letitia, Author at Nuhra

WHAT ARE WE WAITING FOR?

Posted on December 12, 2022 by letitia

In traditional times (not all that long ago) the weeks before Christmas were seen as a time of waiting.

There were memories, reminders, readings of other times when people waited in hope for release from a dreadful situation, or for someone they were expecting to come, for a promise to be kept.

Today we look at the people of Ukraine holding on with a terrible hope that missiles will cease raining down, that missing sons and daughters and husbands will come home, that the freezing winter will be over and that help will come from somewhere.

It must be so difficult for them to keep hope alive.

In our much gentler circumstances we wait for the feast of Christmas. But it’s difficult for us in Australia to think of these days as a time of waiting. In our hemisphere so much is about finishing; school graduations, book clubs taking a long break, parties at work, final examinations.

The year is coming to a close and we are probably waiting for a welcome holiday away camping or swimming at the beach.

But still we light Advent candles one by one and remind ourselves that the birth of a baby at Christmas means a time of waiting as it does for all women pregnant with a child growing in her womb; for all fathers waiting for the child to appear.

This is a potent image, not to be submerged by too much tinsel and shopping.

Ann Belford Ulanov, a mother, priest and psychologist, writes of the strange psychologic and physical metamorphosis a pregnant woman undergoes and that this is a model for all spiritual transformation in our own lives.

It is important to reflect on the spiritual and religious imagery of Christmas and feel the pulse of new birth stirring in our own lives.

At this time before Christmas it can be a good thing to be quiet sometimes and ask our heart

‘What are you waiting for. What new birth is longing to appear in my life?’

HIDDEN TREASURE

Posted on August 15, 2022 by letitia

Who would have thought that the fate of such a small insect would cause consternation and distress among so many of us?

The news that a dangerous virus threatens our bees brings home to us just how dependent we are on nature, in spite of our huge advances in technology. Worried beekeepers have seen their hives destroyed so that an introduced mite causing this disease, cannot spread. Orchardists fear the failure of fruit trees and market gardeners their vegetables. They all depend on bees for the pollination and health of their gardens.

We depend on them as well.

We’ve always known this, I suppose, but sometimes it takes a catastrophe to wake up to the implications that what happens to the bees affects us all in so many areas.

Watching the distress of a beekeeper whose hives have been destroyed, you realise that it’s not just the material loss but some bond between them that goes deep into the soul (or psyche). The bees are such extraordinary little creatures in the way they form their communities; in the mathematically sophisticated, hexagonal cells within the hive and in the way they can communicate to each other the discovery of a bush full of honey-flowers.

Evolution has often been described as a competition – a struggle for survival. But between the bees and the flowering plants there is cooperation.

Now that flowers are beginning to appear in our gardens (even though winter is not quite over) I watched a bee struggling to thrust its way in to the centre of a tiny pink flower. The petals of the flower were trumpeting ‘Come and visit me!’ but it wasn’t an easy way to the centre. The precious stamens were hidden inside so that in the struggle to get to the centre, the bee could dislodge a few grains of pollen and the flower would live again next Winter.

In the writings of the mystics – those explorers of the invisible realities – a hidden treasure is often mentioned, as well as the struggle to discover it. The Sufi mystic, Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee sometimes quotes God as saying, ‘ I was a hidden treasure longing to be found.’

Jesus tells the story of someone discovering a treasure hidden in the earth. It’s not there just for the taking; there is the struggle to go away and to earn enough money to buy that field and take possession of the treasure.

In their book Bio-Spirituality, the authors, Campbell and McMahon remind us that our biological connectedness to a vast Process of Unification will gradually reveal itself. We hope to witness to this Process by walking the Labyrinth on Saturday 20th August in a celebration of bees! Join us.

Holding it all together

Posted on July 18, 2022July 18, 2022 by letitia

The news of war in Ukraine is gradually drifting from our television screens. Some have said that they can no longer bear to watch images of such terrible suffering night after night on the news; the suffering of people who, until a few months ago, lived in a prosperous society very like our own.

The media, always alert to its role of mirroring the concerns of their audience, can quickly turn a blind eye.

However, one image of that suffering may remain imprinted on the memory. It is of a line of captured Ukrainian civilians crossing a quiet street. They are in single file, bowed down, each holding onto the coat of the one in front. Moments later, they have been taken out of sight behind a vacant house and executed, their bodies left like bundles of clothes on the ground.

What may come to mind if you have seen Ingmar Bergman’s film, The Seventh Seal, is the closing shot of a group of people against the horizon, holding hands as they are led by Death across the screen. His film of course, is set in fourteenth century Europe as the Black Death raged across Europe, killing one in three of the population.

Both images are profoundly troubling.

In this time, when every tragedy happening across the world is there on our television screens, how do we hold it all together – our ordinary, largely peaceful, everyday lives and the terrible events happening to our human family somewhere ‘over there’. Can we continue to hold images of gaunt Ethiopian women holding their skeletal children, without eventually turning away – feeling helpless?

