I watched my daughter, Sarah, wait for nine months for the magical creature within her to  emerge from her womb. She set up the nursery, ate wholesome food, gave up alcohol, read articles on “what to expect”, and did everything in the name of he-who-was-coming, Archer. 

Sarah changed as she waited, as though another woman waited within for just this moment. The changes she was making were changing her. She was changing for him, making room in her life and heart for him. It was as if Archer was already among us, we longed for him so, talked about him constantly, told stories of how he moved within her, predicted his personality.

And then he came, precious in every way. We were entranced. Nothing was too grandiose to describe him. A kaleidoscope of genes and temperaments, awesome and spellbinding in every way. I held him and trembled.

What I experienced firsthand with this experience is what Karl Rahner, the German theologian, called the radical nature of hope. Hope is not passively waiting for something we expect will happen. It is the active, passionate involvement in what is just beyond our grasp, yet already mysteriously present. Hope is radical — “going to the root or origin of a thing” — when it is rooted in life, in the present moment, not in some future event.

It’s not waiting to celebrate what is yet to come, but living as if it has already arrived — just as my daughter, Sarah, lived and thought her pregnancy as if her baby was already among us. Her whole focus and energy embraced him as a living, breathing member of our family, unseen by the naked eye, yet present.

There was no question whether she would love him, or if he would love her. She loved him, without having to see him. There was a clearing away of any conditional, provisional thinking of what should be; there only was, and it was Archer. Sarah demanded no prerequisite, gave no ultimatum of who was to appear. Archer would appear, and that was enough.

Sarah was grounded in a state of radical hope — living her present moment as a reaching out to and a participation in the unfathomable and unpredictable possibility that was already becoming. She spent her whole pregnancy seeing and embracing a reality she could not see with her eyes, living as if she could already see it, hold it, love it. To be spiritually alive, I believe we have to live out of this kind of radical hope every day .

Just as Sarah marveled at what was taking shape in her womb, we are called to marvel at what is taking shape in our lives:   Whatever is taking shape in me right now is exactly what I need to be the person I am meant to be. Everything I need and want is already within my grasp. What I am doing now is exactly what I need to be doing to ready myself for whatever is next to come, already in motion towards me. 

Whatever pain I experience has meaning and teaching that will instruct me about my life and about the direction I need to seek.  I do not have to suffer just because I experience pain or sadness. I can discover the healing power that is already in it, even though I cannot see it with my eyes, feel it in my heart, know where it leads me. I believe I have the power to birth it out of the pain of what troubles me now.

My future is already within me and I embrace it wholly, without knowing it fully at this time. If who I am becoming, or if what shape my life is taking, is not what I know to be best for me,  I have within me the wisdom and the power to take the next step to make the changes I need. It is all, right now, within my grasp.

Living with this kind of hope, rooted in the present moment as containing all I need to become whole and healthy, provides a sense of joy and resilience that sustains me on the journey, an assurance of enoughness and trust that quiets my angst.

For me, personally, being a first-time grandmother of such a magnificent creature has opened up space in me for this kind of hope. When I hold my grandchild, I hold my future. He is a part of me going forth, on and on into future generations of which I already am part, because of him.

Archer is, indeed, an archer whose bow sends arrows of life outward into an unknown sea of family yet to be known and loved. I touch my future through him, and I contribute to his future by the loving way I hold him now. Is this not what we who believe in a Creator God mean when we say we live in the security that we are part of God’s future? 

The journey from the unconscious self to the conscious self we are today is the story of the human race. It is also the story of each of us who moved from fusion and total immersion — total oneness with our mother — to separateness and conscious mind as an adult. It is a movement from an unconscious experience of Center to a more conscious experience of Center.

Archaic man could not experience himself as separate from nature, from the life force within himself. He lived in an unconscious state and claimed no personal power. What happened to him happened because of the trickery of the gods or his own inclusion of them through ritual.

We experience ourselves as separate from nature, separate from life. We have a conscious mind separate from the experience of our body and we make choices and life decisions based on this experience. Archaic man could not move to Center and consciously act from that, on his own accord, with his own energy. We can, and must, if we are going to act out of our wholeness.

It is difficult to articulate how this happens, but one knows when it happens. No one person can define Center for another. We can only talk about it and around it. I can share when this happens for me. As an introvert, I experience wholeness internally. Others may experience it differently, externally, with others.

