Mystic Heart of Easter: Sunday (4/4)
Relationship between the soul and the body. Womb or Tomb. Spiral or Cross. Forgiveness. Commission.
General banter and waiting room: 0-7:50
Warm ups (Stretch and Pranayama): 7:50 to 21:15
The Story and Questions for the Day: 21:15 to 35:00
Silent Meditation 35:00 to 55:00
Discussion: 55:00 to End
TRANSCRIPTS
This morning, let the om be a joyful noise. I'm alive. I'm alive. I'm alive.
Easter Morning at the Tomb
When I left you yesterday, we were in the entombment and the ambiguity and in the quiet. This morning, predawn, if you are following the traditional rendition, Mary Magdalene along with Mary, mother of James go to the tomb to pray on the body. They get there and the stone is rolled away. They walk in and there's nothing there. There's just the linen shroud left on the table. They go back into town and they rouse Peter and Peter rouses Simon. "They run to the tomb. They run as fast as they can. "Where's the body? Where's the body?" They walk in and it's not there.
Well, the men don't stay very long. They decide they have to go back into town to tell the others. Mary stays and she steps into the tomb and she sits there and cries.
According to the stories, the angels come to her and say you know, "What's going on, Mary? Why are you crying? You knew this was coming," basically. She's got her head down. When she looks up the apparition or the vision or the physical embodiment, depending on your particular interpretation of this story, of Jesus is sitting there. He says, "Hey, I'm here. You can't touch me cause I'm still in between worlds. Why are you weeping? This is the prophecy fulfilled." Then he appears to all of the other apostles. He appears for the next 40 days. There are a lot of sort of stories about how people respond to the re embodiment. This is essentially the beginning of the Christian mystery.
I think it's a really important question as a non-dualist or as a Yogi or as a tantrika who believes in the oneness of the universe to be in question about what is ... Does it matter if we understand the resurrection in the story as life in a body?
Historically, at this time there are three sects of Judaism that are relevant here: The Sadducees, the Pharisees and the Essenes. The Pharisees, of which Paul was one, believed that the resurrection actually was after death. You got to keep your human body and that it would just be restored to the best shape you were in at 25 basically, and you would get to keep your human body after death.
The Essenes believed that the soul was eternal and that the resurrection was only about the soul living on beyond the body. This core inquiry is what is the relationship between our embodiment, which is so delicious, and our eternal nature, the part of us that returns and unifies again with all that is after the body is complete. I would say the non-dualist or tantrik understanding is that the body is a play thing.
Standing is that the body is a play thing. It is part of your identity is who you are now, but it is not all you are. You are not just the essential soul. You are not just your body but you are both AND. But for me, when I was coming up I didn't grow up in any kind of religion. I found I was very compelled to start going to church when I was in my teens by myself after my mother passed, I walked by a church and there was singing going on, I think it was 14 and I took myself to church and just sat in the back. And so I sought the stories out as I got older to understand what they were. And I never really needed to know that there was a body that came to life because it was really about this essential triumph over what others might... Over the vagaries of life.
They had done their worst. Everything that was the absolute worst that humans could do to one another. Lie, betray, hurt, harm, torture, maime, kill. Everything they could do to a body had been done and still he rose in love and he was on his untaintable soul, was there on display. That lived beyond all of the nonsense and drama of the pain that can be done to a person in a body. And I wanted to know what is that essence, what was that that looks at all of the suffering in the world and says, "They know not what they do and lives beyond it and loves beyond it and forgives beyond it."
So that's the first potential question of the day. What is the soul's relationship to the body in your own life and in your own experience? If you've sat in silence long enough and you've had the experience where you go beyond the edges of the body and all of a sudden you're transparent, even for a moment in meditation and you feel the lightness of being, you might have a different opinion than if you're very identified with the flesh body.
The Spiral or the Cross
And then the second thing I wanted to do this morning is to read to you a piece from Matthew Fox that questions the dominance hierarchy message of the cross and replaces it with something else. So I'll jump into the... I'm reading out of his really fantastic book, A Spirituality Named Compassion, which is a follow onto the cosmic Christ. He says, resurrection... Maybe I'll start a little earlier. "The cross was an invention of the Roman Empire. The empty tomb, on the other hand, is the product of the divine imagination. How strange that Christians should have invested so much more energy into the cross than into the empty tomb? It is time that we started to explore the riches of this neglected treasure.
