All Inner Christmas messages are gifts for you. Make them your own through inspired reflection. Share them with those you hold dear and let them be the beginning of a creative and heart-freeing conversation. Dance with them. Dive deep with them. Leap into the heights with them as during the Twelve Holy Nights we live beyond time and space and find the spiritual conditions for profound creative play.

Friday, January 1, 2010

January 2, The Ninth Holy Night - The Inner Intention to Be Awed

The Ninth Inner Intention - to be awed

Wonder is the virgin soul. Awe is the pregnant soul.
Wonder is nothing to think about. Awe is something to think about.
Something has been perceived or conceived within.

To be awed is to perceive or conceive in wonder and in dread.

If you are like me you are struggling right now with our modern words:
dreadful
wonderful
awful and awesome.

These words are thoughtless and their meaning distorted. Through their energized exclaiming they debase sacred states.  Wonderful and awesome exclaim blinding light.  Awful and dreadful exclaim chilling darkness. They have become Hollywood words, cheap novel words. They are reactive and superficial, not responsive nor deep.

During the Holy Nights, we return to sacred meanings/feelings. Sacred or spiritual love asks us to be awed in wonder and dread.

Awe is an awareness that something has come to dwell in you that is not you. You must come to know/love this otherness. With wonder you are innocent in relationship to this otherness.  With dread you are wise to the otherness. With dread you consciously include the fear that the otherness will require you to grow, to evolve, to renounce, to forgive, to suffer and to know joy.

Too often we cover otherness with a shroud of egotism.  We cannot bear awed love, so we make it selfish love.  The otherness is seen as an extension of ourselves. We devour otherness with dismissals, denials and demands.

The intention or willingness to be awed means we will always sense the otherness and give it its own space no matter how deeply and profoundly it comes to dwell within us. The moment we possess or even attempt to possess, we cannot be awed.

Imagine being awed by the perceptions that we experience in relationship to a rock, a rose, a cat, a friend, a child of our own, an enemy, a work of art, nature. Imagine doing this with a concept: addition, truth, money, is, suffering, love, breath.

I so wish I had been awakened (initiated?) to the intention to be awed. Somehow, perhaps through some karmic grace, I was able to remain in a state of awe for my two children, for my clients, works of art and certainly for concepts. However, I lacked the ability for extended awe (I usually manage momentary or intermittent awe) for so much and so many.  Too often I have fallen into a wonderful-awful-dreadful determinism and selfishly dismissed otherness, denied otherness and demanded absorption into my way.  How much more I could have loved if I had perceived or conceived awe as my soul’s intention.

The Holy Nights are nights of wonder and dread.  Our soul’s will fills with awe.

The thoughts on the Inner Intentions to Love, do not inspire me to offer questions or exercises.  Simply contemplate what has awakened in your soul as you read this message. I imagine working with the notions of awe as innocent wonder and awe as wise dread will be quite stimulating.  And I am sure you will never say or hear wonderful, awesome, awful and dreadful in the same way again.

I hold you and your Inner Christmas in awe.