For me, I know this happens in me when I allow energy far, far greater than my own to enter my body, to pour itself through me in a way I am taken up by it and momentarily held, carried, comforted and transformed by it. One of the ways I experience this is in nature, when I allow the energy of the earth and of the heavens to pour themselves through me so that I am momentarily immersed, merged in them, then separated out, more whole, more healed than moments before.

I move to Center and consciously call on the wholeness I experience in that moment to intersect, to join with, to merge with my own energy – my present pain, my problem, my inability to get past something draining my energy – so wholeness can enter my person and do what I cannot do by myself. I can then act on this new energy in me from a conscious place, a knowing place.

The wholeness in nature allows me to remember the wholeness at my center that has resided there from my beginning, since my essence took form in my mother’s womb, from some time before, perhaps, when I was part of some energy larger than my own.

I know at that moment I am part of that larger whole and that what paralyzes me now, frightens me now, is also part of that larger whole. I know I will be all right, that I have within myself the power and the grace and the energy to face, do, decide whatever I cannot do alone. It speaks for me, through me, in me. It acts in me, with me, from a source beyond myself.

I walk in early morning, before dawn and movement parade other energies. It is dark, the moon hangs low in the heavens, a continuum from rich orange to pale lemon, shifting shapes from sliver to whole. The darkness holds me, quiets me with its stillness. As I walk, I call on the energy of the quiet earth to ease any troubled thoughts, any unresolved concerns that distract me from her holy presence.

Whatever it is that seems insurmountable or draining at the time feels massaged, soothed, danced out of me as I walk. By the time I reach home, the sun is coming up as the moon bids goodbye for the day, streaks of sunlight pour out across the sky; birds begin their morning song. I am calm, filled with an energy that can take on whatever I couldn’t just an hour before.

Whatever it was that seemed insurmountable slowly takes on perspective, becomes more approachable, manageable. I know it will not destroy me, overpower me, diminish me in any way, for I am part of a larger whole and that wholeness braces me up, moves through me, is larger than what I face or fear. I have returned home centered, reclaimed, knowing. The knowing is conscious, rooted, grounded and anchored in something of substance, trustworthy.

I am walking under the moon, I am in the moon, the moon is in me, I am the moon, the moon is myself. I am enveloped into the oneness of the moment. I merge with it. There is nothing, for that moment, but the moon. I slowly step back into myself, separate out from the moon, the earth. The moon is now above me and I am walking under the moon, conscious of this, emerging from an unconscious oneness, refreshed, whole.

Archaic man could not see himself separate from the moon. I can. I am conscious. I can consciously call on the energy of the moon to hold me, to whole me, to heal that place in me that needs new energy, new direction, needs grounding. I move into Center, I merge with Center, then move away from Center, back into myself, into my own center. I act from the Center that moved through me. I allow it to move through me and to give me its energy, then to move past me. I carry that energy now; I am part of that energy, that energy is myself.

I choose to merge because I know I can merge, separate out, then move on as I am, in my own center. Archaic man had no conscious mind separate from his experience of being in a body. He could not escape the fusion. It all felt magical to him.

I experience this wholeness at other moments as well — walking the beach with my young grandson, allowing the pounding surf of the ocean and the wet warmth of the sand to move through me, to minister to me, to wash away any fragmentation in me. We stroll, mindless, picking up shells, with no destination, on no timetable, not aware at times that the other is present. I become part of the universal movement of life, out of my body and yet wonderfully in it, empowered by energies greater than my own and yet connected with my own, wholed.

Moving in and out of Center is, for me, a spiritual moment, a moment that calls together transcendent and imminent energies in a conscious way. Divine energy and human energy dance together, if only a moment, on the pinhead of my existence, yet releases in me conscious energy that changes me at my core.

Some transcendent moments knock us to the ground; the veil that hides that holy face is dramatically split. It may last only for an instant, but it remains with us as sacred memory, a holy vision of terror and strength. For me, these moments have been moments of great emotional elation and moments of great sadness.

The first, an emotional high. It was my daughter Sarah’s wedding. It was like all the facets in the home of my body were turned on, full blast, and every experience entering my body ran the full range of feeling between ecstasy and terror at the same moment. 

Sarah decided she wanted a down payment on a house rather than a traditional wedding. Only immediate family was in the church that morning, so there were no distractions in my heart. Every word from the celebrant’s mouth, every smile from my daughter’s face, every chord from the organ’s belly, every sigh from the family’s yes, every internal motion in my body’s beating soul played me like a violin on its best day. I burned with joy.

