Message on Enlightenment

From this month’s high service, the prayer to the mystery of light, a scripture from Matthew:

“Magi from the East arrive in Jerusalem saying, “Where is He who has been born King of the Jews. For we saw His star in the East and have come to worship Him.” 

Last month we found ourselves in Advent, a time of waiting, but expectant waiting. A time to believe that the promise is true, that it is already. A time to “be not afraid” but rather to accept the truth of the promise, that the Holy Spirit has placed the potential of the Christed human within each.

This month during Epiphany, during our service to the mystery of light, we remember special and great teachers “who gave the monumental gift of mind to others” – and it lists Socrates first, moving finally to all the “other teachers who imparted the glory and wisdom of Greece to the whole world till the world was changed by the light of another world.”

I’ve been remembering some of those early Greek teachers. Those crazy eccentrics who in their single-minded devotion to knowledge, to studying Existence for its own sake, experienced as if ecstasy the monumental gift of mind and then passionately set out to impart it to others.  I was startled to realized again how linked to light this gift of mind is – so many of these early Greek teachers, were stargazers.

Anecdotes abound about their lives of looking, their bio theoretikos, a great deal of which was spent gazing up at the heavens. They were said to “live in eternity.” While watching some star, the wise Thales fell into a well and the story goes that his Thracian maid chided him for wanting to look at things in heaven when he couldn’t even see what was at his own feet. Pythagoras when asked what he lived for answered, “To look at heaven and nature.” And, Anaxagoras when accused of caring nothing for his own kinsfolk or his country, pointed to the heavens and said, “There is my country.”

I am grateful to such gazers in this day and age where artificial lights blur the night skies. I am grateful that such men lost and found themselves in the stars, for a Golden Age of mind, for Anaxagoras, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Empedocles, on and on to Socrates. I am grateful that these men were Seers and not merely Spectators.  That not only did they learn to See, but even when they saw what “couldn’t be right”, had the courage to speak what they saw – to put down their “I say this to be true”.

I am grateful to these early Greeks who reached with their minds to God, tried to reach all of the way. Who reached without expectation, without attachment, reaching only from the need to reach, the joy of reaching, who tried to reach all the way.  During this season of the star, we give thanks to those who first experienced this gift of mind as if epiphany, to those who first saw the idea, the eidos, the shape of a spiritual cosmos and man’s place in it.  “A sighting that had nothing to do with telescopes or observatories – one that could only be made in the depths of the human soul.”[i]

In this season we think of the teachers who teach and what was waiting in us becomes real…

We think of the magi who saw a star, a potential, a world’s chance to be…
Who didn’t know what the particular potential of the star was…
Who didn’t know what world’s chance to be it was…
But they beloving, revealed their believing and came to worship… 

Heraclitus said, “If you do not hope, you will not find that which is not hoped for; since it is difficult to discover and impossible to attain.”  How many stars in the East have gone unseen, or perhaps seen, were ignored.

During this season of epiphany may we receive the gift of pure vision and if you see a star in the East, may you have the courage to load up the camels. Today.
May we be seers and not mere spectators and reach for the star, try to reach all of the way.
Because Advent is over and so is the season of waiting. 

[i] Jaeger, Paideia.

(2002)