Faith, Hope and Love

It is not true for one minute that plants live for earth, for sun, for wind, for rain, or tremble before the far-off ravaging fire, lightning, storm or flood. They live only for the flower which has existed in them since birth. In vain we wait for sap to tell its truth, for life itself to divulge its secrets. Its sole aim, its only goal, is to make itself an image of the truth it was born with. To this extent earth, water, air and fire are only contributors to the purpose life has in mind; any attempt to make the four elements the cornerstone of either natural or moral philosophy will always come to nothing. They are only servants. The attempts to peer into the mysteries of nature by breaking it down into its component parts will simply yield more component parts, and still more, until we are left with a fractured mosaic of something which was once a grand image.

But even the grand image itself is nothing compared to what the plant knows when it feels the gentle wind stirring about it, the sun's low rays enkindling it with warmth, the tiny streams of water circulating around its roots, and the cold earth preserving it for spring. It gives itself completely to the flower which is to come. It cannot tell what it knows and we cannot ask it to do so. And that is why philosophy must bow to faith. It is why all rigid truths must give way to hope. And it is the reason why all creation springs up for love alone. Faith, hope and love - but the greatest of these is love:

Through the shining patina on the stones I come,

thirsty as a pilgrim for what seeps and stills,

to where the silent sap conceals its will.

There beside a fountain of rest I wait

for sap to share its mind and heart with me.

Instead I hear tales of ancient pine,

of springing boughs of fir, and long, in God's name,

for the flower which will winter on that tree.

Jay

© landar 2011. All rights reserved

You are welcome to quote from PageLight on the condition that you cite the author and the source:

Author: Jay Landar
Source: www.pagelight.blogspot.com

A Path of Sunlight

The sun at its lowest point continually lights a path into the human heart. This is the meaning of the winter solstice event in Newgrange in Ireland, where the sun's rays on the shortest day of the year penetrate the narrow passageway into the chamber at the center. The path of the sun is a coming, an advent, into the center of the human being. And there are many other paths which prepare for this. The path of the angel into human consciousness, bearing a message. The path of a star across the sky. There are paths which are singular and subjective - for example, the path moonlight takes across the water to where you stand. No two people will see exactly the same path, because no two people stand in the same place. Likewise the path between you and a rainbow: a rainbow is not an optical illusion, it is a singular, subjective experience based on where you stand in relation to sun and rain. But you will never objectify it or make it the same for all people.

That the sun must light its path into your heart is the most significant thing of all. You may stand and gaze across the country, seeing its low rays catching the stubble in the fields, almost awakening a memory of the long stalks swaying in the summer sunshine. But the view is frozen: frost creates a floor for the fields which seems permanently white; sheets of ice evade the fingers of attempted thaw. There is something about the frozen world which will never change. At this point only the human heart is capable of making a wondrous birth, a new beginning. And this it does within the shrine at its center. The world lives again because of this leap in the human being, which the angel has foretold, which the path of the star has revealed in the sky.

All this may seem like anthropomorphizing, like unscientific clutching at straws. But science has lost sight of the individual path, of the singular, subjective event in human life. The path of the human being down through the stars onto earth is another such event, capturing, at the moment of birth, the exact brilliance of all the planets and constellations in a unique way. No two human beings have the same horoscope, even twins born ten minutes apart. For many people these things are just fanciful - but in their hearts, I believe, they are longing for a return to the deep truths of the subjective path. The mind can create objectivity and has to do so, but experience must be allowed. The path to the Guardian Angel is the one I would finish on. A childish notion? Let it be so. But a living being who has our unique, individual interests at heart in a way that only a child's eye for truth can properly comprehend.





Jay

© landar 2011. All rights reserved

Rock-Crystals

The virtue of the sun going lower - being driven lower - is that its level rays strike deeper into narrow openings hidden in the earth. And in these openings lie caves which, at other times of the year, conceal their unspoken ornaments in perfect darkness. Even the names of rock-crystals tumble from the lips like precious imaginations: chrysoprase, heliotrope, rose-quartz, amethyst. But now, under the spell of the lowering sun, their angles and eminences, their curious colors and striking transparencies, flash into life and extend far beyond their normal, lowly domain.

My best counterpart for their metaphor is the human brain, or perhaps - better - the human skull. Ah! the number of thoughts which have been passed over or concealed because their true value was never allowed to shine! The number of thoughts which only need the glancing, angled light of the sun for a short space of time to reveal their radiance, their glorious-sounding names! And these are the thoughts which have been growing in us, in the manner of crystals, over long periods of time. How odd that they only need the corner of the year to flash up into brilliance!

Why? Because these are the thoughts which line the wall of the cave, which grow in us without our probing or stimulation. At their deepest level these are the thoughts which answer the call of the sun with their eternal light, stored for this moment - their precious names speaking only when our senses are lowest to the ground. Precious or semi-precious, these thoughts belong to the universe and grow in us.