First, a tomb is basically rounded or circular in shape, and Jesus' tomb was carved into a cave. Resurrection literally doesn't mean rising up. Since if he had risen up in the cave, he would have bumped his head. It means instead exiting and going out, leaving death and its shrouds behind. It is an empty tomb into which persons entered and from which one left more of a womb. Being empty and having been emptied. It is not a closed circle but an open circle and more than that, it is not a closed womb or tomb as in a narcissistic return to wound like security and fetishness with self. Instead because it is open and because someone has actually exited from it, it is a tomb in motion, a circle in motion, thus a spiral.
As a spiral, it is clearly distinguished from a mere repetitive cyclical view of the universe, which sometime Eastern philosophers espouse. The revelation is that it has a direction. A spiral has a direction which is meant to increase love justice in the world. The spiral represents a true revolution from the word to revolve for it is turning around, a turning from, a turning toward and a turning on. This is the real rebirth, the resurrection."
And that to me like to move from the cross into the spiral, into the unwinding evolution. What King called out as the long arc that bends towards justice, that that we are on that spiral of evolutionary intent as humans. So that's the second contemplation topic. The first is what is the relationship of the soul and the body? The second is can we visualize and embrace the spiral that is not only in the four quarters of the heart, but that it is the essence of the revolving womb.
Liminal Space
Another possible topic is the mystery of the liminal time between life and death. And between the sort of dissolution of the spirit into the formless. In the Christian calendar, the 40 days after Easter are the days that the embodiment kept appearing to the disciples. And if you've lost someone, your father or your mother, you might experience them coming to you in dreams or talking to you in that space, in between life and death. Anyone you're intimate with. So what is the mystery of this space? How close are we between our consciousness and other worlds? And how willing are we to drop into the mystery that we're not just living in material observable reality, that there is more going on there all the time. So the mystery of the liminal space.
The Commission and Transference
The other couple of things that really are interesting to me is so you've got this very small cadre of people who have experienced his love directly or love directly in general. And he gives them this commission to go and spread it out. Spread this word that you are always forgiven, no matter what, your essence is forgiven, you are always forgiven. You love one another. See this light in everything. Effectively the core message of namaste. I see the light and you, see the light in everyone. You are forgiven. And he says this message to these people who surround him and say, "Don't be afraid, spread to the corners of the earth and tell others." And how thousands of years later, that core message is still what we're attempting to spread mediated by all the dominance, hierarchies of the cross, the ladder, the oppression, the power structures, all of the things that have been overlaid it. And yet still at its essence love one another is right there for us.
Where did they find the bravery to keep telling this story? And to communicate by embodying that love so that by their fruits, so shall you be known. That roots and the way the disciples and the apostles and everybody. How they appeared, it was the testimony of their own loving being that was able to grow in others around the world. So that's the last possibility for a meditation topic, being living love.
Living love so that your way of living is such an attractive force to let others feel pulled in.
Live the Hawaiian blessing: Thank you, I love you. I forgive you. Please forgive me in the way we walk in the world. We walk with that consciousness that we're always the one energy, but it's our hands and our body that are called to serve and to be showing up with that love.
All right so I'll recap the meditation topics whenever you're being called to.
How do we understand the soul's relationship to the body in our deepest heart? Who are you? What is the mystery of the liminal space which goes along with that? What is happening between life and death? What is your intuition saying? How do we live the love? How do we embody the forgiveness? How do we live the light every day? Ways of everything the world delivers. Or you could just contemplate the spiral, the revolving an evolving wounds story toward justice and love.
Personal Meditation
So we'll go into it now. Dropping in, dropping the faith deep into your body and creating a clear channel between the bottom and base of the body and the crown of the head.
Lifting the crown high and opening the back of the neck. If you're able to do this, pull the hips toward the core, the outer hips in, lift the perineum up toward the tailbone and then elongate the spine nice and tall. Your heart should be here. Open chest to feel expansive from the breath already and then relax the entire amount of arms. No stiffness, no Moodra is necessary unless you just wire it. And perhaps for this one, turn the palms up to receive and let the talk [inaudible 00:35:46] open like the little soft spot where babies are soft at birth between the skulls. Imagine that pulsing and being open to receiving. So the top of the crown is open, the jaw is loose, the eyeballs are back in the head and turn your inner eyeballs upward toward the third eye. Let them float up into the forehead, and then releasing and going inward with your contemplation topic. I'll see you in 20 minutes.