Flashes of feeling and intuitive insight folded in on themselves. As if I stood on the threshold of the mysteries of mysteries, I experienced myself witnessing the wedding of earth and sky, of the first man and first woman, of God and man on the altar that day. I was standing at the center of the universe and seeing, clearly, far beyond the horizon of what was taking place there that morning. I was lifted into a transcendent moment and I had no words to speak it.

Transcendence opens up. The veil is lifted; the wall tumbles down. Archetypal beauty and truth and love pulse our body like a fire hose. Like Peter at the Transfiguration, on top of that holy mountain with Jesus and Elijah and Moses, we long to put up a tent and remain, transfixed, on sacred ground, never to let go of the experience of it.

I felt like I had looked into the belly of life and been infused with an energy and a wisdom not my own, but God’s. But, just as Jesus took Peter by the hand, Life took my hand and led me back down the mountainside and into the only life this mortal is destined to live, my own.

In my other grail experience, the ground shook again, this time for our country. Transcendence opened again; the veil was shattered. The holy ground upon which we stood was littered with death and an ideology gone mad. For a moment in time, on 9-11, the World Trade Center, along with the Pentagon, became the center of the universe, an intersection of powerful positive and negative energies that vaulted into explosive fire and unimagined chaos.

It was a communal moment, a moment of archetypal mayhem and death and intolerable misery, coupled with moments of archetypal beauty and love and truth. We looked over the wall that separates us from these archetypal realities, and from one another, and we joined hands in silence. The accounts of that day, the stories of those we lost, the stories of those who rushed to help, the stories of those who were left behind – these stories are now our anthem.

Love showed its face in our having weeded through every piece of rubble of the WTC by hand. We did this to remember and to honor every single person lost. This helped all of us to feel we were participating, there somehow. It helped us to feel we had done everything we could for those persons desecrated by that senseless attack.

Beauty emerged from that order, from our getting back to the foundation, to the ground of this now hallowed tomb, so there could be a new start, while never forgetting what happened there. We could not start over until we got back to the most personal we could be with it, until each one of us felt consecrated by those holy ashes.

Those fallen buildings are metaphor for all the falling outs that occurred that day – our loss of innocence, our naïve theologies, our entitled isolation from what had always happened “over there.” It was a clearing out of everything we took for granted and, yes, a communal trusting that something, something, would emerge from those ashes that would, indeed, make us stronger in those broken places.

Until we hit that archetypal wall and were forced to look over it — not be satisfied with just leaning against it — we couldn’t grasp the truth or the vision of how to move on. Those archetypal seeds of love and beauty and truth we experienced that day have to be carried by us back into our everyday world, on this side of the wall.

Hopefully, we can call on this vision and use it, now, to move on. Hopefully we can use this newly focused energy and power, now and tomorrow, for all our walls.

We each carry within us memories of healing moments. Images flood my soul of my daughter Sarah’s wedding day with its hugs and laughter and tears; images of firefighters going into the burning WTC, and firefighters, mourning their dead, digging through those hallowed ashes. I carry other images of loving moments and words that healed me in the past. I call on these. They are pieces of transcendence; traces, too, of an imminent presence that blesses my soul.

The ancients believed that the Center moved. The Center of the Universe was anywhere (or anytime) divine energy and human energy converged. I stood at the Center at the heights of emotion with my daughter’s wedding and at the depths of emotion with the collapse of the World Trade Center.

Both of these experiences released more light in me, released more consciousness into my being, and instilled in me a vision of transcendence that will remain with me into my old age.

At the center of the personality is a precious gem, our “I am.”  It pulses through us from an uninterrupted stream of sacred energy that reaches back to the “I AM” who spoke to Moses from the burning bush and reaches forward to the person we are yet becoming. It is the essence and soul of who we are as a human being. It’s presence in us must be fiercely protected at all times.

My grandson, Archer, at four months old, has it. His glee and delight in himself is so apparent, he leaves no alternative but to laugh and dance in his presence. “I am here!” exudes from his every pore. “Aren’t I wonderful?” It makes me want to throw up a boundary around him and not allow anyone close to him who would discourage, demean, or deny him his feeling of specialness.

