“Manna From Heaven”

Welcome to this month’s topic of ELIXIR: Personal Fulfillment.

I have a wonderful sister (three actually!) who is a pastor for the United Church of Christ. While that is not my own spiritual path, she and I share deeply and I treasure her viewpoint from her inclusive, liberal theology. While thinking of how to open this month’s theme, my sister Lee (Rev. Lee Ireland from Connecticut) told me of a sermon she was giving, called “Manna from Heaven.” Well, of course, that is the Elixir of Personal Fulfillment itself, so I invited Lee to share her sermon focus with us here.

She agreed, so here are her words:

September 24, 2017 

Here we have one of the most human passages in scripture…this is a passage that is close to home as I think about all of those who’ve lost everything to the hurricanes and earthquakes. 

2 In the desert the whole community grumbled against Moses and Aaron. 3 The Israelites said to them, “If only we had died by the Lord’s hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death.” 

4 Then the Lord said to Moses, “I will rain down bread from heaven for you. The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day. In this way I will test them and see whether they will follow my instructions. 5 On the sixth day they are to prepare what they bring in, and that is to be twice as much as they gather on the other days.” 

and in the morning you will see the glory of the Lord, because he has heard your grumbling against him. Who are we, that you should grumble against us?” 8 Moses also said, “You will know that it was the Lord when he gives you meat to eat in the evening and all the bread you want in the morning, because he has heard your grumbling against him. Who are we? You are not grumbling against us, but against the Lord.” 

11 The Lord said to Moses, 12 “I have heard the grumbling of the Israelites. Tell them, ‘At twilight you will eat meat, and in the morning you will be filled with bread. Then you will know that I am the Lord your God.’ 

13 That evening quail came and covered the camp, and in the morning there was a layer of dew around the camp. 14 When the dew was gone, thin flakes like frost on the ground appeared on the desert floor. 15 When the Israelites saw it, they said to each other, “What is it?” For they did not know what it was. 

Moses said to them, “It is the bread the Lord has given you to eat.”  : Exodus 16:2-15  

   Have you ever felt like the Israelites in the passage above?    Like your life was going along just fine and then suddenly – the rug was pulled out from underneath you and you had to pack up and move??? And start all over again – with nothing? Think of all of those who are now feeling like that in Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico, and Mexico –  who are enduring the consequences of the hurricanes and earthquake! 

    Last night I happened to see that “Bruce Almighty” was on TV and it was hilarious to listen to his lines from the beginning of the movie, which could’ve been exactly what was not printed in the Exodus passage.  It became even more meaningful when toward the end of the movie, God was playing a blind man begging for money and we heard the words to the song playing in the foreground:  “What if God was one of us?”   A profound touch to a movie that begs us all to consider our understanding of God and who we are as human beings living on this earth and in fellowship with one another.  Interesting!   

What if you had the role of being God for a few days?  What would YOU do?     

So – If you had been an Israelite – would you have not appreciated that the leaders were complaining to God about the way they were being treated? I mean, if God had said your tribe was his chosen people, and then led you out in the desert and proclaimed your freedom but now you were struggling to figure out how to survive, wouldn’t you be belly-aching and demanding justice just like you see described in this passage?  Justice from God?     

And what would you feel like when you heard God’s answer? – “I’ll give you your daily bread and quails”…. 

That would get old pretty fast, wouldn’t it?  

 What would you do?    

What would you have been hoping for God to do?    

It begs the deeper Q – what is your image of God?  A being up in heaven who manipulates us human beings like chess pieces?   Making demands before our needs will be met?   

BUT – according to this passage in Exodus – your needs ARE being met! Just not as you were expecting or according to your hopes and perhaps your design of how you wanted your life to go.   When you realize that your daily needs WILL be met – but not as you may have wished – you will hear the invitation – bringing a change in your mindset. 

You know that feeling?  

L I S T E N  
 
Begin to see with new eyes.  