SILENCE
0:54:00 Dialogues and Conversation
Good morning. Good morning. Rub your hands together. Get some heat in the palms. Place the palms over your eyes. Let the heat penetrate the eyes. And return to the here and now, peeling the hands away and letting the world arrive into your being.
0:55:42 Erin
Good morning. It's Erin. Thank you so much. Form and formlessness is one of my absolute favorite, favorite topics. I love it. It's amazing. And it's not a concept to me, it's so personal. I've had so many experiences of and both. Both... yeah.
I love that I am so human. I love that I am so human. I love that I'm alive and I get to experience life and feel life, and at the same time have an experience of my formless, timeless, essential self. That I can experience life so deeply, but not, and I rarely say but, and not be seduced by the pleasure or pain of it. To keep expanding my capacity, to hold and experience both the form and the formlessness, my humanness and my spiritness, and it's extraordinary.
And actually, Christine, I felt so moved by when you mentioned that Mary's experience of being in the tomb womb with Jesus, and she was suffering, and He came. He appeared to her and He said, "Hey. You know that this was the prophecy. Why are you suffering?" And I love that, and it touches me, and it's connected to this. I love that we can, it's available to us, to experience life, really feel it, and also know the perfection of it. That even the worst thing that we could experience is perfect. It's really perfect. Can we soften and open to the possibility that even the pain and the suffering of that loss, is perfect? And yeah. Yeah.
And actually, it ties back into, and I'm going to say it again and I know it's a little controversial, but there are no victims. Jesus wasn't a victim there, and neither was Mary. It's that co-creation with life. Yum. To be both human and spirit. Thank you. Yeah.
0:59:45 Manena
I had an experience in relationship to the love and also the spiral, and I was really trying to connect with the experience of the suffering, the layers of the Psalms, moving from the suffering into the prayer and the awe of it all, and into the thank you, and then feeling that core of love and spirit that allows the forgiveness.
And then the thought of the resurrection, and how he's basically without the body, is just anchored in the core of the love and forgiveness and the spirit. And feeling that the spiral in me or in people, moving towards that, is like finding a relationship with that core. And then connecting with either aspects of yourself or aspects with other people that are in the suffering or in that part of the Psalm that is the part where you're really in the pain or in over identification with the physical, which is a version of the pain. Sometimes it manifests as pleasure too and connecting with that, you're either in yourself or other people, and then bringing it back to that core of the love, the forgiveness and the spirit.
And I feel like that movement towards reaching out towards yourself or towards connection with others and then moving back towards connection with the love and the eternal, that to me, I started in that meditation to feel the spiral being drawn through that movement of the binary and through movement of the effort of the exercise of connecting with both of those things and feeling, not releasing the effort of connecting with both but not being both at the same time. That constant moving through to connecting with the other so that it has that moving forward feeling.
And I really feel like that teaching that you gave of... And also the metaphor of the tomb being a physical, the tomb womb being the physical embodiment of that spiral and actually having, like Erin was saying with Mary Magdalene and Jesus there and that connection of coming from love and stretching towards the pain, connecting with it and, and then reminding and bringing it back to the love. That happened between him and her in the metaphor of this womb tomb spiral form was really powerful to bring that home to me and really came home and during the meditation and I don't know is amazing new way to relate to it. So thank you so much Christine, for setting that up and setting up that... setting that up.
1:04:09 Christine
You just touched on so many things in there, but I want to pull out one word. When you said binary, this is such a critical evolution of consciousness that even when there's a polarity, we think of Shiva Shakti or male female, that they're never static, that they're always moving and existing in this process and continuum, this infinity between them, and that any conversation that wants you to be in polarity permanently to be static in the binary is a lie. That whether it's handicapped, non handicapped, male, female, whatever it happens to be, that it's never all of one or another.
There are no red states and purple states. They're only shades of... No, red and blue. They're only shades of purple. Literally if you blend them on who actually voted. So even that model is just a freaky... It's inaccurate. And so the more we speak with truthfulness, the more the binary language disappears, and you're in this mobile process of understanding polarity and opposition and the moving in and out like you're saying. It's so beautiful.