Somehow, we need to hold it all together, without rejecting either what we may see as our own fortunate lifestyle (although it has its own huge problems) and the chaos created somewhere by poor government or global oppression and corrupt practices.

We can hold all our human family in our heart (as well as making financial or other practical contributions). The important thing, I think, is to keep remembering them as we go about this business of daily living; to keep them in mind and in prayer without becoming hopeless, knowing that we commend them to a Heart and Consciousness that is intimately part of our human existence.

The Coming of the Light

Posted on June 9, 2022July 28, 2022 by letitia

Last week, we walked the Labyrinth For the Earth. There is a lovely Japanese myth that celebrates the earth and what comes from it. It links earth and sky together. This is a re-writing of the sketch of the story we read together. It can be found in Sansom’s Japan: A short cultural History.

The Myth of Ameratsu, the Sun Goddess. Japan.
The Goddess Ameratsu was the Shining One. She circled the sky each day bringing light and warmth and nourishment for the crops. In her light, fish swarmed in the waters of the inland sea, great trees covered the mountains and the people were happy and prosperous.
But all was not well among the gods. Ameratsu’s brothers were a troublesome lot, fighting and feuding the length of the land. They refused to listen to her pleas for peace and were particularly rude in the way they replied to her.
Offended, Ameratsu decided to take herself away from the ceaseless din of warfare. She retired into a cave, deep in the earth and stayed there, refusing the other gods’ requests to come back to her place in the heavens. Earth and the heavens grew dark and cold. All life was affected. The crops failed and the fish disappeared into the depths of the sea. The plentiful streams that tumbled from the mountains, froze. People cried to the gods for assistance but to no avail.
At last, the gods made a plan. They assembled outside Ameratsu’s cave. They covered the trees in jewels and lit a great fire that gave light and warmth. Then they joined hands and began to dance. One of the goddesses danced so wildly (and a bit disgracefully) that everyone began to laugh.
Deep in her cave, Ameratsu heard the laughter. She was curious and crept to the mouth of the cave. One of the gods was waiting there at the entrance and, as she peeped out, held up a huge mirror in front of her. Ameratsu saw her own shining beauty (which she had forgotten about in the darkness of the earth). When the mirror drew away, she followed. As she emerged, the earth and heavens were filled once more with her light, gradually at first, like the first dawn, then growing stronger as the Sun at midday. The gods and goddesses celebrated her return; the brothers vowed that they would fight no more and the whole land and the people were at peace.

This week some of us celebrate the Feast of Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit on the first followers of Jesus. The symbols of the feast always show a descent of fire from above. In an extraordinary way the disciples were drawn from their fear-filled hiding place in the upper room, out into the streets where they must have sounded like the fiery prophetic voices of the past. Just as Ameratsu gained courage to emerge from the darkness by seeing her own light reflected back to her

Perhaps one way to think of the Holy Spirit is as a great mirror held up to each of us so that we too can know the hidden light we all hold within ourselves.

What is Cosmic Time?

Posted on May 23, 2022 by letitia

Last week, at our monthly retreat day, we took part in a guided meditation – travelling on the Road of Your Life.

It’s a popular meditation but it hadn’t been done for many years so it was a surprise to find that it still had a ‘freshness’ about it.

In a meditation like this, we tend to look back on our life and the kind of road we’ve walked – stony or smooth? And we look forward to see how we are feeling about the future: hopeful or not.

The ‘road travelled’ is mainly about past and future; linear time or ‘chronos’ time. In our contemporary Western societies time is usually seen as ‘linear’. We look back at history in a chronological way – ‘before the Christian Era’ or so many units of time after it.

This clarifies the concept of time for us; makes it manageable and concrete.

But there is another description of Time as Cosmic or Kairos-time. This experience of time happens, I think, when we have a sense of time as ‘standing still’. We seem to be in another reality which is fullness, infinite, mysterious and yet somehow familiar.

We have all had moments when time seems to stand perfectly still and we are held in that stillness; it could be a moment of utter beauty – or otherwise.

The Victorian poet, Edward Thomas, described one of these moments of what we could call ‘ kairos time’ in his little story-poem: Adelstrop.

He is in an express train travelling through the English countryside. Because of the Summer heat, everyone in the carriage is dozing. Unexpectedly, the train stops at a station, there is the hiss of steam and no other sound in the quiet afternoon. In that moment, a kind of hiatus in time, he sees the countryside with a clarity and beauty he has never experienced before.

‘And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloustershire.’

Time and space expanded for him in that moment when he was held in the stillness of the present.

(Sadly, Edward Thomas was killed not long after in the First World War.)

We can all remember moments like his – perhaps holding a newborn baby or watching a sunset or standing in the Australian bush.

Eckhart Tolle, in his book The Power of Now, urges us to practise staying in the Present. It can be quite difficult for some of us but he describes it as powerful- a different experience! Our culture doesn’t encourage us to find these moments of presence but if we can, life can expand for us and we may see things in a new light.