Notes For A Talk I Didn't Give

Last night, June 1. I was supposed to be in Minnesotagiving a talk and introducing my new book, CIRCLE OF MYSTERIES. But my husband’s health emergency kept me home. Dear friends from Minneapolis, Steve and Kathy, delivered the talk for me. Imagine a large room in an old brick building on the campus of the Collegeof St. Catherinein St. Paul: 

Bless you for your presence here. I had every intention of looking into the eyes of each of you, and receiving from your hearts that openness and love that makes giving a talk such as this possible. Instead I am in Oregon with my dear husband, John, and we ask your prayers for his healing from lymphoma of the central nervous system which has suddenly returned.  

And my dear friends, Kathy and Steve Callaghan, are with you there in Minnesota, reading words I wrote while thinking of all of you and sending you every grace that is in my heart. My promise was to explore with you the Mysteries of Light. This promise was occasioned by Theresa King’s publication of the third edition of my book CIRCLE OF MYSTERIES with a

new section on “The Mysteries of Light,” added to the Catholic rosary meditation by Pope John Paul II in 2002.  

And how appropriate This Mystery of Light is included in a conference about Yoga in the World – because these mysteries are placed squarely there – in the world, in the public life of Jesus – as if to say HERE is where the mystery of Light is found, right here, in our daily lives, in each moment, each encounter, each practice we do to open ourselves, expanding consciousness – becoming more aware of who we are and how we each incarnate and manifest Divine Light. 

We are what Divine Light becomes as it bursts through into matter and is manifest. Not just through us, but the entire universe—each blade of grass, the new green of springtime trees, the jewel of each Minnesota lake. 

Gerard Manley Hopkins said it so well: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God – it will flame out like shining from shook foil…it will gather to a greatness like the ooze of oil, crushed.” 

We are individual expressions of universal reality. Everything we do, think, feel, and realize is because of that participation…a circle of being, a circle of mysteries.

In the public Life of Jesus, these mysteries of light are summed up in 

His baptism

The wedding at Cana

His public ministry of preaching, healing and conversion

His transfiguration before his disciples

The Last Supper Eucharist – a communion with all being, every person, God and human. 

From meditation on these mysteries comes a powerful realization—it’s something we’ve been told in Christian scriptures, but can finally begin to live out in daily life. It is the awareness that not only Jesus, not only the holy ones, not only the saints and avatars and gurus, but we, ourselves, are the Light of the World. 

Pope John Paul asked us to consider Divine Light at a moment of darkness in the history of our world. It was one year past 9-11, and we were deep into what we call the War on Terror. He must have been asking us to consider the paradox of Light in this material world.

“Light shines in darkness, and the darkness grasps it not” Darkness does not comprehend Light – cannot encircle it – cannot contain it – cannot imprison it – cannot dim it. 

WE are the Light of the World – do not put that light under a bushel basket, Jesus said, but let it shine to all who are in the house…the world is our house in this life.  

As I experienced these mysteries and wrote my experience, as I heard them in my heart over a period of three years, the world seemed quite dark. My own life also seemed dark. It was at that time that both my husband and my sister discovered they each had aggressive cancers—and I was living in the light of their faith and courage to heal, even while I was meditating upon and writing these mysteries. 

Just two weeks before I was to give this talk my husband John’s cancer returned. Again I heard the summons to be the Light. A dear friend from St. Paul wrote to me, connecting this personal summons to CIRCLE OF MYSTERIES. “With this distressing news I see that "circle of mysteries" does not just refer to the rosary, is not just the title of a book.  It's also this life, this earthly round.” And the words of a song by Delores Keane keep winding through my mind, the melody a wonderment, the paradox that is the essence of every “earthly round” amazing me with every inhalation and exhalation of breath:  “Even on the darkest ocean (of illness and of violence and of war and of terror: ) You will be the Light.” 

What happens in this prayer of the beads? I ask. And it comes to me that Light is connected to consciousness, and the quality of the Light is in direct correspondence to the level of consciousness I experience at a given moment.

Meditation on the mysteries takes the form of questions: Of what are we aware? What do we see? 

The rosary is a prayer rising from consciousness of the most basic mysteries of existence. It makes use of chant to quiet the mind, and beads to ground the spirit. When I was young, a child, I didn’t know the purpose of the chants or the beads. I thought that a string of repetitious prayers was everything there was to know about the rosary – and I felt bored by it. In adulthood I thought I would be the least capable of all people to write a book on the rosary – I had no idea what the result would be. I undertook the task as an act of love. I’m still amazed! 

