Arcs: 21 April 2013

After my typical few minutes of calm and "Observation," as I described last week, and a few more minutes of - what to call it - prayer, specific meditation on the presence of God, invocation, the mindspace produced the image of a huge candle. I attended a concert at St. Andrew's Cathedral in downtown yesterday, and they, like most liturgical churches, had those caps on top of their candles, which seem to exaggerate the candles' (already large) size. The candle in mind today was like those candles, but about ten times their size. I'm not sure how I knew this, because in the mindspace, there's no relativity of perspective, but it was huge, and the flame was equally huge - probably larger than the candle itself. After a few minutes playing with the image of the candle, a tiny flame blower-type flame appeared and came closer to the main, gigantic flame. A phrase started looping as some kind of echo:

If a flame is lit within another, will it shine ever brighter?

The new image was of the little flame drifting inside the big flame. It didn't have a wick, but it was very sure, very intense, very small. Soon there was a ring of little flames like it, slowly turning in a circle around the circumference of the main flame. The imagery's pretty obvious - Spirit is the large flame, and we, our energies each separate from the Spirit's, are still within and subsumed and - well this is the question - strengthened by the flame we have in common. And though we each be separate, we're all made of the same substance, the same organic reaction. By dwelling in Spirit, we are made more aware of the flame in us; by joining in a circle of fellowship, not only are we in the presence of a greater light, but also contribute to a greater illumination of the light itself. The more of us are present in the light, the lighter our surroundings - and the cycle is perpetuated.

It was about here that our friend Jonathon arrived. It was his first time visiting, and he'd gotten lost. I rose to greet him, and sat back down with fresh concentration. Jonathon's making plans to visit me in Seattle this summer, and so I'm unsurprised that the next image to come to mind was that of a plane's trajectory over the North American continent.

At first, there was just one; then, there were many. They increased in distance and speed and momentum, almost, from the slow, realistic speed of an actual plane to an electrical zapping across continents almost instantly. And unlike in these pictures, they got thinner and thinner, more hairlike - they were no longer just planes, but energy, the Light, connecting people to one another internationally.

There was a man at meeting today, named Silas, who is the pastor of a church in the programmed tradition in Kenya. With Jonathon and his Mexican heritage plus the Seattle travel motif, his place next to Silas created an interesting energy for this image to feed on. The arcs had been a clear, colorless energy before, but they became increasingly golden, until they resembled the color of the flames from the beginning. It's really the same concept: the connection between all people, unity in an energy that's in all people and places.

Having made this connection, and sensing - imagining - the connection between everyone in the meeting room as similar hair-thin projection, the arcs morphed into the rim of the edge of the first, big flame. It was solid - perhaps metal. But it was glowing and hot, which made anything that got placed on the rim move very quickly, as though it were oiled, or as if it were a puck on the surface of a pingpong table. I was spinning by my hands like a gymnast on the round bar that was the rim of the flame - it was maybe 8cm in diameter - and went all the way up it, then down the other side. This image had been fully absorbed when it was interrupted by vocal ministry.

It was about the recent floods in Grand Rapids, and how the presence of water everywhere points out how crooked everything else is. How the water always finds an equilibrium, that it's always straight, always even, when it just calms down. I've never thought of water in this symbolic light - that of equality. And as I contemplated the image, I realized that no one water molecule is actually exactly on the same plane as another, because what's up and down, high and low, is subjective - water covers our whole planet. Even if we understand people in relation to one another and no one is exactly the same, the way water flows into equilibrium is a great illustration of the way we ought to relate to one another. Like our planet's surface is a mass of mostly water, the human race is a mass of mostly water - yet energy still holds it together. Even submersed in the water, as we are, there is the energy of the flame in every molecule: electrons zooming in and out of orbits, moving atoms past one another, particles moving at nearly unmeasurable speeds, even while in the deepest of calm.