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- Our “Big Sits” Story
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Many, many years ago, when I was in training as a teacher. Our art teacher who went on to become a renowned artist, Wynona Mulcaster, taught an art class on Saturdays to youngsters 4-7 years. This was an non elective, but it nurtured something deep within me that set me on the path of Visio Divina as darkness/light became a major theme in the unfolding on my life. I developed this sense of seeing in the dark embracing the glimpse’s of light. Mike Moyers, image this week has led me to profound places. Sitting with the image as given the hands with long bold fingers holding/guiding the light. Below the hand I am sitting in this luminous presence. I turn the image 90 degrees. This luminosity flowing from the right, turns in to the blue of serenity, beckoning me into the darkness, I turn the image 90 degrees again, a white resurrection figure immerges, red fire to the right and the left above signify a coming through something intense; the red below to the right and to the left supporting the immerging luminous Presence, held up by the blue of serenity. Another 90 degree brings me back to what I saw initially. “For you is the fountain of life, and in your light we see light.” Ps.36:10.When I awake these mornings, I sense presences walking though my being.
Yes, Pamela, forward it to me: behmadeline95@gmail.com. Or should I email you?
Many thanks with blessings.
My journey with light/darkness began a long time a go, an experience with a persistent cat, days of morning fog. It was at this time John 8:12 became my companion scripture. Moving forward many years to yesterday, following several of the hours of United in Prayer Day March 8-9. One of the groups led us into and through an embodied Welcome Prayer experience. The Welcome Prayer has become a faithful and significant companion for me. Usually I pray the Welcoming Prayer when something particular has been triggered. During the embodied prayer experience it was like I was in freefall stirring up debris in my unconscious self through layer upon layer down into the crusty depths. In this whirlwind experience there was this luminescent presence, dancing, irrupting into a joyful recognition, awareness, affirmation at each pause of letting go of security, approval, power and embracing the moment just as it is. A luminescent presence of one-ness! I have been experience significant fluidity between the unconscious, semi-conscious and conscious part of myself these last years. I am deeply grateful for this guided experience, something one can’t do for oneself. I am wondering, well really hoping that Contemplative Outreach might make available some of these guided experiences.
I am deeply grateful to Contemplative Outreach for organizing this kind of event, such a massive undertaking! One group led us in a Visio Divina of block by block of persons gathered in experiencing a ” global unity of silence as God’s first language”.
An awareness check this week of significant mountain top experiences some of the most profound have been the one on Mount Tabor. Yes one was experienced physically at this place; many others reconnected me at times of darkness, of lostness, distractedness, great awareness. What lingers, is the sense of beloved-ness when I wasn’t even aware of this; that of incarnational beloved-ness; that “God is working in the lives”, those others, co-partners in the same endeavor. This week I spend more C.P. time wrapped up in the dazzling moment itself. Only I didn’t know it at the time. I have been profoundly touched, consenting to the presence and action of (******!!!!***** ). I sense this burst of a little flame from each of my fingers; each one, a name of someone in my life .
What is speaking into my journey now “the wild beasts” are the false narratives I have collected/told my self about the my experiences of powerless impasses down through my Lenten awareness examens. Following a huge evacuation of the Spirit, preceded by a painful paralyzing blockage there are these unexpected appearances through memory or dreaming of seeing with new eyes. I intuit being encircled by dancing angels.
Interestingly, the first decade of my life as does entering the current decade began with Valentine’s day and Ash Wednesday on the same day. The image offered this week has drawn me this liminal space in tones of browns/oranges. The images of persons to the right represent my intervening decades, the observer, the curious one, the question asking one: “If you want to …. you can…?”, engaging in the response ” I want to, be clean”; rushing of into the decade connected by that brief touch of eyes/hands. This week I keep returning to Visio/lectio- ing, moving deeper in something abyss-like , being totally absorbed by, Jesus bent over, eyeball to eyeball, his eyes penetrating mine, his enveloping hands covering mine, lingering. This enveloping abyss is totally opposite to the haunting abyss of despair; a lingering sh-sh-shush timeless moment.
The image this week is connecting me with my “witnessing presence”. For some years now my awake time, my dreaming time, and that liminal space between the two is all my real life, the Welcome prayer being a revealing presence. Sunday night in to Monday morning my dreaming time opened a deep ego scar that had become thickened and hard. The experience so deep that it propelled an energy unleashed in the liminal space where the Welcome prayer became very active (perhaps a Jonah in the whale experience). When finally I found myself fully awake I felt the positive energy of anger, no longer am I powerless, an anger gently massaging the long festering wound. Just as we soak in warm salt water the scarred area of a wound, so is Welcome praying time for me.
I resisted responding to: Who do I say I am? Slowly by into Thursday there was an interior thaw or perhaps scales being removed from my eyes as I gazed into the left side of the image for this week. At age 20 at the time of a heart wrenching crisis, I consciously left the answer to this the question to God. Consenting to the thaw, the descaling of my vision this week I saw that all the hints I was giving God through the ensuing years isn’t the me of God’s desire for the real Adeline, me, the one called by my name. I was/am stalled in my tracks of being the one I think I am. What a relief! Resting in lectio Visio on the lop sided golden globe-like flame. The end of January I received my first birthday card for my up-coming February birthday with a big number on it. How did I arrive at this at one time thought of as an impossible number! Today’s Gospel reading(common) lectionary, of Simeon waiting so many years for the Messiah and boldly acknowledging the One long awaited for. What is my Simeon revelation today? I consent to the real shape/shaping of my inner longing humbly/gratefully. I consent to embracing this now moment as it is, to this very real inner flame not of my choosing, but of my longing.
