Joseph Campbell always used to say, "Follow your bliss." But why is that so hard — cannot your bliss find a better route than this? One that doesn't lead directly into a swamp?

Once — in 1989 — my life-work seemed at an end. My three-year contract at the UUA was up: I'd created the Welcoming Congregation Program and shepherded it through the General Assembly, and got such an overwhelming vote that its future, and that of the Office of GLBT Concerns, was secure. I was about to find out that my own future was not.

The congregations I was sure would snap me up didn't. Never mind, I got an Interim assignment in West Yorkshire — but it was August before those British Unitarians could bring themselves to tell me there was too much resistance to the idea of a queer minister from America.

And now it was Fall. No other positions left.

Lousy economy: not even any temp work.

No unemployment — ministers aren't covered by that.

All I could do was have a plumber connect some water and put up in a friend's gutted, unheated house for awhile. I won't go any further with this pathetic tale of woe — that's quite enough, I think.

This was not the most jubilant period of my life. I'll spare you the rest, except for this.

The most vivid memory I hold is the day I got the bad news. I walked out of the headquarters, across Beacon Street, down the familiar foot-paths through the Public Garden to the swan pond. There was a dense fog — it shrouded everything, hiding anything that was more than a few feet away — it was perfectly surreal. I stood in the middle of the city of Boston, but I saw, in place of the accustomed cityscape, pure light. There, a visible realm so private I shared it only with a few ducks and swans — the layers of my outward life were stripped away. I can never forget that moment that fused the physical reality of light with that of my mind and soul.

I would not mention this, except that I know that you have been somewhere like that, or you will be. You and I may be there again. So much for security.

v

Here is a truth we should learn in loss: that loss leaves us as it finds us, neither better nor worse. But it is in the stripping away of the not-us and of the transient accidents of our lives that a deeper fog of our distorted perceptions can melt away.

I didn't leave the Garden in any more jubilation than I entered it, but I left it differently than I entered it. The loss, the fear, and the disappointed hope were still there, but there was something else more fundamental than any of these.

v

It's a season of light, but light isn't always visible.

And light is more fundamental than time and space.

Light is more fundamental, and it is everywhere. It's just that we cannot see it.

The light that strikes the eye is known only through the energy it releases — which is translated into a physical image — which appears to be composed of light. But that light is a composition of the mind; we never see "the light itself."

v

Why am I telling you this?

Because there is something more fundamental, more elemental, than what we can see or hear or taste. But sometimes we can know it.

Even space and time, and matter and energy, are only manifestations of a deeper underlying continuum. But everywhere there is light.

There is an obvious parallel between light and consciousness — something that is equally mysterious to us. Neither light nor consciousness is part of the physical universe. Mystics, East and West, have long linked light and consciousness. In Christian churches during this Advent season, the first chapter of the Gospel of John is read. It speaks of the Word that was at the Beginning as a Light that shines in the dark, and the darkness has never overcome it, a Light that comes into the world and enlightens us. Images of light are everywhere, from the ancient Gnostics to the Hindu festival of lights last month.

The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation speaks of "the self-originated Clear Light, eternally unborn . . . shining forth within one's own mind." A great Sufi mystic¹ spoke of his experience of a light "gleaming in the Unseen. . . . I gazed at it continually, until the time came when I had wholly become that light."

There is something going on here. Do physical reality and the reality of the mind share the same common ground — a ground whose essence is light?

v

Hanukkah begins next Friday evening, you know.

The Hanukkah Menorah stands as a symbol for all those forces that, twenty-two hundred years ago, surged up within the human spirit and met a corrupt and oppressive regime that seemed immovable.

These were the outward and visible circumstances:

The Jews had been living under an ugly occupation by the Syrian king. Their rituals were outlawed; the Jerusalem Temple had been turned into a Greek temple; dissent was silenced.

And the country priest named Mattathias, and his sons, led a rebellion, and after three years of guerrilla war, they triumphed, and won independence.