Hear new messages that you wouldn’t hear otherwise. 
Trust differently.  Stop trying to influence other people’s free will.   
Recognize that God’s angels come in many different forms. 
What is it that you are seeing is emerging that couldn’t come any other way .  You know it could be because you have been demanding that God create things to fit into your vision rather than allowing the ways of love to unfold. How are youy today being asked to let go and Let God – be? Be the creator of your own life? 
It means you will have to check your ego at the door and “surrender”….surrender your attachments to particular outcomes  and thus  become a servant of divine love. 

May God’s light and peace and love pour down upon us this day and strengthen us in our ability to walk with one another and those we don’t yet know and share that and watch as other’s lives begin to open and be enriched and transformed.    Peace and grace, Amen.  

Prayer of the Day 

Gracious Lord,  
Fresh as each morning  you come to us, 
Crafter of manna. 
     Your grace rests  gently upon us, 
      waiting to be gathered, to become the bread of life 
we share throughout the day. 
 
Fresh as compassion’s justice, you come to us, 
Servant of the poor. 
Choosing to give as you desire, 
you show us the last, so we can make them first 
     in our hearts and hopes. 
Doing no wrong, you make us right 
     with God for all time. 
 
Fresh as the water, which turns a desert 
into a meadowland of flowers, 
Spirit of uninterrupted grace, you come to us. 
When we would grumble, you give us the gospel to live out; 
when we would protest, you teach us songs of praise; 
when we would utter laments, you fill us with God’s laughter. 
 
God in Community, Holy in One, 
refresh us with your presence 
as we continue to give you thanks and go forward with your love.  Amen.  

images are from pixabay.com

Thanks for your Guest Blog, Rev. Ireland!

I welcome YOUR comments and Stories!

The Road to Sadhana

The poem I shared last Tuesday I composed in 1978 while on a very memorable road trip across country by bus from Buffalo to Tempe, Arizona. I was traveling with a friend, Grace, to check out Arizona as I would be attending college there the next year. It was a very eventful trip on so many levels. The Greyhound bus broke down in Effingham, Illinois, and about half of us stayed on until Flagstaff, Arizona, where we were rerouted on a Trailways bus through what was one of my and Grace’s primary spiritual destinations anyway: Sedona.

All through the bus trip, especially after the breakdown and even moreso after an encounter with apparently a murderous pair hightailing it out of Albuquerque (I’ll tell that in a bit), I composed a trip length poetic account of the journey. Part of the coda verse I still recall for the epic poem was:

On the Road to Sedona,

Where all is Sadhana…

Sadhana is an Eastern term designating a state of spiritual enlightenment; a state of calm one achieves from centering deeply.  As our theme this month is the similar or related experience of apotheosis, it feels right for me to revisit this adventure, now 39 years later.

So the murderer, even more than the breakdown of the bus and rerouting through Sedona, sparked a major change of consciousness for me.  Grace and I were at a bus stop in Albuquerque where Grace met a police woman. She told Grace she was on the lookout for a murderer and his accomplice trying to get away from New Mexico.  Our bus left there at midnight, the last bus for the night. Two men, one recently bald, paid the bus driver directly when he got onto the bus instead of paying as was normal at the ticket booths. Grace and I were sitting second row from the front of the bus to avoid cigarette smoke. The tall, bald man, wearing a serape with a metallic bulge in the pocket which he arranged over the seat to be positioned so the bulge was just behind his head, sat in the front row, with his partner sitting catty-corner behind us across the aisle (carrying only a wrinkled, paper bag). The Bald One, who resembled Lurch from the Addams family to me, pulled out a cigarette (forbidden for the 1^st three rows), stared ominously at the bus driver, and chortled: “Goodbye, New Mexico, forever!”

OK, so that sets the scene. My friend Grace immediately figures this is the murderer the police woman is after, so she leaves the bus to tell the woman about him. She returns, telling me the police woman acted frightened to know the men might already be on the bus and asked Grace to be careful and not stir up trouble. So, I got off and told her what I had seen re. the money exchange with the driver. She acted concerned but frightened and told me to get back onto the bus and also to not cause waves.

