THIS SANCTUARY IS THE PLACE WHERE THE NEW COUPLE INVOKE blessing and protection on the fragile world of ‘betweenness’ that has begun to develop and grow from that clear space where once they were strangers to each other. In some intuitive way, it is as though this sacred beginning already knows more than them. The beauty of a blessing always issues from a deeper place in time. Though the words are intoned on a particular day on a special occasion, the light of the blessing reaches towards them from eternal time where memory and future live within the one circle. The blessing of their journey already knows more about the journey than the new couple do. The Celtic Imagination had a profound sense of how a blessing could awaken and evoke the deepest potential of a situation. The Celts understood that all beginning risks the unknown; a blessing was intended to be a shelter of light around the pilgrim and the place. A blessing brightens the road; the heart is no longer completely vulnerable to the dark. The journey can lead anywhere; it can even bring new guests to the earth.
N
EGLECTED
B
EAUTY
:
T
HE
W
ONDER OF
C
REATING A
N
EW
L
IFE
WE MAY REFLECT ON HOW IMAGINATION AND CREATIVITY CALL beauty forth; how the reverence of the creative eye can discern beauty in the most unlikely guises. Yet so often we forget that one of the greatest miracles of beauty is the event of bringing a child into the world. Outside of your work and its creative force, the beautiful places you have seen, the compassion you have offered, the insights you have achieved, the sufferings you have managed to endure, those you have loved, the miracle each day of the world’s beauty ebbing towards your attention, even the beautiful Unease of God – none of these can compare with the unbelievable presence of your own flesh and blood smiling up at you in the face of a little baby.
W
OMAN
: W
OMB OF
B
EING
THERE IS NO OTHER WAY INTO THE WORLD EXCEPT THROUGH THE body of the woman. Woman is the portal to the universe. She is also the womb of Being. Each person in the world commenced life as a minuscule trace within the depths of the mother whose womb is the space where that trace expands and opens to assume human form. In terms of one’s later identity and destiny abroad in the world, this is the time of ultimate formation and influence. In human encounter, there is nothing nearer than this; no two humans can ever come closer than when one is forming inside the other’s depths. Naturally the relationship is hugely imbalanced: the one is a complete person, the other is minuscule and is just beginning a journey towards identity through absorbing life from the mother. Yet within the night of her body, each is helplessly open to the other. No man ever comes nearer to a woman. No woman ever comes nearer to a woman. This intricate nurturing and unfolding into identity takes place below the light in the physical subconscious of her body. The mother sees nothing. The whole journey is a hidden one. It is the longest human journey from the invisible to the visible. From every inner pathway, the labyrinth of her body brings a flow of life to form and free this inner pilgrim. Imagine the incredible events that are coming to form within the embryo: how each particle of growth is like the formation of a world from fragments.
T
HE
P
URE
C
RY
T
HAT
E
NCIRCLES THE
R
IPPLE OF
B
EGINNING
TO BE A PARENT IS TO BE INVITED INTO THE NATURAL DEPTHS OF divine creativity. Mothers and fathers inhabit the secret of God’s heart. They open a sacred door in the soul for a most vulnerable and intimate stranger to enter and inherit the earth. Though it comes to be through the gradual rhythms of nature in that warm space between two lovers, the creation of a child is an event that takes place on the cliff-edge of Nothingness. From the infinite and unknown Nowhere of the invisible world, someone is brought into Being. The stranger comes from eternity into time, from the pitch black night of Otherness into the dawn of a human countenance, from the penumbral depth and silence of the earth into the word-filled, wave-shaped music of consciousness. When two lovers lie down to consummate their hunger for each other, somewhere a pore opens in the infinite and their love surges beyond their names, hearts and minds to assume an independent human form. Regardless of who they are, where they go, how they live or love or suffer, from now on the form of this child will always be between them. In some instinctive surge, they have unknowingly entered that place outside memory and dream. In the deepest well of the night their pure cry, like a moon-glimpse, encircles a ghost ripple of beginning. Drawn within the pulse of time, the ripple secretly structures itself into the faint spiral of visibility, an embryo soul.
