In this Paschal Season, the world is opening up and in need of wisdom to chart the territory of loving presence and action toward all beings and our earth. Keeping vigil during this season is our way of waking up and praying that wisdom would guide us. Many of you let me know of your ‘yes’ to this vigil, others of you may have said ‘yes’ in your heart, still others may feel in need of leaning into those of us drawn to hold this post. . . to you I say ‘lean in and let us carry you.’
We offer our vigil not only to all people, ancestors, the conscious circle of humanity (living and non-living), the planet, the Cosmos, and to God, but to very specific people and situations (several of you have shared these with me). We trust that our offering is of some benefit to the collective nervous system knowing that it is both enough and not enough. We let go of outcome because we cannot control such things and yet we know in our hearts that this kind of collective practice does assist in creating the conditions for a complex system to move into self-organization and healing. In short, it does make a difference even if we do not see it directly.
May your mind be open, heart be wide, body be at ease.
May you re-collect and re-member yourself.
May you stand firm and awake.
May your heart be full of grace, your soul fueled by love.
With fierce love,
Heather
Here are a some of the readings from this week, from Cynthia Bourgeault's book The Wisdom Jesus talking about this Pascal Season:
“For the first 40 days [post Easter] Jesus is back on the planet among his friends, and disciples, offering his final teaching and transmissions by way of a series of miraculous visitations known collectively as the resurrection appearances. Next comes the ascension…. then 10 days of hushed expectant waiting. Then comes the promised fiery descent of the Holy Spirit, which Christians celebrate as Pentecost“ p.125-6
“I believe firmly that during these great fifty days of Easter, that same invitation is extended to each one of us: to catch the drift of what Jesus is really inviting us to and to deepen our capacity to receive the intense spiritual energy available to us during this sacred season as a catapult to our own transformation." p. 126
“Jesus, the living master, is real, alive, intimately and vibrantly enfolding you right now. He is more present, in fact, than even your breath and your heartbeat. . . But to really know this presence you need to tune in on a different wavelength: to shift from your usual binary operating system to the heart frequency where this Jesus connection broadcasts.” p. 136
“The question of whether Jesus uniquely rose from the dead, or whether that makes him uniquely the Son of God, is probably not the right question to be asking.
The real point is this: what Jesus does so profoundly demonstrate to us in his passage from death to life is that the walls between the realms are paper thin. Along the entire ray of creation, the “mansions” are interpenetrating and mutually permeable by love. The death of our physical form is not the death of our individual personhood. Our personhood remains alive and well, “hidden with Christ in God” (to use Paul’s beautiful phrase in Colossians 3:3) and here and now we can draw strength from it (and him) [and all our ancestors] to live our temporal lives with all the fullness of eternity. If we can simply keep our hearts wrapped around this core point, the rest of the Christian path begins to fall into place.” p.133-4
“…Yes, his physical form no longer walks the planet. But if we take him at his word, that poses no disruption to intimacy if we merely learn to recognize him at that other level, just as he has modeled for his disciples during those first forty days of Eastertide.
Nor has that intimacy subsided in two thousand years—at least according to the testimony of a long lineage of Christian mystics, who in a single voice proclaim that our whole universe is profoundly permeated with the presence of Christ. He [or Christ our Mother as Julian of Norwich called him] surrounds, fills, holds together from top to bottom this human sphere in which we dwell. The entire cosmos has become [Christ’s] body, so to speak, and the blood flowing through it is [Christ’s] love. These are not statements that can be scientifically corroborated, but they do seem to ring true to the mystically attuned heart.” p. 134
“Without in any way denying or overriding the conditions of this earth plane, he has interpenetrated them fully, infused them with his own interior spaciousness, and invited us all into this invisible but profoundly coherent energetic field so that we may live as one body—the “Mystical Body of Christ,” as it’s known in Christian tradition—manifesting the Kingdom of Heaven here and now. Jesus in his ascended state is not farther removed from human beings but more intimately connected with them. He is the integral ground, the ambient wholeness within which our contingent human lives are always rooted and from which we are always receiving the help we need to keep moving ahead on the difficult walk we have to walk here. When the eye of our own heart is open and aligned within this field of perception, we recognize whom we’re walking with.” p. 134-5
“Jesus was just sitting there—surrounded by the deepest, most alienated, most constricted state of pained consciousness: sitting, if we can imagine it, among all those faces of the collective false self, sitting there in the midst of all this, not judging, not fixing; just letting it be in love. And in so doing, he was allowing love to go deeper, pressing all the way to the innermost ground out of which the opposites arise and holding that to the light. A quiet, harmonizing love was infiltrating even the deepest shadows, in a way that didn't override them or cancel them, but gently reconnected them to the whole, holding all things in love's embrace and in such a way that released them from the grip of duality. In that ultimate letting be, he transformed them into sacred vessels of divine love. This is the mystical meaning of the great Pauline statement: In [Christ] all things hold together (Col. 1:17).” compiled from p. 113
“The wager is this: that Jesus, the living master, is real, alive, intimately and vibrantly enfolding you right now. He is more present, in fact, than even your breath and your heartbeat. But to really know this presence you need to tune in on a different wavelength: to shift from your usual binary operating system to the heart frequency where this Jesus connection broadcasts. Wisdom Christianity is practice-driven. When you do the practices that nurture the heart, you will sense this connection as a living bond. Your being becomes receptive to the higher meaning. When the practices that sustain this encounter begin to drop out, you revert back to your usual operating system, and the connection fades.” p.136-7
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