The bus wound slowly through the night from Albuquerque to Flagstaff, a very long night for me as I was on high alert. I whispered our suspicions to the woman behind me, Terry, who had been instrumental in getting our passengers to stay after the breakdown and to be rerouted through Sedona so that some of the rest could go directly to LA. Terry was traveling with her grandmother. She started a phone chain whisper throughout the bus, notifying everyone of the possibility we had a murderer aboard. Unfortunately, this whisper also reached the Accomplice across the aisle, who suddenly started coughing and rattling his brown bag to get the attention of the Bald One.

At a roadside stop in Holbrook, Grace and Terry and her grandmother and I sat huddled together at a diner. The Accomplice shadowed us, being sure to sit within earshot. The Bald One never came into the diner at all, pacing outside and at one point pressing his face and nose up against the window glass to stare in at us.

When we reboarded, the bus driver shot me a frightened glance, as if to say again, ‘Don’t cause waves!’

So, back on the bus for the next few hours I entered into a deep contemplation, the deepest of my life til then. I sang a mantra, HU, which is a sacred name for God known to many religions. I chanted and went into a deep state of repose where I encountered spiritual Masters and agencies giving me instructions on how to be a channel for calm and Light in this situation, to prevent a major catastrophe involving all the passengers.

Then something really weird occurred on the bus. People who had thought the whispered suspicions were a hoax or funny started joking loudly about who the murderer was going to take to the back of the bus and shoot first! This was surreal to me. I sank deeper and deeper into my contemplation.

At dawn, as we were approaching Flagstaff and the beautiful desert and San Francisco Peaks there, I came out from the contemplation, truly altered. I felt a calm as I had not known before. As I looked out at the desert and the Mountain, I said to Terry and Grace:

“People think that the Desert is barren and dead;

It is not: It is teeming with Life!”

At this statement from me, Bald Lurch turned his head slowly to stare me down.

“So, how do you feel about YOUR life?” he cooed ominously.

Now, you might think my response would be fearful, but no. Because of the alteration in consciousness I had enjoyed in the deep contemplation, I actually was feeling quite elated. I looked back at him, eye to eye, and smiled broadly:

“How are You!?” were the words that came out of my mouth.

The Bald One merely grunted in disgust and turned his head back to set upon that metallic bulge.

We reached Flagstaff, alive.  The Bald One and the Accomplice were the first to rise from their seats and head for the door. Once again, Lurch uttered mysteriously:

“Goodbye, New Mexico, forever!”

That was the last any of us saw of these two men, now across the border in Arizona.

After a few hours those of us going on to Phoenix boarded the Trailways bus that would take us through Sedona, known to Grace and myself as a very spiritually charged area as our spiritual group had land there at the time.  This part of the journey was like a pilgrimage for us.

As we rounded the bend from Flagstaff down into the majestic Oak Creek Canyon, the bus stopped at a rest area. I walked across the field and stepped down a bit from the  cliff edge to sit and be immersed in the Canyon overview. It was like an Eagle’s Nest, and I have returned many times since. That is where The Canyon poem emerged:

It is drawing me into Its depths;

It will contain me;

Yet in that instant It shall free me,

Until IS-ness dissolves beyond

Eternity

Where Just Isness IS.

We reboarded the bus and headed on down the canyon into the red rock splendor of Sedona. At the bottom we got out for a food stop.

“It’s like love,” Terry said.

“It can never be contained,” I responded.

images are from pixabay.com

Other than those words, language failed me. I could not speak, identifying one mountain or person or bus or tree; all was an absolute Unity. This utter silence stayed with me until we reached Phoenix. I would later remember it as a brief glimpse of cosmic consciousness, experienced on the Road to Sadhana.

* * * * * *  

This will be the final September post, as I have nothing more to say now on the topic!

I welcome your Comments and Stories!

