advantages into disadvantages.
It would be useful if we developed more of a can-do attitude and a stick-to-it-iveness around these problems, rather than throwing up our hands in despair. The destructive forces certainly seem to have a can-do attitude. I remember talking to a friend with cancer once who was having trouble keeping up with the dietary changes and spiritual practice that she knew made her feel better and hoped might have a positive effect on the illness. Now, we can all incline towards entropy at the best of times, never mind during a serious illness, but it's still not the best way to go. I reminded her that the cancer didn't sit around twiddling its cells going, "Hmmm, I don't really feel like metastisising, think I'll just lie around the lung today." The cancer had a can-do attitude. So do malefactors. Are we less industrious than our individual and cultural dis-eases?
Just as cancer kills its host organism starting with growth from a single cell, a tiny number of malefactors can create harm out of all proportion if we let them. Yet destroying our culture hurts them too, just as cancer ultimately kills itself. It's worth remembering that, angry as we may feel towards them, it's also not in their interest to let them go unchecked, karmically or practically. Many of them were, no doubt, as sinned against as they are now sinning against others. They are not happy people. Transforming our culture means we have to seek out and eradicate the root causes of dis-ease (for example, why is our culture producing millions who want to look at child porn?), contain malefactors, and, where possible, treat them while safeguarding the innocent.
This requires an awful lot of activity, which should come as no surprise. The medieval European alchemists didn't just throw lead and a few other things in a vessel and hope for the best. They tended it, heated it and added more elements over time to make gold. They didn't just wait for gold to happen. If we want to transmute the dross, poisonous matter in our culture, we have to do the same.
As an example, in the couple of weeks since I wrote this and Jamie Oliver's series first aired, he took a petition with 271,000 signatures to Downing Street and secured a government commitment to increase school meal budgets to 50 to 60 pence a plate and institute healthy eating programs. (They said it was all just an amazing coincidence, that they'd been planning it all along of course!) It just goes to show what one person can do, using their unique abilities to help as best they can. He could easily have just remained a TV chef, but in an earlier show, he helped underpriviledged kids train to be chefs and now he's done this. He's not a saint either. He swears and loses his temper on occasion like most of the rest of us. Yet he's managed to alchemically transmute the toxic 'turkey twizzler' into salad, chicken and pasta! His website for this issue is www.feedmebetter.com .
Time spent waiting for huge metaphysical change to be visited upon us by anyone from ascended masters to space brothers to Christ is time wasted. Even if change were to happen in future through some outside agency, waiting for it is still a waste when beings need help now. It's down to us working in our own ways.
It may even be that any such outside agencies are waiting for us to do more before they put in their two cents. I had a profound experience once at mass. As many of you know, my mother and grandmother raised me in an Animist, primarily Pagan tradition, though members of our family had been Christians as well. When I got older I found myself drawn to Christianity as a facet of the Divine that manifests through all traditions. Twelve years ago I used to go to mass with a Catholic friend. Because of my shamanic training and a good measure of Deity's grace, I began to have some profound experiences with Christ, the Blessed Mother and angels.
These experiences included a wealth of iconography and terms I wasn't familiar with, having not been raised Catholic. All this very much annoyed my friend, a 'cradle Catholic' who didn't have visions and resisted learning how, though I assured him that the techniques themselves were neutral, i.e. not Pagan, Christian or anything else. St. Theresa of Avila and St. Ignatius used similar techniques.
Anyway, when the host was elevated at mass one day, I saw an angel with a fiery sword appear. (I later found out that this angel was Uriel.) I'd never seen a being like him before, made of light, holographic looking. He noticed me noticing him and came down face to face with me. It was a truly overwhelming sensation, awe-full in the true sense, scary but great and overwhelming and uplifting all at once. I sensed that this being was on such a higher, other, level that communication was a big effort. He had to sort of drag me up and bring himself lower so we could meet somewhere in the middle. He breathed into my mouth. Then he asked me a question, it felt like part of a catechism, a ritual question and response.
"Who are you?" He asked
"A child of God."
"Why are you here?"
"To serve God."
He didn't respond at first, and I sensed that I'd responded incorrectly. Finally he spoke.
"To love God, and through that love bring the New Jerusalem."
I wasn't very clear on what that was, but I asked, "When will it come?"
He responded, "When the space has been cleared on earth, so it will not crush what lies beneath."
My friend later told me that the New Jerusalem was the prophesied kingdom of God that would arrive with the second coming of Christ. I was surprised to have gotten this sort of message, yet there it was.
I think God/dess is waiting for us to clear the space before anything else, or other, happens. Clearing the space isn't just about throwing light at stuff either. We don't expect that the dishes will be done through meditation alone, though meditation improves our frame of mind while doing them! Clearing the space is about removing physical and psychological garbage, helping in ways grounded in physical reality.
God doesn't want to dump his city on the world's evil and just squash it. As much as we might want that to happen, we're all part of God/dess, we're all ultimately on the same journey, and it would be more useful for all of us to transmute these energies rather than just chuck them. God/dess often seems ruthlessly useful to me. Nothing is just wasted or chucked in nature, it's all transmuted, however long it takes and however uncomfortable the process may be at points for individuals.
You see, the age and its opportunities form the container, but we are the contents.
We have the golden age in potentia. What we need are more golden agents, people acting from the enormous advantages given to us.
Let's do that instead of twisting them into disadvantages.
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