I actually have something on my altar. Hold on. This is a artist up by Adam. This is an actual galaxy that if you look on the Hubble and you get up close to it, it actually has this explosion in the middle that looks like an eyeball. But it's the sort of a physical representation of that infinity in the universe. And that's why I have it there. That dynamic. Dynamic. [crosstalk
Carl:
I wanted to kind of extend what Manana was saying about Mary Magdalene's role. Christine last night you and I were working on a poem about a seed and I was just thinking about the moment in which a seed begins. It does begin with a crack. It begins with a breaking open of the skin. So there's a moment of violence before growth and if you want to get kind of historically, you can take this back to the nature as God agricultural, pre-Christian.
But then I was thinking about, "Well what happens? What streams through that crack?" And what streams through that crack is water and nutrients and sunlight. And metaphorically that's your community. Those are the people who are washing you or holding you up. There's always been this saying that what doesn't break you makes you stronger and I don't think that's true. Some people crack and they get broken and they stay broken. And the difference is community. The difference is people around you giving you support and sharing the humanness and normalizing the break so that you say, "Yes, I too feel this. This is what's going on." If you take a look at anything around recovery or addiction, it's always the community that reframes the crack as something universal as opposed to personal, and that is such a powerful, powerful notion. So, that's sort of one thread I was meditating on.
The other kind of goes back to your pod theory and has to do with the powerful message of putting skin in the game. Jesus knew this was coming. He knew the Romans were not happy about this. And yet he continued to teach as he was teaching. And I've just been reflecting on the current moments and this whole economic notion of symmetry at risk, which is, "Yes, I'm going to do this and I'm going to put skin in the game." And while it seemed like in our current state where we're thinking about the economy and the bailout is you can feel the radical injustice of a rigged system in which people benefit when their predictions are correct and if their predictions are not correct, they don't suffer at all. So I'm feeling that the beauty of symmetrical risk as a moral concept.
1:09:07 Christine
I love the reflection on community as the water and the sunlight and that is more symmetrical. We used to say when I was married that you can't both go down at once. Only one can go down at a time. So that someone's there to hold when things get tough and-
1:09:50 Adam
One piece sort of shows up for me here too. And I think I'm going to speak to this a little bit in the evenings, thoughts on tonight, but it sort of shows up here too. It's interesting, this idea of when Jesus returns and Mary reaches out to him and he says, "Don't touch me." The way you said it this morning was, "I'm kind of in between the worlds." I've also seen that in places where he's sort of encouraging her not to be attached to his form because he's with her everywhere. " I will be with you always men, but it's time to be letting go at this point."
But there's another piece in this which I kind of just want to honor also in this tale of the post resurrection period, and it feeds a little bit to the themes of yesterday somehow for me too, which is the idea of uncertainty and doubt. And it all looks good in the rear view. Like you were saying yesterday, "How does it feel the day after your master, the Lord, has been killed, but before the certainty of the rebirth and the resurrection has manifested itself?" That sort of "Ah." That crunchy kind of, "Fuck man, what's happening here?" feeling.
And one of the feelings that was predominant in my reflections on this yesterday was this whole idea of uncertainty or doubt and how on the one hand the uncertainty of it sort of acts as a test of faith for us, and it underlines the unknown and challenges our certainty in a way that brings humility ideally because we can't totally know, and so we have to both sit with the uncertainty and sit with a certainty of what we know, what we have experienced, what we know to be true. And then also somehow hold the humility of, "Actually it's all bigger than me and I'm not a hundred percent sure about it at all."
But in the tale, I think it's a week later or whatever when Jesus returns to meet with a bunch of the disciples and they're all, "Oh my God. Mary wasn't kidding around. You are here. This is for real." But one disciple, one apostle was not there and that was Thomas. And so they're all talking to Thomas later, "Oh man, that's amazing." And he's like, "Sounds amazing, but until I see it, how am I supposed to take your word on it? You're telling me that Jesus returned in the body and that you all had that experience? Until I have that experience, I can't be sure."
And that later they all gather again and Thomas is with them. And Jesus specifically, I would say, I mean this is my interpretation of it, but I feel like in a way Jesus rewards Thomas for the uncertainty and the doubt that he was willing to reveal and share because even Mary Magdalene didn't get this gig. But who is the only person in the historical record that we know of who literally touched the body of the risen Christ? It was Thomas. It was he who doubted. And Jesus calls him over and says, "Thomas put your finger in my wound. Do you believe now?" And he says something like, "Blessed are those who believe without having seen." But to Thomas, he gives the honor of being the only human being that we are aware of through the scriptural and historical records to have actually with his body touched the body of the risen Christ.
