THE COURAGE TO EMBODY HOPE

A Message for July 4^th

We are now in the sign of Cancer, and it is very fitting in this energy, this gateway into form, for us to be working with the Goddess, and specifically as this expresses in the form of the Black Goddess, the Black Virgin.

We are moving into the Fourth of July, the celebration of the birth of America, and for many we may seem to be a long way from what we would perceive to have been the vision or ideal that America was embodying, which was the hope and the promise of equality. I have spoken before of how America was unique in that it did not come out of the traditional ways that most nations emerged, which is out of conquest, out of war, or out of the dividing up as a result of political action. America was born out of a desire for an ideal.

It was fully anticipated that Washington, one of the founding members of America, would step into the role of a king or a dictator, and it stunned the world when after the victory, Colonial George Washington turned in his sword to retire to his farm. This was unheard of, because any general coming out of a military conquest would always demand some sort of reward, which usually meant power and financial reward. So George Washington did that which was unheard of.

In addition to that there were all these individuals with their different ideas about what the founding should look like and what this country should be based upon, and out of that coming together the Constitution was created.  And so you had these people with all of their diversity, their opinions, and their individuality, who reached a consensus that was bigger than what their individual piece was, and which had a greater sense of inclusiveness.

If our country was built upon freedom then perhaps we need to consider what true freedom is. Many of us may perceive, or have been taught, that freedom is the means to pursue whatever it is that you want to pursue, and if you have the bigger gun to do it, so be it. Or that freedom includes whatever an individual may desire: “I want it because I want it and I have the freedom to go after whatever I want.”  Does this sound familiar?

However, the founding of this country was based upon mystical and spiritual principles, upon the Mystery Teachings. The understanding of freedom was that it came from a source within us, and that true freedom is contact with the inner Self. And for those of us who have been reading “A New Earth” by Eckhart Tolle, isn’t that what Tolle would say to us? But Tolle isn’t the only one. It has always been written in the Mystery traditions that true freedom is when you are aligned with your authentic Self, your true Self, and everything else that may parade around and appear as freedom is a glamour and an illusion; it is a maya that will entrap you, that will distract you, that will divert you. And if you continue to stay enmeshed with it as a community or as a country, it will destroy you, because it is based upon falseness. It is based upon a false sense of “I”.

As I was reflecting upon this I was also seeing that everywhere you turn, we as individuals, and certainly on a national level, and many would also say at a world level, appear to be bereft of hope.

Last weekend I attended a celebration of “Juneteenth” which is a coming together of community in honor of the freeing of the last of the slaves that occurred in Texas. This was, by the way, several months after the proclamation to grant them freedom, but they were being held, literally, as free labor. This is one of the shadow aspects that we as Americans have never really dealt with. The American Indian is another one. We’ve given lip service to it, but we have never dealt with that underbelly. But then again as we point to that, what we're really saying is that we usually don't deal with our own underbelly, do we? Because that is what it is reflecting -- it is not out there but within ourselves.

And that is one reason that we are working with the Dark Goddess today. I called to Her, and She is calling to us, because part of what She offers us is to go into that unconscious realm, into that hidden realm, and to bring to it the light of awareness.

I have been going to “Juneteenth” for several years, and one of the experiences I had this year was that there was a palpable energy of optimism, and this was there despite the overtones of economic stress with rising food and fuel costs. The overall and pervasive energy was one of optimism which was born from the possibility and hope for change.

And Hope is one of the powers of the Great Mothers.  There's a text that was recovered on Egyptian Gnosticism, and this text speaks about the great abyss, and that what is needed to cross the abyss are the five powers of the Mothers. These five powers are Hope, Peace, Faith, Love and Gnosis, and when these five powers are embodied, they give the ability to cross the abyss. And I think that there is an abyss that we are seeking to cross, individually within ourselves, as a country, and as a world; an abyss that is a change of consciousness that includes hope.

Hope can become a word that is just tossed about, but it can sustain the depth, the vibration and the frequency of the Cosmic power that it embodies. It isn't about hoping to get enough money to buy a new dress, or about hoping to meet the right person and get married. And while that kind of hope may have its place, what I’m speaking of here is the hope that identifies itself with that everlasting authentic Self; the hope that isn’t pinned upon the appearance of things. It is not even based upon happiness or unhappiness, or what I think is right, or what I think is wrong. It is not based upon appearances but it is rooted in an absolute trust of Cosmic Order.

It is our Lady of Czestochowa who called to be with us this day. I had the privilege of being in Poland and going to the shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa. This was back in 1999, and you could still feel in the soil the trauma, and yet there was this bubbling sense of hope because the liberation was in process. In Poland when the unions were on strike calling for solidarity, the people were not allowed to wear any kind of insignias, any kind of a special marking, so what they wore to indicate their solidarity was a pin of Our Lady of Czestochowa. She held the energies of hope and of unification.