I know this is isn’t possible. After all, I’ve been down that road myself. It is the human journey to have it, to lose it, to rediscover it. Archer has to eat the apple of experience and learn what he is here on this earth to learn. He has to be put out of the Garden of Paradise — wounded by life — and forced to wander the earth until he can come back to his essential self in adulthood.

The primal unconscious unity the child first feels with Mother, with life, has to suffer a wound, has to be ripped from these feelings of fusion, in order to grow. Our “I am” journeys from mystical union, through separation, struggle, individuation, back to mystical union. The whole journey of life is a return, a remembrance – but a return to a conscious wholeness.

We give away our “I am”, or have it taken away from us, in the service of life. This does not happen without loss, loneliness and deep longing. We give away our “I am” slowly, usually in order to be loved. We do it to please, in order to be accepted or to belong. We do it to be what our parents, friends, community need us to be in order to be deemed “good.”

We do it when we produce in order to have “worth” or recognition or what others tell us will bring us “happiness.” Worth is not something that can be proven, especially to oneself. A solid sense of self is the only guarantee of feelings of self-worth. This comes from hearing, from the start, that we are worthy of love just because we are. Our unique gifts make us special.

We give away our “I am” when we lose touch with our feelings, when we don’t trust our own intuition of what is right for us, when we allow our vital energies to be drained from us by demands placed on us by others who are not themselves in touch with their inner life. We do it when we project on to someone else our own power, our own gifts, thinking they are more special than they are. It takes a long time to pull back that projection and claim our own gifts.

We do it when we stay in our head, when we lose touch with our body and how it feels to be alive and vital and part of this incredible universe. We do it when we don’t take time to reflect, to know what it is we really want, when we lose touch with our soul, our spiritual self, our core. We do it when we sacrifice the deepest part of ourselves and don’t even realize we’ve made that choice.

Our “I am” can be taken from us by others in all the ways abuse occurs, from sexual to verbal abuse. Poverty, war, injustice, neglect of any kind, strip our spirit. We have it taken from us when there is parental alcoholism, extended depression, with any physical or emotional  absenteeism. We do not feel cherished as a child and therefore cannot cherish ourselves.

To know it, to lose it, to come back around and experience it, as T.S. Elliot said, “as if for the first time,” is the human journey to the self. We have to steal back the fire of our creative energy, our passion for life, our deepest longings, in order to light up those parts of ourselves we have betrayed or have been robbed from us by others so we can release the fire within.

Learning to find our voice and to speak it, discovering who we are in the process. Discovering what makes our heart sing, whether it’s painting or gardening or playing with our grandchildren. Trusting the intuitive, sacred wisdom of our body to know what is best for us, even when others judge us or scoff at our choices.

These begin to reel back in the self that was lost. These begin to release our “I am” energy into our adult life. It’s not unusual to experience young energy in an aging body. As we age and come to accept ourselves as we are, we tap into energy and loves we had abandoned. Age brings the wisdom and the opportunity to honor this sacred energy. Having produced, proven, provided for and poured out our energy the way the world demanded, we can now take back our true self.

I’m on the other side of the journey my grandson Archer is just brginning. My “I am” was lost, but now it is found. Life teaches me this is just how it is. As the conscious part of nature, we too must cycle as all life cycles — disintigrated, restored, freed up, transformed. I rise each morning ready to recreate myself in ways comfortable to me. Creating a life does, indeed, take a lifetime.

The mythic Center is different for everyone. It’s a feeling of home for some, a step into the sacred for others, a magical place within, for still others, where everything flows and connects. It’s wherever and whatever enlivens a person and allows them to feel fully connected with their real selves.

We all go searching, as Phil Cousineau says in his Once and Future Myths, “following a golden thread in search of a hidden gate. . .  We ache for the mythic home, paradise, the garden, the green land where we will find love, find ourselves, make the hard sacrifice, and, finally, do the right thing with our lives.”

That “hidden gate”, for me, lies in the center. I find my personal center when I feel deeply rooted in some trustworthy, archetypal spring within myself that flows from a sacred source beyond my personal will and understanding. I feel held and empowered from some greater source. It’s the connection that’s important, as if I already possess what lies on the other side of that gate.

The notion of home, for me, suggests that sense of feeling held. Nature holds me, and soulful words. A genuine smile from someone I care about holds the deep moment we’ve just shared and binds us together in unspoken union. It holds us both. A spontaneous telephone call from one of my children holds me with bouquets of memories of past togethers.

