We live our deepest soul’s desires not by intending to Change who we are … but by intending to Be who we are. And clearly our intention — to Change or to Be who we are — profoundly shapes how we live… we believe we must do to ‘improve’… whether we feel we must ceaselessly push ourselves
to reach higher…
or simply find the courage and confidence to allow who we are to unfold.
The latter view calls for choices that support and expand our essentially compassionate nature, while the former aims to reshape our essentially flawed nature with heroic efforts of Endless Trying.
This comes at the end of the story of the appearance of the Virgin of Guadalupe in 1356, told by a certain Padre to Fathers Vaillant and Latour in Santa Fe in the 1850’s (Willa Cather’s novel Death Comes to the Archbishop, 1927):
Father Vaillant began pacing restlessly up and down as he spoke, and the Bishop watched him, musing. It was just this in his friend that was dear to him. “Where there is great love, there are always miracles,” he said at length. “One might almost say that an apparition is human vision corrected by divine love. I do not see you as you really are, Joseph; I see you through my affection for you. The Miracles of the Church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly to near us from far off, but our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.”
I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny, invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of [a person’s] pride.
The old Celtic festival of Imbolc (Imbolg) is traditionally celebrated on January 31st / February 1st. It is a Cross Quarter Festival, midpoint between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox. However when calculated astronomically, the date this year would actually be February 3rd. At the Mound of the Hostages on the Hill of Tara the rising sun at Imbolc illuminates the chamber. The Mound of the Hostages at Tara is a Neolithic Period passage tomb, contemporary with Newgrange which is over 5000 years old, so the Cross Quarter Days were important to the Neolithic (New Stone Age) people who aligned the chamber with the Imbolc and Samhain sunrise. In early Celtic times around 2000 years ago, Imbolc was a time to celebrate the Celtic Goddess Brigid (Brigit, Brighid, Bride, Bridget, Bridgit, Brighde, Bríd). Brigid was the Celtic Goddess of inspiration, healing, and smithcraft with associations to fire, the hearth and poetry. http://www.boynevalleytours.com/hill-of-tara.htm
Wordsworth, careful of the dignity of the senses, wrote that “pleasure is the tribute we owe to our dignity as human beings.” This is a profoundly spiritual perspective. Your senses link you intimately with the divine within you and around you. Attunement to the senses can limber up the stiffened belief and gentle the hardened outlook. It can warm and heal the atrophied feelings that are the barriers exiling us from ourselves and separating us from each other. Then we are no longer in exile from the wonderful harvest of divinity that is always secretly gathering within us.
This morning I watched how swiftly the colors of the clouds shifted at sunrise.The phenomenal world is in constant change. It is a challenge for us humans to live in that reality and work/play in the awareness of it. When we polarize situations– like and dislike, agree or disagree, we can at least watch what we are doing from a “third” vantage point. When we form an opinion and unconsciously stick to it, wearing our set of polarizing glasses, no matter what, we are closing our gateway to greater possibility. Our tiny, contracted identity is challenged when another perspective is offered. We are being given opportunities, repeatedly, to change– to align our minds with the wisdom of the heart. To accept everyone just as they are and not judge one another. We have the choice to truly listen to each other, and to eschew polarization and the denigration of ourselves and others (most obvious in the political arena). I wish us all well!
