Sunday, December 20, 2015

Birthing the Divine

Jim Curtis, "Chant"

In advent we journey toward peace through hope, with love and joy. We sink into the quiet of our hearts and minds, as nature, in the northern hemisphere, slows her pace and earth cools in the shortest days of sunlight. The season calls us inward, toward the deep truth of who we are, toward the reconciling of our mind and heart. "Be still!" declares the Holy Darkness, "and wait for the light to come."

Wait. Watch. The coming of the light is inevitable. Pay attention! this is your story.

“You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level.”

~ Eckhart Tolle

Pay attention now to where the birth of Jesus has taken place. This eternal birth takes place in the soul totally in the way it takes place in eternity, neither less nor more. Whatever perfection is to enter the soul, be it divine, unique light or grace or happiness, all of it must come into the soul of a necessity through this birth of divine awareness and in no other way. Wait only for the birth of Christ within yourself, And you will discover all blessing and all consolation, all bliss, all being, and all truth.

~ Meister Eckhart

There is a light that shines beyond all things on Earth, beyond us all, beyond the heavens, beyond the highest, the very highest heavens. This is the light that shines in our heart.

~ Chandogya Upanishad
Art: Jim Curtis

Be aware. You are made in the image of God. Bring that forward. Be the Love and Beauty that you are made to be in the Image of the Creator, to whom you are eternally connected.

May the peace of the Eternal Christ, the Word of  Divine Light be born in your heart this beautiful season.

_/\_Peggy at ECUMENICUS

Saturday, December 12, 2015

Advent by Thomas Merton

Charm with your stainlessness these winter nights,
Sergei Gapon, AFP/Getty Image
Skies, and be perfect!
Fly vivider in the fiery dark, you quiet meteors,
And disappear.
You moon, be slow to go down,
This is your full!

The four white roads make off in silence
Towards the four parts of the starry universe.
Time falls like manna at the corners of the wintry earth.
We have become more humble than the rocks,
More wakeful than the patient hills.

Charm with your stainlessness these nights in Advent,
holy spheres,
While minds, as meek as beasts,
Stay close at home in the sweet hay;
And intellects are quieter than the flocks that feed by starlight.

Oh pour your darkness and your brightness over all our
solemn valleys,
You skies: and travel like the gentle Virgin,
Toward the planets' stately setting,
Oh white full moon as quiet as Bethlehem!

Read this poem slowly. Read it, perhaps two or three times so you can feel into the words and rest deeply into the place from which Merton describes the scene of Advent unfolding. Read and rest with the words until you step out of time and feel yourself  "more humble than the rocks, more wakeful than the patient hills." Smell the sweetness of hay and hear the lowing of the beasts in the barn. And on the vast open mountainside, the sheep graze in a silent starry night. Let the words of the poem, like the coming of the New, pour over you slowly, slowly and gently lift you into the flow of the journey to Bethlehem.


May the serenity of the season surround you ~ Peggy @ Ecumenicus