And so I guess I just want to honor the role of doubt and uncertainty. It's okay that we don't fucking know how it all is or how it all works out in the end or what it all means now that the sacred reality honors that doubt and uncertainty. That's not always a sign of lack of faith and "Oh, ye of little faith." And it's not a diss on us. It's okay to hold out until we're sure what we're knowing and what we're experiencing. So I just wanted to throw that [inaudible 01:14:32].
01:14:32 Christine
You're not in the Emersonian tradition of, "You know what you know." And if you don't know it personally, whether it's through faith or it's through... If you don't know it personally as an inner knowing, then don't take it on. Don't pretend. If you were walking with someone who every time you were around them, literally miracles happened, you knew directly the love that they showed other...... happened. You knew directly the love that they showed others. You knew what it felt like to be in that presence. It might not even matter to you, but you could say, "I believe it, man, he's with me. He's with me right here in this room." Or, "He showed up and it was amazing." You might have that and it might be an embodied deep belief. And if you don't have it, don't pretend. It's so beautiful. Emersonian self-reliance meets doubting Thomas, we're all good. I love that insight. Thank you, thank you for that. And I know that's also for you personally in your exploration of, "I want to know and believe deeply inside of myself." Especially with teachers. I think that's a very personal observation for you also that's relevant to faith.
UNK:
Thank you for sharing that. I love that. That's also really personal to me that we all have an experience for ourselves that we know through experience. It's a knowing that comes from so deep inside from an embodied experience. I think it's so important. It's so empowering and I feel like it's the way now, no more following. Not being seduced by what other people know and believe and by the messenger and by the guru. It's really knowing for ourselves through experience. Thank you.
And Christine, I just wanted to thank you for the invitation to consider the holy moment of the day, and the impact that symbols have. And as I look back on my experience as growing up Catholic, I think I would have had a totally different relationship to this religion if I were to have been looking at an open circle instead of a cross with a dead body.
And for some reason I find myself looking at those symbols, the cross or the tomb, as also a decision point of what to honor, whether it's the masculine or the feminine. And I think the white boys in charge went with the cross and actually I'm a little bit pissed because the miracle happens in the tomb. And as opposed to, "Oh, we're going to lead with the cross as we go and we go on our crusades," so it just became... And I apologize for what I'm bringing into this space, but I think it's important that we also honor the spectrum of what's here in these symbols, even in this day of risen glory. There's also been a usurping of that energy for all sorts of very earthly gain on the part of church leaders.
And I think there's a sadness that I'm bringing into this space around the co-option of something quite remarkable for very human and selfish ends. And I have a lot of sadness about that, too, underneath this momentary anger. I think right now I'm sitting in sadness that the beauty of this message that really could permeate all, its different expressions that it's taken for control, primarily, and what we've missed and yet at the same time, it is what it is. It had to happen the way it happened. And because of that in some respects we are here with you as an antidote. But it was quite beautiful to feel the motivation there that's present. Thank you.
1:17:00 Christine
First of all, I really appreciate you acknowledging the idea that the spirit of Christ was stolen or co-opted. Like all liberation theologies of every spectrum that turn you towards self-reliance and love and kindness, they all get co-opted by capitalism for feel good, or by power structures for temporary, like a hedonic cycle. Feel good for Sunday, feel good for your yoga class, but then return to the world unchanged and have to keep coming back for that juice. And if you'd have stuck with, from the beginning, the liberation theology of love and no fear of death, because that's not what there is. If that was all there was and people, like you like to call it, truly calmed their nervous system and sat in that, there would be none of these struggles. But that's a very risky thing to power structures.
And so you'll notice, even with the way yoga spread in there west somewhere around the mid nineties, it started getting capital infusions. All of a sudden it's about the clothes and the hour-long class versus dropping deep into the experience of your, to Adam's point, self referential truth which becomes quite cosmic. So I think we can reclaim it. There's a lot in the tech science community that the backlash to that disappointment and the bludgeoning by the cross is material realism, scientific observable reality as the only truth, and a shaming of the turning toward the Christ or the turning toward the light within as a real thing.
It's very difficult to speak about Christianity in the contemporary culture without being considered a little bit loopy and ungrounded in a deep way. And so I find that this process of looking deeper and deeper into the stories and reclaiming the Christ story and the Magdalen story, that we are restoring ourselves in a way, too. So I appreciate that.
:
And then there is the forgiveness that eventually comes of the Church. Go to a Catholic church, after Thomas and after sitting in meditation, go into a Catholic church and watch the priest do the rituals and tell me they're not having a mystical experience themselves.
