Daily Signet

I always knew that everything was filled with the spirit of God—not just we upright primates, but all animals, trees, plants, water, stones. It was unthinkable to me that they could merely be chunks of animated or motionless matter.

I am amazed that there are sentient beings who can look at the components of our world and perceive only skin, petals, crystals, bark. Who can view such unfathomable complexity and regard it as an accidental conglomeration of molecules.

I began to consider what vision might be truer—that of eyes who regard not God’s energy within that which they see—who call a silver maple merely a tree, look upon their neighbor as just a walking blob of cells with verbal capacities, or the evening sky as a darkening void occupied only by glowing bodies flung abroad by no hand. Do they see more clearly because they believe nothing to be before their sight but those material items?  They add no quality by their belief in something within or behind what they view. Or do eyes witness with more truth which perceive all to be infused with God, and thus see with heightened resolution?                                                  

Donna Piper Leichtling

Daily Signet

Here we are—21st century man created out of the dust of stars and animated by the Creator’s breath. Our access to this inspiration, this Holy Breath, can become constricted or at least partially blocked. We become short of breath, labored with the immediate and no longer capable of drawing on the inspiration intended for our earthly walk with God. Moses was on the backside of the desert where he was focusing on his daily living—tending the sheep. It was as he approached the mountain of God, Horeb (as the scriptures say), that he was startled into a full expansive breath that awakened every cell. For, “the Lord appeared in the flame of the fire…” and I think that the experience would catch my breath and then awaken me to a whole new onrush of thoughts and inspirations too.

Here we are—21st century man created out of dust of stars and animated by the Creator’s breath. Our access to this inspiration, this Holy breath, can become constricted or at least partially blocked. We become short of breath, labored with the immediate and no longer capable of drawing on the inspiration intended for our earthly walk with God. This is not to suggest that we remove the immediate and become centered on a heavenly kingdom or a better tomorrow or a therapeutic interpretation of the past. Instead, it suggests that we recognize, know again, that this life now is imbued with life always—the Holy Breath. And this life always is alight with joy and should be the fuel for the immediate. We are the burning bush that is not consumed. And this Holy Breath should light our lights and make us into lights and transform our star dust into star light for the world to see.                                                                                                              

Benjamin Martin

On This Day…

Sikh remembrance of the martyrdom of Guru Arjan

Daily Signet

When you commit to your chosen life, to your Origo, your soul, the Kingdom of God Within You—not to your ego— then you can begin living your own life. Not somebody else’s life. You no longer settle for the life you were trained to live: scarred, twisted, bent or beaten into living. Not the life that friends, newspaper, TV, radio—even PBS—tell you to live; not the life you drifted or were sucked into living. When you commit to living your own life, you take your first step to becoming an Aristoi of God.

When you pray, as a friend once told me he prays—“Oh God, make me that man you mean me to be”— you have committed to your unique individual life.

At the core is committing to your true life—your Origo’s life, your soul’s life, the life of Your Kingdom Within—the life God means you to live. That’s axis mundi. Everything else flows from, is nourished by and is judged by that first commitment. The fruits of your life will be produced from the blossoming of the seed within you and from the DNA of what you’ve committed to. 

Ben Leichtling

Daily Signet

The Holy has been revealing itself to humankind for a long time; in fact, it is doubtful if any concept has lived in the human experience—in the human witness—for so long a time as religious truth. It just won’t die. Where humanity is most human, this religious perception is more vivid and most intense. Where man is only homo faber (or less), this awareness may or may not obtain….Humanity did not exist until the sacred entered the material, the flesh, the animal and by synchrony became one with it. Homo faber, no matter how brilliant is just not enough….When the sacred entered this little creature, he or she became Godlike by the gift of speech (logos)—the third great gift of Grace. And religion was born. From the beginning, this was the true religion, no matter how much or how little was or is apprehended or comprehended. No matter how it is interpreted: in corn pollen in a burning bush or in a star…God is not more when He speaks again 20 or 30 or 50 or 100 thousand years later, over Bethlehem or in a cave outside Mecca or in the Deer Park or by Deer Creek.                                                                                                    

William Boast

Daily Signet

In the work world, when we eliminate an employee, we call it “firing them.” Normally, such a “firing” seems to result in a bankruptcy of esteem and hope, an unsettling sense of what else can go wrong and raises the question of where to go from here. But, I remember one company celebration, at which I met a former employee who had been fired in one of the company’s downsizings. I told him I was so sorry he had been let go. He responded by saying, “It was the best thing that could have happened to me. I didn’t like who I was becoming and I didn’t have the guts to do anything about it.” This guy was truly “fired.”

A firing can reveal a mercurial spirit—known in alchemy as the prima materia. Sometimes this spirit is represented by a salamander as the surviving element that emerges from the fire. Alchemists considered this element as a substratum that could transform baser metals into gold; it was the much sought-after philosopher’s stone.

I hope everyone in Christuman is fired—that we may be unhinged from our sources of comfort and be upended into seeing the salamander in the fire. I hope we get a swift metaphorical whack up the side of the head so that we see stars—that line of stars that runs along the spine and drops down into the craters of the mind. I hope we discover that we are priests to a soul that is bigger than each name and occupation and fears and American values and successes and failures. That somewhere in each of us, we are seamed with stars that can be revealed in fire by fire. The gift of God, of the imago Dei, of the imagining within you, is a gift of fire.                                      

Benjamin Martin