Great reformers and freedom-fighters — but we don't always know ourselves very well, know what lurks in our inmost hearts. In later years, the descendants of Mattathias — the Hasmonean Dynasty, as they were called — proved no less enamored of power and greed than the Syrians they had deposed. Now they were as corrupt as their former oppressors. When some Hasmonean brothers were feuding among themselves for control, one of them committed the act of ultimate betrayal. He invited the Roman Empire to intervene in the dispute and become protector and overlord of the Jewish kingdom. So much for the revolution. And now the Hasmonean dynasty was greedily servicing the imperial designs of Rome. Most Jews were deeply resentful and felt the betrayal.

Later, some wise rabbis wanted to create a new symbol of liberation. Their new symbol would not focus on the famous Hasmonean liberators who had actually betrayed them. Instead they created a symbol whose central theme was something more essential, something less transient, than that rebellion, because in the end, it, too, had failed, it had been corrupted.

They created a little story about the eight-day festival that the triumphant Maccabees held when they won freedom so many generations ago. It wasn't so much about the Maccabees, but about a miraculous pot of oil that kept the Temple's Menorah burning for eight nights even though there is enough oil only for one day.

They wanted to say that there is something more fundamental, more elemental about Life Itself, that demands freedom, and justice, and wholeness, and fulfillment. Beyond any particular party or army or hero or cause, there is something elemental that yearns and strives and perseveres and never ceases.

v

Emerson says that fire is the most compelling symbol of what we should be, "the sign of a robust, . . . burning, radiant soul."

The light of fire seems to tell so much of our story, the descent of life on earth.

And we are descendants of the first light, the fire that flared forth from an unimaginably hot and compact region of pure energy that expanded and cooled and condensed into elementary particles, and then atoms, and then all this radiant Universe. We are come from that light and we are that light from the first fire.

The spiritual quest is not, when we understand it aright, really about finding some remote Deity dwelling in the heavens, revealed in some scripture or taught by some priest or guru. It is about grasping who and what we are, and what it is that moves and surges in us, yearns and strives in us, that Light of which we are expressions, that is everywhere, even in the dark.

Is it some ragtag army of farmer-priests in ancient Jerusalem? — even if later the reformers turned corrupt. Is it Martin Luther King declaring that he has a dream, and a multitude of people who share it? — even if the promise of his revolution has not been fulfilled completely. Is it ancient enemies taught to hate and distrust, shaking hands, laughing together, and forming a government in Belfast? — even if, for the time being, Ian Paisley's war-mongerers have again gained the upper hand. Is it the fire in the mind of an artist, a Unitarian artist named Charles Dickens awakening the conscience of a nation?

Maybe it's you, not sure if there is really life after some heartbreak of loss, or facing something that must be called by every customary definition Failure, or maybe success, but you wonder if you can ever find purpose and meaning and know that you are doing the work that you are meant to do.

v

What is it that glows in our faces and enlightens our minds and fires our hearts? Can you see it here today lighting these faces? Can you name it or dissect it and examine it? What is light, and where did it come from?

But like the first light that spread wide the Universe and lighted the stars, the light of consciousness is expanding, creating nobler and higher forms of being. It will not cease. It is like a rushing stream that will not stop to be observed. If anything could stand still, it would be swept away by the torrent it tries to resist. Our minds flow with this stream of light; they cannot stand still.

The light is not seen except that it light some object, which, lighted, becomes an instrument of our seeing.

There is light in the world so long as there are those willing and personally prepared to embody it. When there are no such persons, then the world will be enveloped in the encompassing darkness. What you do with the Light has to do with your estimate of what it means to be a human in this time, in this world.

For those caught in darkness, locked out in the cold, shut out from the blessings of life, there is light sometimes only when somebody is willing to embody it, to stand in stark contrast to the encompassing darkness, to be consumed by the sacred fire.

v

But who wants to be consumed by the blazing brightness?

We know, after all, about Icarus, who, using wings made by his father, Daedalus, escaped King Minos's labyrinth and flew higher and higher toward the sun until the sun melted the wax that held the feathers to his wings. He plunged into the sea.

Humans have always been drawn to the light of a fire. Our earliest ancestors were both awed and terrified by the fire that issued from the rocks and the smoldering cones of the rocks.