01:22:57 Leroy
So many Easter reflections come up for me. I remember going... Can you hear me okay? Can you hear me? Yeah, so many, going into Manhattan for Easter Day parade with my 11-year-old girls and dressing up in their Easter dresses and going into St. Patrick's Cathedral and praying. I wasn't brought up a Catholic, but I had a Catholic wife and I used to love to go to the ceremony because I just loved the mystical ceremony. And these stories about rebirth, what's been coming up for me these last few minutes is this [inaudible 01:23:53] that I love the [inaudible 01:23:56] of [inaudible 01:23:59] wherever you are, whether you're a worship or whether you're a heathen, whoever you are [inaudible 01:24:06] broken your vows a thousand times before [inaudible 01:24:18].
:
And to me that's what today is about, what life is always about is just picking yourself up and starting again. No matter how many times I've fallen off my wagon of meditation or love or peace or green juice, all of my vows, what matters is picking myself up. So Easter is another opportunity to pick ourselves up and refresh and start again. And this is an interesting Easter for everybody. I want to thank you, Christine. Thank you.
01:27:28 Katie:
Good morning. I'm good. I was thinking about this through this lens of, I don't have any religious upbringing so I've always used the sense of filtering through all the stories and all the beliefs and things in terms of kind of like truth with a capital T versus truth with a lower case t. And so there's this sense of when you hear all these different stories from different, well I guess from anything, but from religious backgrounds and different things, you know there's a part of your brain that could argue like, "Is this possible? Is this true? Did this really happen?"
But then there's something that happens in the body when you just like know something's true because you just feel it in your body, you know? Even when Adam was reading that book that's like classified as a work of fiction, I feel parts in there that I just know that's true because I feel the truth of it. And it doesn't even matter whether it literally happened or not. The information is true, the message is true, what's reaching is true. And so there's just like those two truths don't have to be connected in line for something to be one or the other. And I was thinking about that kind of personally, just kind of visualizing that image of spiraling as we were meditating and thinking on my relationship with my dad, and I haven't seen my dad in a year. And so I was thinking about this idea of forgiveness and he actually sent me an email yesterday that really crossed the one boundary that I have, which was not to send me emails. If you want to talk don't send me unpleasant emails but find a way to ask me to talk and I'll sit down face to face with you.
And so I've kind of spent the last, I don't know, 12 hours or so kind of feeling like I have this one choice or this other choice and there's these two choices. Which direction do I go in? Do I be mad and put up all these kinds of defenses or do I find a way to be loving and forgive and just understand where he came from and his woundedness and just allow space for that? And I think the beauty of that image of the spiral is that just like as you kind of allow yourself to move in that way, it's almost like from each rung of the spiral there's other possibilities available and so it's never just there's the two options. It's almost like as you allow yourself movement and as you allow yourself to kind of come into that rhythm, there starts to be other things that are open, other truths that are available.
And so, I don't know, I just really love that feeling of moving up that spiral and seeing that there's so many other of those capital T truths that I'm just not seeing yet. And just to be able to give myself the spaciousness and the time to, I guess, to be in the uncertainty of it and not have to do anything right now. And just kind of allow myself to just sit with, I can be both things. I can be really pissed and I can also be understanding and loving at the same time and allow those to, I don't know, co-exist. So thank you for the space. It's been just really beautiful. Thanks.
1:32 CLOSE
Christine:
Beautiful, people. I have a poem to close today. It's not really an Easter poem and it's one that I didn't write. This is a Galway Kinnel poem called Saint Francis and the Sow. Do you know this poem? It's a springtime poem.
The bud stands for all things. Even for those things that don't flower, for everything flowers from within of self blessing. Though sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness, to put a hand on its brow of the flower and retell it in words and in touch that it is lovely until it flowers again from within of self blessing. As Saint Francis put his hand on the creased forehead of the sow and told her in words and in touch, blessings of earth on the sow. And the sow began remembering all down her thick length from the earthiness snout all the way through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail, from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine down through the great broken heart to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering from the 14 teats into the 14 mouths sucking and blowing beneath them, the long perfect loveliness of sow.
The long perfect loveliness of you. You are forgiven. Love each other. See the light. ( singing)
May peace reign in your hearts. Happy spring, happy rebirth, happy Easter. Namaste.
Thank you, Christine. Thank you, everybody. God bless.