I read an article some time ago about Temple Granvin, a well-known scientist who is brilliant and somewhat autistic. Unmarried, without ties, she ached for the normalcy of feeling held. She remembered, from her childhood on the farm, how cows went through what they affectionately called the squeeze machine that held them still, quieted them, while they were being branded.

She created her personal squeeze machine in her home, a container in which she lay down at night and pulled the two wooden sides together so she was enclosed, held, stilled. The comfort this allowed her, the holding it provided, brought her into herself and connected her with that deep, still place within. She knew the importance of being held, contained from within on a soul level, and she created this possibility for herself.

I think Temple experienced center, somehow, with her squeeze machine. She was not seeking containment from without but from within. She did not need to be constrained or held back from anything, but released and freed up by something that nurtured and fed her spirit-potential. Any tightness and need for control was rocked away in invisible arms.

The ritual she created — the coming-out-of in the morning and the returning-back-into in the evening, along with the feeling of being held in a deep way – recreated the movement of center. The Center is that from which we’ve come and that into which we will return at death. It holds us, grounds us, centers us in something larger than ourselves as we live on the earth.

Center is that source out of which come all the metaphors we use to express the true, all the energy out of which we dance out the divine in us, the Alpha and Omega of everything whole we experience from womb to tomb. Our center is that becoming point in each of us.

The trick is to find what holds us, really holds us. Some look to alcohol, others food, others, whatever addiction seems to create the feeling of being held, quieted, returned to a primordial unconscious, free of anxiety. The only physical realm in which there is no anxiety is either the original womb or the final tomb. There are no opposites, no duality, no choices in these two.

All new energy entering us brings with it an element of anxiety. Anxiety is the price we pay for consciousness. There are two types of anxiety – the anxiety of dread and the anxiety of anticipation. If I am not connected at my center and aware of the larger field in which I move and have my being, new and unfamiliar experiences will cause a sense of dread and fear in me.

If I am connected at my center, new and unfamiliar experiences will fill me with the anxiety of anticipation. What is occurring in my life right now that is inviting me to learn something new and important? What new thing is happening that is pushing me to outgrow the limits of my present boundaries and comfort level? The anxiety I feel is a signal for new growth.

There is something innate in us that knows when we’re at this center point, on the beam, and when we’re not. Joseph Campbell says it happens for him, “when everything is in harmonious relationship to what I regard as the best I’ve got in me.” We experience the totality of our being at that moment and it flows easily, from a source we know not, into whatever we touch.

Some say Tiger Woods swings a golf club out of his center. He consistently swings out of some place of wholeness, from a source he welcomes but cannot control upon demand. The task, for us, is to discover that center within and to order ourselves, align ourselves to it; to create a spiritual practice by which we align ourselves to the best we’ve got in us.

Certain things have to be aligned in me before I can experience the rapture of being centered. I have to be in a place I feel one with life, comfortable with who I am and what I have to contribute to the whole. I have to feel grounded in my feelings, in touch with my needs and how to meet these needs, not empty or compulsive. I have to experience enoughness.

Like the rifle I was taught to aim as a child at summer camp, when I line up these qualities, ground myself in a readiness to receive the new energy pouring through me, and slowly squeeze the trigger, I usually find my center and the grace to handle whatever is before me.

Like thread through the eye of a needle, energy from an archetypal source threads its way through our soul at our center, our core, our soul’s eye. This thread, this soul energy, weaves through us, pulls us in and pushes us out into life, from our center. When we are centered in a conscious manner, we are in touch with our moving both in the eternal and in the temporal. 

We allow something larger and deeper than our known capacity to stir us. Others feel it. In the words of W. B. Yeats, from his Celtic Twilight:  “We can make our (center) so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own image, and so live for a moment with a clearer – perhaps even with a fiercer – life because of our quiet.”

“The thing Jesus was best at,” my friend Jerry once said, “was making people feel better about themselves, re-introducing them to some lost, forgotten value in themselves – a value that had been put down, attacked, denied, ignored, or discriminated against. He saved people by this, freeing them up to live their lives more fully.”

Jesus “re-introduced” people to their center, reminded them of those things about themselves that had been robbed from them by the people and demands of their life.  Jesus freed them up to be the persons they were born to be, before they had gotten lost in trying to please others, gain status, compete for things that never satisfy. He got them in touch, once again, with what they needed in order to be whole, “saved” by life, within the context of their present circumstance. 