And that is what the Goddess calls us to -- to be unified, and to connect to the common good of the authentic Self, because when you are in alignment with your true Self, then you are in alignment with the Cosmic Self, which means that you are unified. My authentic Self cannot have a different agenda from your authentic Self. My ego has a different agenda to yours, I guarantee you, but the nature of the true Self is inclusive and it is universal. It is comprehensive and complete. And that identity is what brings about freedom that is not at somebody else's expense. That is true freedom.  And we have some confusion about that because what we have associated with freedom is the idea that “mine is mine, and you’ve got to get yours, however that comes about.” And there is the perception of limited resources, the perception of duality, the manifestation of separation, and inevitably there has to be conflict in that, and disharmony and disunity.

I saw something on a sign at one of our local churches that said that Jesus would come and right all the wrongs. And some of us may wonder why the Great Mother doesn’t come in and just get all of her children to act right. Why doesn’t she just step in here, this powerful, this great Mother.  And we may think, “If You’re so powerful, where are You? All these people aren’t acting right! My brothers and sisters are playing in my sandbox!”  Oh come on now, I know you have all thought that way before. And let us go back to Hope and Faith and Peace, the powers of the Mothers, and that part of us that says, “Why don’t you come in and fix this?”  Which then brings us to, “If You are not coming in to fix it, it is because You don’t like us, or because You don't exist!”  Right?  Let us get honest here. Come on, guys, surely at some time in your spiritual life you've had that thought.  If not, I’ve had it two or three times for you!

What we know is that if you do everything for your children, what happens? They don't grow, they don't learn, and you disable and dis-empower them. But what you should do for them is that you open the doorways; you provide the means, so that they can have what they need to grow.

One of the things I read about the Black Goddess, the Black Virgin, is that She is both the heavenly Jerusalem and the bricks that make the heavenly Jerusalem. I loved that definition of Her because She is both transcendent and immanent, and She embodies the whole spectrum. And we are the prima materia, we are her matter; it is inherent in us. Even our personalities are tools. Our egos are vehicles that give us the means to change because they offer that space for Fire by Friction, which then burns into the Solar Fire, the Fire of Illumination.

I think we are in a cycle of Fire by Friction, and I mean that the world, what is reflected to us outside of us, is undergoing incredible friction. And this Fire by Friction is igniting -- in some cases literally igniting – so that it can become the Solar Fire, the higher Fire that illumines, the Fire that is comprehensive, the Fire of the Christ Consciousness. So this Fire by Friction as we experience it within our own personalities is also the same Fire that liberates us, and this is what the Mothers have created and hold the space for, and this Fire by Friction offers to us the doorway of liberation. The abyss is identification and alignment with the authentic Self which then means that we are in a place of unification, a place where we have taken that which seems irreconcilable and it becomes reconciled, and not because it looks the way we want it to, because then we’re back in our inauthentic self, but because it is what it is; it is the I AM.

The Black Goddess is called upon over and over again, and something that I've come across several times is that many would say that the Black Goddess is called upon because many people through the ages have felt that God turns a deaf ear to them at times, or that the Angels are about bigger business, but She is always there and She hears our cries. She hears the wailing.

Have you ever noticed that on sidewalks that are covered with concrete there will be a blade of grass that will manage to find the one crack, and it will grow through that place?  Life is that urge. But life includes death, because it is out of destruction and death that new life emerges. So does She hear our cries? Yes. And there is life and diversity in ways that we cannot even conceive, not just life as we perceive it, but in myriads and myriads of ways.

So I’m inviting us to call to the Dark Goddess to bring us healing, to bring us wisdom, and to give us the courage to embody hope. The courage to embody hope -- that may seem like an odd statement, but the truth is if we're embodying hope then we are aligning over and over again with the authentic Self. That's true hope, instead of living on the fringes of what we are more familiar with, which is the fragmentation of our personality, the comfort of our self-righteousness, the familiarity of our despair, and the justification of our complaining. We are familiar with our duality, but it takes courage to align with the power of hope, to stand with the Dark Goddess, and to turn again and again to the authentic Self, which means the embodiment of wisdom, and which is a source of healing. Healing is unification, because She is of the world of form as well as of the Cosmos. She is the embodiment and the reconciliation in form of that which we have been told is irreconcilable.

Seek the Goddess. She hears your concerns and your cries. She also sees your hopes and your joys. Seek Her wisdom and the energies of true freedom, which by its very essence is the embodiment of the Great Mothers, the embodiment of Love, the manifestation of Peace, the expression of Gnosis and the essence of Faith and Hope. And at this time, in this gateway of Cancer, the doorway into form, let this wisdom be made manifest and this healing be actualized.