Daily Signet

If you haven’t seen a baby chick be born, go YouTube it. Once the shell is cracked there’s a lot of unhappy chirping going on and when it emerges it is an ugly mess, a mat of feathers and spindly legs.  Emergence requires that we embrace the feeling of awkward and uncomfortable and yes, even ugly. In the words of Isabelle Davis, “Life is about the challenge, isn’t it?” It is not easy. Resurrection never is. For Christuman we celebrate the resurrection right now, in springtime as have people for thousands of years--the barley planters of Mesopotamia, the Teutonic people paying homage to the goddess, Ostera, where Easter came from. This too is our season of remembering and paying homage to one of   sacred tenets: “from the death of the least of me is born the best of me.” But we are we are called to do more than just remember. The Christ in us requires us to participate, to live in a daily litany of breaking out of the shells holding the least of us so the Christ in us can emerge. The chicken lays an egg every day so there is an egg a day, 365 days a year that we must open from the inside. Crack it open, waddle around, rejoice in the best of you.                                               

Jamie Ziegler

On This Day…

St. Longinus: Roman centurion present at the crucifixion who recognized Jesus as the Son of Man – he was later martyred for this

Daily Signe

And so here, in our cycle of time, we are returning round to a season of renewal, to the Mystery of Death and Resurrection.   The potency of death and regeneration were not exclusive to the Christian belief; in fact, many argue that there is much borrowed from earlier renditions in the mystery religions.    “Every mystery religion, being a religion of redemption, offered means of suppressing the old man and of imparting or vitalizing the spiritual principle.  Every serious mystes approached the solemn sacrament of initiation believing that he thereby became twice-born, a new creature and passed in real sense from death unto life by being brought into a mysterious intimacy with the deity.”  This was true of the Orphic, of the cults of Isis, Attis, Dionysos, and Mithra.  This is true of the Christed-human being born into humanness not attained by the first birth.  We are steeped in a traditional belief of regeneration that calls on the Christian metaphor of Christ’s death, burial and resurrection as an idiogram connecting us to a universal truth found in so many of the major religions through all time.  For in a sense, we are the world’s only chance to be – God’s only chance to reawaken in this slumbering lump of genetic code a spiritual charge and vitality that can light the hearts and minds of those around us and of generations to come.  Like the initiates of old, may we each individually become renewed creatures and pass in real sense from death unto life by being brought into a mysterious intimacy with the Divine. May it be so.                                                Benjamin H. Martin

On This Day…

Ordination date of Benjamin Martin

Daily Signet

I have translated, transmuted, transformed all of these…by the alchemy in me (every dance, every color, without category)—synchronous, creative, spontaneous—at that moment—till I saw the beauty, felt the joy, generating passion out of that moment and so created the new dance, the new experience where that passion generated the new there on that street corner, in that woods, by that stream, on that passing day. The Sacred Journey…alive. The journey for us can be ‘generative and in continuous joy.’ Create a new dance. If you have a plan, a goal, a strategy for your life, you will miss all the joy, all the beauty, all the wisdom, all the adventures of the mind and heart and body and soul.

William M. Boast

On This Day…

Anne Frank died, 1945 in Bergen Belsen concentration camp

Daily Signet

The call to Creativity is a call to embody the foundation: “We are created in the creative image of the Creator and our acts of creation make known this Imago Dei impressioned upon our hearts: all believed and all beloved.” We are called to creatively respond—and through our unique acts of creation—we make known to all this Imago Dei—the Christ in each of us, the God Image in each of us, the Origo in each of us—impressioned upon our hearts.  

It is a short-lived gift, this humanity of ours. It calls us to that which is personal and generative. It calls us to the mastery of craft that we might break through to what is at once unique to us and universal to all. 

Help us, Oh God, to embody the perennial vision of the Human by attaining to our original—
that our daily bears the signet of our true, of our created. Amen.

And again our prayer, 
Help us, Oh God, to embody the perennial vision of the Human 
by attaining to our original--
that our daily bears the signet of our true, of our created.  
May we answer the call to Create.  Amen.                                         

Benjamin Martin

On This Day…

Anna Sewell born 1820 in Yarmouth, England, died 1878: writer of the classic novel, Black Beauty, and activist against cruelty to animals
Quotes: “We call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words.” “I am never afraid of what I know.” “My doctrine is this, that if we see cruelty or wrong that we have the power to stop, and do nothing, we make ourselves sharers in the guilt.”

Daily Signet

Is there anything more mysterious than creativity? Where we are gifted with the power to make anew from that which has been and invoke something that has not been—the mystery of conceiving something uniquely Here that has never been conceived here Before? O my, thank you God, for having created us Human and may we, in the image of your Creation, create what is uniquely Human. "For only from originals can originals come. This is the flow and power of creativity—from age to age and from day to day." Holy, holy, holy—how you must love us! Heaven and earth are full of thy glory.

We raise our Prayer to the Mystery of Creativity that for us, began as we began to conceive and imagine and sing and dance and make music and emote in color and give expression of words to feelings that seemed somehow foreign or Other and yet feelings that were nested in the experience of our awakenings and our illuminations. And yet, this is just a continuance of a prayer from our grandfather's great-grandfather's grandfather—and so it goes and we carry in to this moment their incarnating DNA and we experience through a shared, inherited physicality the amazing Here of being Human in 2022.  

Holy, holy, holy—how you must love us! Heaven and earth are full of thy glory.

Benjamin Martin