Plato said that we once knew all we needed to know, but that going through the birth canal made us forget everything. We spend the rest of our life, said Plato, re-membering, gathering back into our consciousness, what we knew before and lost by the process of living. This, too, speaks to me of center, that resonance within with that larger spiritual source that stretches back to generations before me and beyond — to that intersection with the sacred, of which I am part.

Jesus “freed (people) up to live their lives more fully,” not in the so-called next world, but in the world in which they found themselves; to live their lives more fully with their families, in their professional choices, in their personal circumstances. He showed them what it was to be loved. He made them feel they counted in his eyes and they began to count in their own.

This was the eucharist he offered each person with whom he came in contact – He showed them how to give themselves over to something larger than themselves and that, by doing this, they got back themselves, their true, whole selves. The bread he gave them was the spiritual alchemy by which they allowed themselves to be changed into the persons they most longed to be but hadn’t known it. Jesus intended this eucharist to be shared from one generation to the next.   

It was the humanness of the people afterwards in trying to talk about Jesus that made Jesus into a model of perfection rather than a model of wholeness, as Jesus would have preferred. Jesus saw people “like sheep without a shepherd” – like people who have lost their center — and he set about to shepherd them in ways he saw God shepherding them. He reminded them of the beauty of nature, of the love that breaks down walls between people, of the truth only life can reveal.  

Beauty, truth, a loving intimate relationship – these save us. Beauty heals. Love heals. The truth that we are more children of the universe, of nature, of life, than children of the tribe from which we come heals. These fortify us from those around us who would rob us of our center, who would demand we become who they need us to be, who tell us what we need to be happy instead of allowing us to discover this for ourselves. 
 
As Plato suggests, we have to pull back into ourselves what we already know but have forgotten, lost, because of life’s demands, or because of the careless, abusive way some of us have been treated at the hands of those who profess to love us. That truth lies at our center. Becoming who we are meant to be in life, discovering what the ancients called our daimon, our purpose, our meaning, is our soul work.

It is not easy work. We circle around and around the truth of something and it still sometimes alludes us. We think we have a handle on who we really are and what we really want and then lose the thread entirely. We hear that little voice within that tells us exactly what we need to do and we just don’t trust it. We think the best that is in us lies out there, “beyond our strength, beyond our reach,” when all the while it is “very near.” (Deuteronomy 30: 11)

This possibility is not, for me, about some paradisal golden age in the past, as it was for Archaic man. It is not about an eschatological golden age in the future, as it might be for some of my more fundamentalist friends. It is, for me, about the daily living out of what is best about me in the present moment of my life. This is the only center from which I can act and choose my life. This is the only center from which I can release and develop the person longing to be free in me. This is the sacred of me.

I am reminded of Mary Oliver’s often-quoted poem, Wild Geese. “You do not have to be good,” she begins. “You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You have only to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” You have only to remember who you really are, what you really love, and who it is that loves you. You have only to remember that the beauty in nature heals and that the truth you need is already within you.

Whether we are robbed of our center by others who abuse, neglect, or ignore our need to be an authentic self, or whether we give away our center to someone else in order to be loved and accepted — we have to reclaim, re-member, re-assemble that core spiritual reservoir in ourselves in order to fully experience life.

It is the hard work of leaving behind our earlier messages and scripts and discovering new ways to connect with the divine in us, Carolyn Myss says in her book Sacred Contracts, that frees us to live more fully in the now. Connecting with the beauty and the love and the truth hidden within our ordinary circumstances is connecting with this divine energy. It is a letting go so that we can re-member who we really are at our core, our center.

It’s the play of light and dark in a painting that keeps it from being flat and lifeless. The light holds the energy, the creative fire.

Early civilization – Archaic man – thought nature possessed magical powers, energy animated by mythical gods. The gods held the light; man, by himself, was dark. Without capturing this light, this god-energy, in his everyday activity, Archaic man thought life held no meaning. Only ritual using prescribed archetypal words and gestures thought to be first used by the gods in some primordial, mythical time, “in illo tempore,” released the light, gave meaning to man’s ordinary existence.

