There is an experience that has to shatter so that what’s true and real can land for a person. The truth is glory. To know that glory, the experience of the usual human drama has to be let go. Wrong knowing has to move out so that a person can know what is true.
Here is one of my very favorite poems, Martin Cecil’s “Thus It Is,” that depicts this process.
From age to age
Love’s word rings forth,
“The truth is true and all is well,
Unconquerable life prevails.”
Oh, man, whose strident dreams
Lead gravewards,
Return to calm and noble
Character of life.
Blaze forth pure virtue;
Depart false ambition’s restless schemes.
Busy thought and troubled feeling
Trespass not in virtue’s wise serenity
Where firm control and awful power
Eternally abide.
Here earth’s pains are healed
And cruel chaos of mind’s spawning
Is called again to order and to beauty.
Wrong knowing has to move out so that true knowing can be embraced. All of us, at whatever age, have a measure of life experience. We’ve experienced whatever we have, for however long, and we think we know and understand things on that basis. Personally, I can be grateful for things I’ve learned and come to know, and for what I have developed within my own human capacity in the processes of life. I’m certainly capable of things now that I wasn’t some time ago, years ago. Of course, the opposite is true: I used to be capable of things that I no longer am. That’s probably true for most of us as years move on.
But the most essential reality hasn’t changed. At the ripe old age of sixty-two, it’s so easy to be so proud of all you’ve learned and all you’ve accomplished, and so on. It can become harder to start fresh and new in this moment, to simply know I Am. I Am, and I am here to create. That opportunity to create never ends. If there’s something that I know for sure, it’s that in this moment, whatever is happening, of whatever nature, I have the opportunity to create.
We recently celebrated Mother’s Day. We may think of our own mother, the wonder of motherhood around us, and those who have given birth to and raised children. Probably, most of those events are in the past. The reality of motherhood is needed right now. Beyond the process of birthing and nurturing of children that we celebrate on Mother’s Day, there is the process of Creation at many levels that needs the surround of the spirit of Mother through a person.
When you think of your world and yourself as a creator, and what’s important for you to create with other people and in all the projects of your life, is not motherhood an issue? If motherhood is the loving surround of Creation, it seems to me that it is always needed. There are the very practical things that a mother does that are part of motherhood, and there are the very practical things that we do to provide a loving surround for Creation around us—for other people, for all the things that we care for and tend to.
Behind all those practical things is the spirit of motherhood—the spirit of great love, the spirit of great care, the containment of things, the holding of things in consciousness. It’s a shortcoming that often goes unnoticed when someone fails to offer motherhood to their world and to other people. The person can point to others and say, “Look how they’re struggling; look how they are failing in some way.” The lack of a spirit of motherhood may not be so obvious, particularly to a person who is failing to exercise that ability. And then it’s easy to point the finger.
For a person’s world to flourish they have to be the mother of creation. Man or woman, we are not exempt. Whether or not we have physical children, we still have that same calling, the calling to bring the spirit of the Mother of Creation.
From age to age
Love’s word rings forth….
From age to age, there’s the calling to us as human beings to rise to the occasion, to let go and shed all the wrong knowing of humanity. There’s our own, there’s our parents’ wrong knowing, our families’, our nation’s, and the history of humanity. There is plenty of wrong knowing we fall heir to from out of the past. People are proud of much of that experience. The truth is that it is only as a person can allow all that experience to be forgotten, so that they’re fully present now to be who they are, that they answer Love’s word.
The real calling in living comes from inside a person to be the Creator in their world—for no other reason than that is the reality of who we are. And by the very nature of the Creator, the Creator creates and brings love, which is the power of Creation, to the creation. It is for the sake of the creation—for the care of the children, for the care of the world. But even before that, it is simply our nature as human beings to reveal the Creator that is within us, that is us, for no other reason than we’re called to do that from within ourselves: to give glory to that reality. Love’s word rings forth and calls us to give glory to the reality of Being, the reality of the Creator.
As human beings and as men and women, there is the world of human beings that we are in the middle of. That world of human beings is full of wrong knowing—or, in other words, human drama. If you think that you can sort through all the wrong knowing and all the human drama in your life, you have more faith in your ability in that regard than I do for mine.
But here’s what I do know: I do know that, as a human being, my life is all about being in service to and being surrendered to the Creator—the creator that I am and the totality of the Creator who is Mother and Father God, all of Being—and the truth that I have the opportunity to transparently bring that reality into my life. That is the North Star in anybody’s life, in the middle of all the human drama, all the human tragedy, the ebb tide and also the high tide. The North Star is our opportunity to bring the majesty of the Creator, the nobility of the Creator, into living form as a human being. To do that individually and to do that with other people. Jane Anetrini wrote recently, calling other women into a shared field of motherhood. I could say the same regarding men, that we as men are here to come together to bring the reality of Father God into the world.
But that’s where it gets complicated. The one thing we can truly know is the reality of Being for ourselves. When you work with other people, all the shadows of human experience come up, sooner or later. It’s so easy to look with a fishy eye at another person; to view them with suspicion and to notice all the wrong knowing, all the human drama in them. That’s the point at which you have to come back to the reality of Being and the one thing you can know for sure. Then I can give what I know for sure to you, and I can receive from you what you know for sure. And then we have something.
There’s a story about the Quaker couple. The man says to the woman: “The whole world seems to have gone to sin but I and thou—and sometimes I worry about thou.”
Where is your North Star? Your place of God-centering in the middle of your relationship with other people? Thankfully, other people can be a constellation in the sky, which helps us navigate. They can reveal something of the reality of the Creator and the reality of Being. But in the end, what can you know for sure?
There’s something you can know, not just in the sense of intellectual knowing about something. There’s something we can each know in the sense of a reality that creates confidence and faith and assurance. But then, beyond that, it is a reality that is a source of power, our own power, a source of love, a source of the greatest gift that anybody could bring to the world. It’s right there within us to be known. And we can know it with absolute confidence in a way that doesn’t depend on anybody else, and it doesn’t matter what anybody else is doing. We can bring the power of that—the love of that, the truth of that, the light of that—and have it rejected and have it not matter, or loved and accepted.
From age to age
Love’s word rings forth,
“The truth is true and all is well,
Unconquerable life prevails.”
It prevails in me always, in you, and in all of Creation. And from age to age there have been at least a few human beings who have heard that call of Love, which is the call of the Creator, and who have answered it and said, “Yes, I’m here for this. I’m here for You. I’m here for You, no matter what. I’m here for You.” And if I can be here for my Creator, I can be here for you, the people in my life, however that goes. I can’t know how that’s going to go, but I can know who I serve and how I serve. I can know the power of Creation. I can know the wisdom of the Creator. I can know His blessing, Her blessing. And because I know it, I can be it.
I see people who dismiss their opportunity to bring the blessing and the power and the inspiration of the Most High into their world. I can’t know why; I can’t figure it out. But I can know that blessing, power and inspiration for myself. What a pleasure, what a joy, what fulfillment that never stops, that I get to be this. In my life, in my humanity, in the middle of all the wrong knowing and human drama, I get to be this.
This is the glory, in the middle of whatever is going on, all the ebbs and flows, high tides and low tides. There is the natural ebb and flow of life, and then there’s the human drama that comes from wrong knowing. But whatever it is, in the middle of it all, I Am. I am the Creator. I get to be what I love above all. I get to be that love, that light.
So it is for each and every human being who is born on this planet. That is our birthright and the birthright of every man and every woman. If I embrace that, I have the opportunity to be with others who are inspired to do the same for themselves. And so do you.