In preparing to share with you tonight, I reflected on my experience of writing Circle of Mysteries, and especially the new Mysteries of Light, to try to demystify myself enough to explain how this prayer was revealed to me in the very writing itself. As I wrote I was aware of being in a state of meditation or focus – and that the locus of each voice had a distinctly different origin. 

I heard three voices—Woman, Mother Wisdom, and Mary—each of which seemed to speak out of the core of each Mystery. Each voice spoke of Joy, Sorrow, Enlightenment, and Glory. And I wondered: What were these voices, really? Where did they come from? 

I realized that each voice represented a center of consciousness – or an opening exactly corresponding to a state of awareness or a frequency of light. I began to suspect that each voice corresponds to one of the chakras – or a set of chakras. Another way of saying this is that each voice represents a form that reality takes, and this form can be accepted and understood according to which center of consciousness is most open in what I call “myself.” 

The Woman’s voice seems to be centered in the Root through the Solar Plexus chakras.  I hear her voice in what Sri Aurobindo calls “the Vital.” She wants to “know”.  She is often troubled and afraid. She sometimes wishes she had control of life, and she yearns to understand how to make herself and the world better in some way—to bring peace and love and justice and compassion.  

Mary’s voice seems centered in the Heart/Throat. Her voice also seems to represent what Sri Aurobindo calls the Super-conscient, or in Christian terms: Christ-consciousness. Hers is the incarnate being, humanity fully expressing the divine from which it originated. She speaks in stories, as she is fully grounded in earth and in our history. 

Mother Wisdom’s voice seems centered in the Third eye and Crown chakras. Hers is an unselfconscious voice of compassion and love. She seems to speak TO the soul, like a divine breath. Like Ruah from the Hebrew Scriptures.  

About the same time as I was thinking this through, I read a book titled, THE FIELD, by Lynn Taggart—a layman’s approach to the quantum physics of light and what is called the zero-point field.  I’ve not much mind for science—but my intuition picked up bits and pieces—threads of meaning—and spun them into possibilities related to actual everyday life. 

Both science and spirituality seem to conclude that we are light beings, afloat in an infinite field/sea of light. From my own perspective, the entire cosmos is afloat in and suffused with Divine Light, with each entity distinguished by a mere semi-permeable membrane. The openness of the centers of consciousness admit Divine Light in a particular frequency bringing with it a specific awareness of divinity in this Time/Space continuum. The light can awaken; it can heal; it can transform. 

At about the same time I traveled to Minnesota to visit my sister who was going through her second round of chemotherapy for metastatic breast cancer. I’d become convinced that illness proceeded from a situation that blocked the flow of light, and I thought I knew the situation in my sister’s life when this had happened. I’m nine years older than she is, and the incident took place when she was just a baby, so she couldn’t remember it, but it could still be affecting her. If together we could become conscious – open to that moment that still existed in both of our beings (there is no time or space in light’s zero-point field) – we could clear the blockage and the flowing light would assist in healing her.

With the help of a music therapist Liz and I visited that moment in her life when, as a baby, she was in so much pain. We opened our hearts. We re-lived the moment (for every moment is always present), and I believe our focus helped transform the darkness of that pain into the light of healing. With the combination of this and other interventions Liz’s cancer went into remission. 

Today I ask all of you to assist me in my present meditation, in this mystery of my husband, John’s, pain—his illness – lend us your consciousness that together we might open to a greater reality than what can be simply seen and touched and felt. I hope you will take a deep breath with us and open to the mystery of Divine Light, that together we might create a new reality of healing and wholeness.  

A few weeks before John’s diagnosis, I walked around the circle drive in front of my house – bright sunlight – spring leaves gleaming in the light – I felt dark that day, though. I feared something—I didn’t know what it was, but it had brought me to tears.

So walking in the sunlight I began to visualize light traveling down through me from the crown along the spine, blocked at the root. By what?  

I know if I am honest:  It was the fear that nothing here is stable, that it will disintegrate, disappear, open up beneath my feet – that nothing can be relied upon. Is it true? Of course it’s true of matter. But the Light—the Light is constant. It shines in darkness. I pleaded with my own body—not just the flesh, but the consciousness in the physical—the consciousness of the cells, each of which contains a particle of light ---- Please, please open.  

I prayed – I haven’t trusted earth. I haven’t trusted matter. I haven’t trusted this body. What would it mean to open to this consciousness? Why do I fear it? I wondered these things, as the voice of the woman in Circle of Mysteries wonders. 

And it opened. I gasped. The whole world was present in that openness – the world in all its striving and its illness and war and its hope and its terror and despair. The whole world, not separate from me; opening with me so that I didn’t know which opening was me and which was the opening in the core of the world, as together we opened to the light. 

I pray the openness lasts. I pray the same for each of you. Let us pray together for the world.