Meditation: An ancient Ceremony

Meditation: An Ancient Ceremony

The work that we do together in the circle

is an ancient ceremony.
It is an act of remembrance.

We do not come to the circle
in order to take in something new.
We do not come to seek an answer.
We do not come to gain insights about ourselves or anyone else. We come instead to invoke the Presence
of the Great Protector
and to take Its Love
into the heart and to know It as the one and only Friend.

There is a simplicity to our work.
We allow everything to come
and we allow everything to return.
We make no enemies with the journey nor with the journeyman.

We come to our feelings directly so that we may recollect
and remember
that these feelings

when stripped of their coerced meanings
are communications from the deep and constant Friend Who seeks to burn the darkness
and return us to the radiance within.

Many of us hold within our hearts
a memory, a faint image
of a place, it seems, that we came from.
It is not a memory in the usual sense of the word but rather the call of something that waits.

Some have felt this calling all of their lives.

For others it has been obscured and hidden within a tangle
of worldly concerns.

e call has appeared in many di erent ways: as a wistfulness
as a hint
as an emptiness

as a creative urge
as a longing to merge with the unknown as a push away from this world of paradox.

In the circle
with the eyes closed,
joined
in the Holy Space of the heart, we nd the safety to rejoice and to renew our relationship to the call.

We renew it
through our anger
our joy
our grief
and through the sorrow of our loneliness here on this earth.
We return to the call and we say yes.

All of the ways we have de ned ourselves
drop o .
All the pushing, the prodding and the lack of gentleness fall faintly to the ground
and in their place
emerges
a mysterious and exotic ower
born on this earth
but destined for something beyond.

In the circle,
in the sacred and ancient circle, in the moon-like hollow
of the non-defended heart,
we allow our humanness
and the Divine spark to meet in such a way
that our day-to-day a airs
our feeling life
our concerns
become a form of art.

In this circle,
in this ancient and mysterious ceremony that we perform, the Ancient Voice
the Love God
the One Who Is,
is permitted to consciously enter
into Its two-armed form.

In the circle those who have forgotten remember
to return to the place
where they have always remained.

Nothing we feel is foreign. No one is out of place.
I am not afraid.
You are not afraid.

Wesit
face to face.
And yet cloistered
in the most sacred and private space we wait.
We pray and wait.

We ,pray and wait and speak
in the ancient language of the gods until
nothing remains of those
weary, earthbound ways
of looking at ourselves
except some faint shadow
which a ects us not.

e heart is our living strength our refuge
our purpose
our wisdom

and the totality of our Being Here
ere
and Everywhere.

We do not come to the circle
to have mystical or complex experiences. We do not come to push away our needs. We do not even come to rede ne
our internal processes.

We come instead
to so give up the world
that we outshine all of its forms
and formulations
all of its ways
all of its ephemeral preoccupations.
We come to practice living
in the power matrix
in the gateway
in the passage
between the angelic realm of endless mystery and this harder place
we call the earth.

Here in the circle
we let go of our sense
that sinfulness
and wrongness
must dominate.
We let go of this.
We sacri ce our weariness and in so doing we nd rest.

We hear from within:
I come to you
my brothers and sisters
as the Evolutionary Impulse.
I do not come to coddle your concerns or to o er vain and sentimental words. I come to ful ll that

for which the heart yearns.
And I come to burn away the limitations which hold that fullness back.

We come to the circle to say yes.
We come to the circle
to be blessed

by the non-moral absolute and all-powerful Radiance.

We give all our thanks
to the maker of the dance
to the dance itself
to the creative act
to the love bliss
to the remembrance
to the fact that all is mysterious
and we don’t know what anything is.

All is well
All will be well
All that exists is in nite and holy
and blessed.