Mircea Eliade’s luminous work, Cosmos and History, documents this world in which time was marked, not by linear, historical time, but by what was considered sacred, and what, profane. Sacred time was cyclic; it circled back around. It was sacred to Archaic man because it reenacted a creative act of a god in exactly the same mythical moment the god originally performed the same act. How this happened, where this happened – this coming together of god-energy and human-energy in timeless ritual – happened, for him, at the Center of the Universe.

No matter where a temple was located, where a marriage was performed, where a child was born – when this was accompanied with ritual that reenacted its sacred archetype — this was the Center, the intersection of divine and human energy. The Center shifted, moved. Without this ritual, all human acts were considered meaningless and this god-energy remained inaccessible, transcendent, aloof. Man, in such a state, was condemned to the dark and meaningless.

The notion of Center is provocative for me. Archaic man, unconscious, without a science, mired in magic and myth, possessed a profound connection with the sacred. This started the human race on its journey; it awoke in man a need to look beyond himself. It spilled over into Greek thought and science and set the stage for the Christian mythos and the Middle Ages.

With the Western world’s general acceptance of the doctrine of the Incarnation, this notion of sacred energy and light took on new meaning. Divine energy — so sought after by Archaic man in order to have a meaningful life — came to reside in man himself, in the person of the Christ. Sacred energy was now available without and within, both transcendent and imminent. Man no longer had to look to a mythical god for the light. The Christ released the light within everyman.

This belief was shattered when Descartes declared the split between mind and body, between science and nature, in the seventeenth century. Western man – unlike Eastern culture — put up a wall around the Center, to borrow archaic imagery. What was once an intersection, the sacred meeting of divine energy and human energy, was now walled off — the divine, or spirit, on one side, human, or matter, on the other.

This split between spirit and matter allowed man to become conscious – to free himself from his enmeshment with nature. This break was necessary for the evolution of consciousness, but it wounded his sense of the sacred. Mind, spirit, was seen as superior and the things of the flesh, the things of the earth, inferior. Nature became something man sought to conquer, control. The sacred, once again, became something separate, outside the domain of ordinary existence.

On one side of the wall, Western man places the transcendent, the archetypal seeds of truth, beauty, love, wholeness. On the other side of the wall, we place man and some vague memory of what it was like to walk with God in Paradise. True beauty and truth are behind the wall, on the side of transcendence. We can only catch a glimpse – God’s back, so to speak – passing in our midst at very high and very low moments, like birth and death and miraculous interventions.

Moments of great beauty and peace, occasions of profound insights of truth, deep and healing encounters of love – these are now our glimpse into something behind the wall and yet available to us in human experiences. These experiences secure us, grace us with a felt presence mysteriously beyond our own; they give meaning and purpose to our ordinary lives.

This Center Archaic man sought in his everyday experience, like a birth, a new harvest, a wedding, is our post-modern experience of a transcendent moment: We experience archetypal beauty and truth and love move through us like a visiting angel. For just a moment, we can see over the wall, through the veil, behind the door that separates us from divine energy and feel that energy passing through us, like the forward movement of life passing through our individual self.

This vision, this visitation of divine energy in us, sustains us and gives us courage to move through whatever experience we are dealing with, be it a high moment or a low moment. It creates in us a vision of our own: If I can call on this sacred energy I know is behind the wall, I can bring that to this situation as a healing presence, a sacred remembrance.

This can empower me not to hold on to the darkness of the situation, the awfulness of it, but to open it up to the light in it, to the sacredness in it. This sacred light is incarnated within this dark moment, and within me, as well as a transcendent power beyond me. This conscious vision, this conscious, intentional calling on this light within our darkness brings us to Center, the intersection of the sacred.

The difference between Archaic man and post modern man is a difference of consciousness. We are conscious, able to call this divine energy into the moment and know that it comes from a source, a resource, we can access with our conscious intention. No longer dependent on the whims of some mischievous mythical god, we can access that power in us.

Is it not time, now, to take down that wall? We are products of Cartesian thinking, yes, but we are conscious, able to look beyond that influence, to see the divine in things, in ourselves, should we choose to. We do have the power, within ourselves, within our choosing, to experience the divine as participatory, with us, in bringing life to full consciousness. The divine is as close as our DNA, just as the Christ proclaimed. We have only to claim it, to profess it, to live it.

The Center that holds the secret is part of us as well. The Center that contains all possibilities and all manifestations of the holy, or wholeness, is part of us.  Within and without, one mystery. The closer we move towards this Center, the closer we move towards our true whole nature.