Cosmic consciousness

The Canyon

It is drawing me into Its depths;

it will contain me,

Yet in that instant It shall free me

Until me-ness dissolves beyond Eternity

Where just IS-ness IS

pictures are from pixabay.com

The Double Vision…

image from pixabay.com

Today I will share my favorite lines from one of my favorite poems, by W. B. Yeats.  These lines have stayed with me since high school years and they return this month with our monthly theme of Apotheosis or the merging of opposites associated with initiatory fulfillment. The poem is The Double Vision of Michael Robartes, and the lines that still line my heart are:

On the grey rock of Cashel I suddenly saw
A Sphinx with woman breast and lion paw.
A Buddha, hand at rest,
Hand lifted up that blest;
And right between these two a girl at play
That, it may be, had danced her life away,
For now being dead it seemed
That she of dancing dreamed.
Although I saw it all in the mind’s eye
There can be nothing solider till I die;
I saw by the moon’s light
Now at its fifteenth night.
One lashed her tail; her eyes lit by the moon
Gazed upon all things known, all things unknown,
In triumph of intellect
With motionless head erect.
That other’s moonlit eyeballs never moved,
Being fixed on all things loved, all things unloved.
Yet little peace he had,
For those that love are sad.
Little did they care who danced between,
And little she by whom her dance was seen
So she had outdanced thought.
Body perfection brought,
For what but eye and ear silence the mind
With the minute particulars of mankind?
Mind moved yet seemed to stop
As ’twere a spinning-top.
In contemplation had those three so wrought
Upon a moment, and so stretched it out
That they, time overthrown,
Were dead yet flesh and bone.
I knew that I had seen, had seen at last
That girl my unremembering nights hold fast
Or else my dreams that fly
If I should rub an eye,
And yet in flying fling into my meat
A crazy juice that makes the pulses beat
As though I had been undone
By Homer’s Paragon
Who never gave the burning town a thought;
To such a pitch of folly I am brought,
Being caught between the pull
Of the dark moon and the full,
The commonness of thought and images
That have the frenzy of our western seas.

The full recited poem follows for you to enjoy:

I welcome your comments, insights and stories!

 

WAY Will Out

Philosophically, I value dialectical reasoning that allows for  a “tension of opposites” to resolve what may seem paradoxical at first blush, so thought arrives at a new, higher order of Synthesis. I have embraced this way of thinking and feeling ever since encountering it from reading W.B. Yeats’ theosophical book, A VISION, when I was 19.

Dialectical reasoning can be helpful in the most practical of situations as well as when contemplating some of the more horrific aspects of life.  Just as Day follows Night and Sun and Moon intercourse daily, in these material worlds Duality is a basic underlying reality, even though from a higher perspective, unity supercedes duality as an ordering principle. We always come back to the Center.

Here are some common idioms that reveal the dialectical nature of our lives:

The darkest day is always before the dawn.

S/he loves me ;  S/he loves me not.

The best of times ; the worst of times.

No pain, no gain.

When faced with a difficult decision, we may call it a conundrum; that is, a dialectical choice.  Do we go or do we stay?  Give up, or press on?

The best solution to a dialectical conflict, I have found, is to:

SURRENDER

Ah, sweet surrender! You need not give up anything but your conflicted reasoning process.  Surrender to your Higher Consciousness.  Return to YOUR Center and act from there.

I once had a Quaker friend who liked to say:

“Way will Out.”

That Way is the essence of Surrender, as also expressed through the Tao Te Ching, the Book of the Way.

“If you try to change it, you will ruin it. Try to hold it, and you will lose it.”
― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

So remember, if you choose:

Water seeks its own level; Way will out.

Die daily to be reborn anew.

Effortless Action issues from Stillness.

Find harbor in the eye of the storm.

images are from pixabay.com

I welcome your comments and stories!

Music for Your Apotheosis

Dear readers, be Listeners! Here is a piece of music I found at the top of the search from looking up “Beautiful Music.” It is called “Everdream” by Epic Soul Factory.

May this music help you today to attain your apotheosis, that state of inner peace and balance that can inspire and uplift you to advance in the direction of fulfilling your highest Life Dream!