Sunday, December 7, 2008

First blog on a Sunday of meaning

This is my first post on this new blog, a joy and fulfillment of great measure for me. And hopefully, for thousands of others who may migrate into my prayer help site or this blog in times of need or with hearts of gratitude. And certainly, these are times of unparalleled need as all of us on this beautiful planet see our economic systems run into crippling rocks in hurricane seas of greed and ineptitude. While we watch and wait, there is a feeling in 2008 that we are in the dust bowl of the 1930's depression—with searing black and white photos of worn mothers sitting in bleak, shadowed surrender, nursing a tiny flame of hope. Many of us have lost our jobs, our homes, our retirement savings, our golden years pensions. I receive prayers every day for help to God, the angels and angelic beings from people facing the worrisome wounds of job loss or struggling to lay food on the table. They have been hit by dire circumstances, hardship, depression, the crying of their children, the fear of mail and voices on phones asking for money. Compassion should overwhelm us in these times. What is compassion? A passion for com-pleteness. Each of us completes the other, as if we are all part of universal spiritual hologram (break a hologram into a million pieces and each piece will still generate the entire holographic image). When others suffer, we suffer in equal measure. Sometimes we may deny this or not be wakefully conscious of it, but at an unconscious level we suffer whenever another suffers. Our compassion sparks a fire of passion that helps us help others. And we feel more complete. More soulful—the ultimate completeness. 

Today is Sunday, the 7th of December. I spent much time this morning in contemplative prayer—a praying state that has no thought, but is just in pure spirit, along the lines of Plotinus or Meister Ekhart. This is also the day that Japan attacked the U.S. naval facilities at Pearl Harbor near Honolulu, Hawaii. It was a day of wounding, death, courage, sacrifice and a power of prayer that is rarely seen or felt. Prayers from wounded or dying service people (and those helping them) reached a super-amplification as all their human and spiritual forces coalesced into thousands of lasers of prayer. Like thousands of laser blue lights of prayer piercing into the smokey skies over Pearl. 

I spent many years at a monastic center in Hawaii. On the monastery property there was a cave dug into the red clayish, earth of a pali (Hawaiian for cliff) going down to a large natural pool on a river. The cave was intimately small. You had to bend to get in, could not stand up, and it went only six feet into the cliffside. It smelled of clay, ferns and Hawaiian humidity. On the left side of the cave as you went in, there was carved into the hard surface an inscription: December 7, 1941. It has been there since that fateful day, very neatly scribed and very remindful of the dual nature of this cave. It was a bomb shelter. For us, it was a communion with God shelter. I spent many days in that cave, meditating and perfecting the power of prayer and a psychic awareness of angels. Eventually, using a small shovel and buckets I deepened and enlarged the cave, and put in a shelf for holding scriptures, incense and an oil lamp. I spent uncounted hours at night there. It wasn't a preternaturally quiet cave (as some caves are), but it had a special connection to the angel and trans-angel realms. It was a place of praying and meditating aloneness that was surrounded in the psychic heaven by tiers and tiers of angelic beings.