Now, how did it all begin?

When we tell a story, we usually tell it backwards, with full knowledge of how it turned out. The apostles did this, after Jesus had died and he kept showing up. Archaic civilizations did this, trying to explain the beginnings so they could explain the meanings of things later.

But, let’s begin with Leah. I only knew Leah after the accident. There was a fire and she lost her only child. She struggled with depression for a long time. Someone handed me this note she had written them one evening in a lesser state of melancholy:

                    I am alone tonight, but somehow I feel positive about the future. As children,
                    we all heard about the rainbow and the pot of gold. Nobody told us that the
                    tricky part was that we had to paint our own rainbow from the colors we had
                    been given. I have had to learn that, in our search, we also have a choice –
                    we can stay under a cloud, or we can get busy and find our rainbow. I have
                    decided that I have stayed under a cloud long enough and now I must  
                    begin creating my own rainbow.              
                                                     Please know I love you,
                                                                      Leah   
                                                         
This is a creation story of sorts. Leah allowed the ferment in her soul to swirl and incubate in darkness until the light of color could break through and rouse her. 

She sat with the black, the dark of depression and loss, until the red of her passion for life could bleed through. She discovered the red in the black and worked with that until the colors of her life turned vibrant again. The slow emergence of healing stirred within her and showed her how to live with tragedy and loss.

Leah created a life, so to speak, from the broken pieces of her struggle, from the rainbow colors she had. Complaining, comparing, bargaining would not help. After sitting in darkness long enough, she discovered in it the light, what she needed to get on with her work.

She understood, after much suffering, that the rainbow is enough. Living with our daily struggle and creating a life within it — finding purpose, meaning within it — is enough. We don’t need the gold at the end. Living is the prize.

Discovering eyes to see beyond the obvious color dealt us to the hidden, emerging color within it allows for healing and transformation. We deal with the circumstance of the moment, we mix our own colors, until something emerges from it that allows us to connect with something larger than our struggle, larger than ourselves. 

Leah thought the power outside of her – the fire that could destroy – was greater than the power inside of her – her resilience, her capacity to find reasons for hope in the broken pieces of her life. Sitting in the darkness, she discovered within her all she needed to create purpose and meaning in the life now before her.

The pot of gold turns out to be not some elusive elixir of the god of happiness, but our own capacity to create, from the circumstances of the present moment, the seeds for a satisfied life.
If we look for this gold outside ourselves – in success, in safety, in someone else — we cannot draw on the power of our own colors, blinded as we are by the glare of our discontent.

There is no one way to create a rainbow, to have a full life. We can move at the speed of our own creative spirit. We can work with our colors in as many patterns and formations as our soul dictates. There are as many colors in our color spectrum as there are feelings in our heart.

Creating a life is creating this capacity to see the red in the black, even when no one else can. It is learning how to call out the best in us even in the worst of times. We know the sorrow we feel now contains the joy we know is in us.

Creating a life is discovering the green of our life force in the blues of our not-having-it-all. We know having does not nurture our being. We know that, if we work them and wait, new color will emerge out of our present ones.

Life, whatever else it can be, is struggle. Our rainbow colors teach us that, out of the struggle we experience now, a deep wisdom and resilience and paradigm emerges that will help us embrace the black moments when they come around for us one more time.

Leah found the power within her depression to see to the other side. She created a life, not out of what she thought her life would be, but out of what it was. 

In this sense, beginnings are everywhere, like openings into the forest that take us on our own individual journey. The colors of our life become revelatory, sacred images of the God-energy within us, calling us forth.

God spoke to Moses from the burning bush: “I will be there as I am.”

This God-energy flows and intersects with us unceasingly, with or without our awareness. We circle around and around this sacred source, draw on it as resource, with or without awareness. When we are in touch with this reality, we are connected at our center, our core, and can access this sacred energy in ourselves.

The notion of Center is archetypal, inborn, present in mankind from the beginning. Primitive, unconscious societies considered this intersection between divine and human energies the Center of the Universe, no matter where it was encountered.
 
When we talk about this internal intersection with the sacred, we speak of our personal center. We say we are centered when we reflect and act from our spiritual core, our essence.

This spiritual core can be violated, assaulted at the hands of others. We can lose touch with our center. Through generous helpings of beauty, truth, and love, this inner chord with the sacred can be restored. This is not easy. It is simple, but it is not easy.