Around the fire, we've listened to stories — our faces warmed by its heat and our backs chilled by the encircling dark. But we could never enter the fire itself, nor could we live in the outer darkness: we have to remain between the fire and the ice, we make our home there.

We know the dangers of our own inner fire, when we follow our bliss or our passion, warm ourselves around that fire. What if we are drawn, mesmerized, into that fire, which seems to promise new life, but seems ready to burn up most of our present life in the process?

What if this fire inside me makes me a crazy fanatic? How can I trust the inner light? We wonder these things, and we give ourselves to our fears. You draw back into the darkness, toward the ice.

You take the path of ice and hide your light because your own fiery possibilities for a passionate and creative life carry with them at all times the possibility of being burnt by failure or cast into the outer darkness of frustration.

You hold back from speaking a creative but disturbing truth, freeze at the prospect and hold your tongue. Keep that fire hidden. A chilled and darkened destiny lived out on the level of frustration is safer than a fulfillment that burns out before your eyes.

v

The richest part of religions are the stories about people of the fire and the light, not of the ice and unillumined but predictable dark. Our story is a story of such luminous men and women.

It is true that, in following our own inner light, fueled by our inner fire, we may experience failure. But the light is there, too. And there — even there, in failure — you will be not less than you are and the light will not be done its great work in you or in the world.

The light is everywhere, but you only see it when it interacts with something and releases energy. That light is in you, and you — you — are the light of the world.

¹ Abu'l-Hosian al-Nuri.

² Peter Russell. Waking Up In Time. Novato, Calif.: Origin Press, Inc., 1998; reprinted from original title The White Hole in Time, Harper San Francisco, 1992, 173.

³ David Whyte. The Heart Aroused. New York: Currency/Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1994, 1996, p. 82.

Sources:

Peter Russell. Waking Up In Time. Novato, Calif.: Origin Press, Inc., 1998; reprinted from original title The White Hole in Time, Harper San Francisco, 1992.

Peter Russell. "Mysterious Light, A scientist's odyssey." IONS Noetic Science Review, Dec. 1999-March 2000, No. 50, 8ff.

David Whyte, "Fire in the Earth," The Heart Aroused. New York: Currency Doubleday, 1994, 1996, pp. 75ff.

©2004 by F. Jay Deacon. All rights reserved.

Meditate

In days of cold and wind and storm, a warmth draws us here and we gather in its glow.

In the greyness, there is a light and we are drawn to it.

It rises from deep places in us and enfolds us. Let no fearful, no grieving heart remain shut and bolted to its generous radiant light.

Be lifted, be healed, be washed through with music.

Let shine the light that penetrates the surface of things and reveals what is essential and true. It is one light, one radiant energy, shining in all. Clear the clutter away from minds and hearts and let it shine in us.

Readings:

A friend and colleague, Lynn Ungar, wrote this:

Come down from the hills.
Declare the fighting done.
Be bold — declare victory,
Even when the temple is wrecked
and the tyrants have not retreated,
only coiled back like a snake
prepared to strike again.
Come down. Try to remember
a life gentled by daily acts of domestic faith - the pot
set to boil, the bed made up,
the table set in calm expectation
that when the sun sets
we will still be here.

Come down and settle.
Unlearn the years of hiding.
Light fires that can be seen for miles,
that dance and spark and warm
the frozen marrow. Declare your presence,
your loyalties, the truths
for which you do not expect to have to die.

It would take a miracle, you say,
to carve such a solid life
out of the shell of fear.
I say you are the stuff
from which such miracles are made.

Rumi, 13th century:

The lamps are different

But the Light is the same.

So many garish lamps in the dying brain's lamp shop,

Forget about them.

Concentrate on essence, concentrate on Light

In lucid bliss, calmly smoking off its own holy fire,

The Light streams toward you from all things,

All people, all possible permutation of good, evil, thought, passion.

The lamps are different,

But the Light is the same.

One matter, one energy, one Light, one Light-mind,

Endlessly emanating all things.

One turning and burning diamond.

One, one, one.

Ground yourself, strip yourself down,

To blind loving silence.

Stay there, until you see

You are gazing at the Light

With its own ageless eyes.