Paying attention to my reactions to people and events was first intentional then became spontaneous as this week unfolded. New awareness of the gift of the human mind as separate from thoughts/feelings, then, new awareness of the reaction of the false self and my true self. On one occasion my spontaneous reaction one of compassion in a situation of being overlooked with great inconvenience. My ego self at peace. Much of the week unfolded with happenings intersperced with spontaneous Welcome Prayer-ing, including awakening from a dream where the Welcome prayer was a fitting response. I am amazed, grateful, humbled.
I am having the most profound wordless real awareness of the Mind as complete complete stillness, silence and spaciousness. The profoundness is all encompassing… no grasping only receptivity.
Nuggets from my soul-ness this week: 1) there is a setting-out time and there is a time returning by another way i.e. consenting to the Holy Spirit so that my real Self embraces my little self nurturing its letting -go of false desires. My ego has honed the planner me, the scripted me. This coming year, returning my another way is trusting the non-planner, the Holy Spirit. The felt sense of this has no words that fit an explanation 2) I touched the ising wave of God this week through following the movement of my breath. I experience this ising wave before/after the Welcome prayer. My breath has become my reset-button, so to speak.3) Recently my dreaming uploading time is followed by the Welcome prayer several times in synch with the ising wave of God and my breathing, receiving and letting go. The dream images vanish as I move into wakefulness. The ising wave of God is cleaning out the junk weighing me down somewhere deep in what I call my engine room. Perhaps 30 years ago my grandmother who died when I was 8 in a dream left me a gift in this engine room of mine. In real life special people with special training go down into the furnace room of a building. My credentials have been slowly developing by consenting to the presence and action of the Indwelling Spirit. There is a more conscious and new awareness of setting out by another way.
The image this week is speaking powerfully, wordlessly into my being, my life. The phrase from John of the cross has been a long time companion, this week with a new incarnational twist, the me, the you is no longer me, myself alone, what a liberation! The paragraph by Fr. Brendan McGuire disturbed immensely this week. Week three of the Ignatian exercise only, the Christ absorbs, transforms. What can this mean embracing a new sense for me of the Incarnation. The many, many people I have accompanied, walked with, who have been bruised, broken absorbing what was not theirs to absorb. As an incarnation person I hold all that harm, that hurt, so the bruised, the broken can see beneath, so they can claim I am a good person, I’ve been bruised, broken by circumstances beyond me, but I am a good person! As an incarnation person I listen. The biggest compliment I have received : no has listened to me in this way. Holding, listening, I don’t absorb “stuff” mine or others, I don’t do transforming, that is what is so beautiful Incarnation. And so, this 2024, I am deeply grateful for “incarnation continua”: my part consenting, accepting. surrendering, embracing ever-deeper purification. And perhaps, delight of finding myself into the bigger box of my being. I AM GRATEFUL FOR ALL OF YOU WHO, HOLD, LISTEN. The kind of nourishment I get with you, WoW-companions I find nowhere else.
The tone of my this week is “abiding” “open” “tender mercy of God” surrounded by the many kindred spirits of my past including Martin Luther kind. I could not go to his speech this week , the essence of which I know by heart; no this last week of 2023, it’s the shepherds in the fields, the none persons in the then society; “abiding in the fields”; Joseph, accepting, embracing what He doesn’t clearly understand; Simeon and Anna, the hidden nurturers of society given to a hidden life of contemplation ” abiding, consenting, open, to the tender mercies of God” Like these two I am called to nurture a future of “accompaniment” which I will not be a part of , but which will further, ” incarnations of the Son of God”. It is my way of being incarnational, hidden, abiding, open, consenting. As Keating says: “a peace transcending joy and sorrow, hope and despair. This peace is rooted in a way of being … “
For someone who life has been marked by living into the “larger picture of life”, liminal womb time has been a struggle. This Advent 2023 time is not about “closing” week one, then week two…….I think Newell’s expression “liminal time between womb and birth, a time of recognizing and celebrating what is already here and always here the WHAT that births is being lived by me for which there aren’t any words just PRESENCE. My sleeping time of symbolic dreams, my participation in the Wednesday group, the presentations offered through the yearly SPIRITUAL WANDERLUST group, my chat with Rachel as she gives me a hair trim, listening/participating in the 5th-step of a thirty-five “womb time” of bruising, my walking/being walked with, with those of you who share here. In summary each breath ‘inhaling/exhaling” I am enveloped by the WHAT THAT BIRTHS . So as week two of Advent ends, I sit in this new aware ness that the border between closing and beginning, of womb and birth are blurring.
Today, a special day for Mary the Mother of Jesus, I am present to a new sense of being that began as Advent began for me with an overwhelming experience of “explosion” as I gaze upon the image this week following a powerful dream. When my alarm went off I was so present to profound joy!!!!, I prayed the Welcome prayer to honor this experience. Watchfulness this Advent is being experienced more as a receiving, being present to wonder, awe, totally beyond any experience of joy/delight I have come to know. A particularly powerful dream at the beginning of the week, my ego self, the self I think I am, and a self that I am beginning to recognize as a ME , – an explosion of wild emotion that my intellect cannot begin to understand and can only receive, perhaps akin to Mary’s YES post Pentecost. As a person often confounded by a capacity to see the wider picture before me, but not the details, this week ,figuring it out today bows into this wild explosion, as revealed in the image and my dreaming life. I can see more clearly the pathway to forgiveness, to receiving the gift of Advent 2023.