The constellations of the zodiac, too, are like twelve sleeping figures around the inside of a cave - and are often described as such in fairy-tales. If you, as hero, bring the magic crystal - the sun-illumined light of thought - into the cave, the sleeping figures will rise and guide you - and rescue the kingdom in its time of need.

The time is now, the kingdom is in need, and the crystals must shine again at the lowest elevation of Helios, the sun.

Jay

© landar 2011. All rights reserved

The Coming Age

The day is coming when soul and sound, when self and sight will be one. It will be the time when cosmos and consciousness will live inside each other. And at the heart of both there will be a birth, a newborn child. This is the meaning of Advent in the Christian year - a long, slow growth through all of time to the point at which the meaning of life, the perfect human being is born. And it's a laborsome process too, through all the realms of earth in which the very foundations of our life were laid down. Thus the shining minerals, the sleeping plants dreaming of sun, the rapt, attentive animals pursuing life and finally - finally - the human being conscious of rising through all these things. And all this in four weeks!

                                                  

It is the time when inner and outer experience each other in mutual interchange; when my consciousness seems to rhyme in the moisture coating the day; when the sun keeps every precious moment wrapped in faith; when the cosmic poetry of creation wakes with me in the morning.

The expansion of consciousness is a gift of nature but we only win back the cosmos through our own efforts. It is waiting to be won - not by storm or acquisition but by gentle birth. I believe this is true whether or not you are a Christian. But the Christian imagery leads up to this point. A process of labor culminating in the birth of what was always present, what was always waiting for us. A process which wins back the different kingdoms of life. It is the story of the world and of evolution, irrespective of faiths.

I see this in the blue of the sky, hiding behind a screen of righteous cloud. Within my skin the cosmos; within its shell the newborn self appears.

Wind

Listen! In the rattling of the wind

an angel comes with promise of new birth;

within the closed might of clouds

a sorrow which is joy declares itself.

Can I bring myself over the hill of pain

to see the tired world breathe in life?

Can I hear the touch of wings

where the seasoned wind grows most strong? Listen!

Jay

© landar 2011. All rights reserved

(All the written work in PageLight is original to the author. You are welcome to quote from the material, citing its origin:

Author: Jay Landar
Source:  www.pagelight.blogspot.com )

Ever Higher Into the Blue

I see that patch of blue through the mist in November and its quality is unattainable. Everything else dances attendance on it. The crooked, coiling branches of the oaks contain their dark dreaming - some leaves might fall if a gust of wind should summon itself from the centre of the earth. There are walls here confining nothing. Their shifting surfaces release thoughts into the air. Pathways, trees, superbly crafted branches - a tumbledown greenhouse, poets in circles going round and round. And crows, rising like black shades where the leaves have fallen. Their cacophony beclouds the sky.

Everything depends on that patch of blue. Its continuing light fills every thought - each hope, each confinement, each fallen shape - right down into the next gust of wind concealing itself in the centre of the earth.

Jay

© landar 2011. All rights reserved

The New Romanticism

In the age of the Romantics poets, artists and musicians gazed out at the world and what they saw struck awe and wonder into their souls. With their hands, their brushes and their pens they conducted the orchestra of skies and restless seas. Inspired by their own restless natures they strode across the landscapes of Europe and made themselves a part of the imagery of the era. Today the world has changed. Artistic and thoughtful souls feel that the gaze has been reversed: nature is peering back into the human being and searching for a moral landscape it can write about, extol and travel. The axis of the world has changed.

The human being in turn creates either a shadow or a transparency. Only a solid form will generate a shadow and, in so far as the human soul has not received its share of wonder and awe, of light and color, it will remain solid. Those who lived their lives in the past with eyes firmly shut form only an opaque surface for nature today. For those who took in the truly luminous nature of the surrounding world a new field of vision opens up. They have the opportunity to learn transparency.

But there are at least three aspects of transparency. There is the luminosity on the side of nature; then there is the numinous world of the divine on the other side; and in the middle there is the self which, in its non-solid state, has to learn to see itself again. By shading its eyes it can find itself as after-thought or after-image. In a sense its own presence is no longer of such importance. The luminous world and the numinosity of the Divine are what matters. At one and the same time nature can look back through the human being and the heavenly can look down into the world. This, I believe, is the new Romanticism. Not that we are a reflecting sheet of glass - a mirror - but that we are a transparency that allows the divine and the natural to work through us equally.

These are the thoughts of one who is amazed that these things can happen and that they truly reflect the path of spiritual evolution. We can talk about saving the planet but our activism must also become so soft that we ourselves almost disappear. In what way we are painted into the picture as individuals, or as representatives of our time, is something the future can decide.

Jay

© landar 2011. All rights reserved 

Picture: Woman Before the Setting Sun by Caspar David Friedrich