Yesterday’s year-end closing was full of drama, as the storm continued on, with more snow, cold, and whiteouts making travel frightening and dangerous. This morning, the new year dawns bright with full sunlight illuminating the frozen landscape, promise of warmer times ahead.
Our Burning Bowl ceremony last night produced, as it does every year, some personal surprises. Through a recent class at Unity, I already knew that being a victim wasn’t serving me and happily released that through the burning. I'll discuss this in another blog later, as its something that happens to many of us.
What surprised me was how lack consciousness also showed up as something I needed to release. I have always been aware of the “down side” of every situation, and have happily embraced the “What if Up” concept, yet my “lack mentality” is deeply embedded. I have released it through the ceremony, but will wind up chasing down all its expressions for awhile.
I think that’s the way these things work: we get the concept, take a stand, and perhaps a huge step forward, but much of self improvement still takes practice, self-love, and awareness of the ramifications and remnants of the old ways as well. Anything less than an eyes-wide-open look is fooling ourselves.
There is another aspect of self-improvement that needs to be added here. It’s the most important step: replacing the old habits with new ways and a new world view. The White Stone ceremony held in many Unity churches the Sunday after New Years Eve is a good example of how that can be incorporated in a ritual. It comprises, essentially, the search for new thoughts and new behavior that can replace the old. My white stone contained the words, “Freedom. Triumph. Riches of God’s Kingdom.” Those words will be seen by me every day during 2011, and will be guideposts when I find myself losing my way.
If we lived our lives in perfect knowledge of ourselves as the Christ Spirit, Oneness, expressions of God, we wouldn’t have things we need to let go of, improve, and triumph over. In a way, that would be too bad. It seems to be part of our human, this-life experience founded on what we do with our free will that make this existence the full, rounded experience it is. In a way, we appreciate God and our Divine nature more because we don’t always achieve perfection.
I wonder if angels get bored?
Oh, my. Take a deep breath...
My thanks to Michael Fox of Knowth.com for permission to use his wonderful image of the winter solstice sun rising over the Irish landscape.
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