LET THERE BE LIGHT
In the beginning, astronomers declare, there was only the blackness of space: no movement, no light, no life. Then out of utter stillness there began to be a moving, a pulsing (breath of God? the Word of God going forth?) and this moving and radiating energy was, and is, a kind of light, though the human eye cannot see it. ( HPB p. 12)
DYNAMIS THEO IN REDEMPTION
Divine action cleanses the universe, pervading and flowing over all creatures. Wherever they are it pursues them. It precedes them, accompanies them, follows them. We have only to allow ourselves to be borne along on its tide. (SPM p. 3)
DYNAMIS THEO IN LIFE
God is everywhere. Everything proclaims him to you, everything reveals him to you, everything brings him to you. He is by your side, over you, around and in you. (SPM p. 18)
GOD IN EVERYTHING, HIDDEN IN A CLOUD
To live by faith, then, is to live in joy, confidence, certainty and trust in all there is to do and suffer each moment as ordained by God. However mysterious it may seem, it is in order to awaken and maintain this living faith that God drags the soul through tumultuousfloods of so much suffering, trouble, perplexity, weariness and ruin. For faith is needed to discover in all this God and that divine life which can neither be seen nor felt but, nevertheless, in some mysterious way, unmistakably reveals itself. Death in the body, damnation in the soul, ruin in the world are the nourishment and support of faith, which breaking through these, holds on to the hand of God offering life wherever there is no sign of sin. Faithful souls, full of confidence, must see God in everything, hidden in a cloud, whose closer presence disturbs and scares the senses. (SPM p. 23)
FLOW
When the greatest Conductor of God’s love appeared among men, He found these channels almost completely blocked by many things that were not love. The hate and fear and misery of man had built, as it were, a dam in the very air surrounding this globe, a thought-vibration of evil so powerful that the main current of God’s love could not get through, as sunlight cannot get through a thundercloud. By his outpouring of love He broke that dam, and reconnected man with God, who is love. (HL p. 40)
ABIDE
We live in God. That’s what we breathe. And this is so whether we know it or not. But we can absorb either more or less of His life-force according to the receptivity of our spirits. (HL p. 62)
YELLOW IRIS
Having borne our sins He turned them into holiness, and sent them forth into the air again cleansed and purified. Having received man’s hate He turned it into love and directed it out into the world again. So He cleansed the thought-vibrations that surround this globe as a purifying plant cleanses our drinking water, taking it in dirty, throwing it up into the sunlight and sending it forth clean. So He removed the thunder-cloud of man’s hate and released the clear shining of God’s love. (HL p. 122)
DYNAMIS THEO IN CREATION
Creator forever broods over His creation, his arm still strong to save and to re-create, and that he intervenes directly when the need and the faith of man make it possible for Him to do so. He is still able to “manipulate”- to perform, to act, to work His works of salvation of the soul of man and of the soul of this little planet earth. ( HGS p. 20)
VOICE OF GOD
The simplest and oldest way, then in which God manifests Himself is not through people but through and in the earth itself. (HGS p. 25)
STILL
And He still speaks to us through the earth and sea, the birds of the air and the little living creatures upon the earth, if we can but quiet ourselves to listen.
A PART OF GOD
You see, God is actually in the flowers and the growing grass and all the little chirping, singing things, He made everything out of Himself and somehow he put a part of Himself into everything. ( HGS p. 31)
BANQUET
YOU PREPARE A TABLE BEFORE ME
SURELY YOUR GOODNESS AND LOVE WILL FOLLOW ME ALL THE DAYS OF MY LIFE
AND I WILL DWELL IN THE HOUSE OF THE LORD FOREVER
BREATH OF GOD
The Spirit and the power of God abide in us. We are not one person but two. In all of you who read, there is the one visible in the mirror, and there is the other one, existing at a different vibration of energy, who is not visible in the mirror. This other one, the spirit or the spiritual body, interpenetrates the body of flesh. You are living in two bodies at the same time. This one is mortal, and the other is immortal. (HPB p. 12)
GOD-the most passionate and persistent of creators.
He is delighted and fascinated with the act of creation, both of things inconceivably great and of things unbelievably small. (HPB p. 25)
CLOTHED IN LIGHT
The original creativity of God that brought forth the worlds in the beginning still shone within them and around them. It was through this light-this creative energy-that man was to continue the work of creation. For the light of God, shining through him, would enrich the earth. The essence of God through him was life unto the earth and the balance of nature was preserved so long as the balance of the spirit was preserved in man.
(HPB p. 28)
WORDS DO NOT DIE
They cry of rage from the murderer, and of anguish from the murdered, fad out from the ear, but not from the heart. The finer vibrations of them remain in the air and, though not audible to the ear, are sensible to the heart. They can be felt though they cannot be heard. And the more emotion there is behind the thoughts. The more they permeate and influence the air and the earth. (HPB p. 36)
POWER RELEASED
God Himself came to earth, and shed his blood willingly to take away the poison of condemnation from the earth. The power of his sacrifice is now realeased to the earth and it is for us to apply it. 9HPB p. 49)
HEALED
Best of all, one can know that the most poisonous thing within us- our darkest secret and our most disgusting sin-can be transformed, lifted up, and made our greatest source of life and healing. (HPB p. 81)
APPERCEPTION
The poet Denise Levertov wrote, “Since almost all experience goes by too fast, too superficially for our apperception, what wer most need is not to re-taste it (just as superficially) but really to taste for the first time the gratuitous, the autonomous identity of its essence. (RT p. 6)
SEE
“Anything can make us look,” saus poet Archibald MacLeish, “only art makes us see.”
(RT P. 15)
INCENSE-PRAYER
The sense of smell is associated with prayer. The bowls of incense, representing the prayers of the church, can be both seen and smelled. The sense of smell is not only the most subtle and delicate of human senses, it is also he most iconic, in that it involves the entire human sensorium more fully than any other sense. The sense of smell is the sensory analogue to prayer. Prayer cannot be practiced in detachment. Invisible and involving, prayer penetrates and permeates. (RT p. 17)
HEAVENLY FIRE
Christ came to send heavenly fire on earth (RT p. 32) Fire penetrates and transforms. The fire will burn us until we worship thus; … (p. 35)
CIRLE OF LIGHT
“The light shins in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” Light reveals order and beauty. Or, if there is something to be feared, the light shows the evil in proportionate relationship to all that is not to be feared.
(RT p. 38)
We do not live in darkness, but in light. We are not cursed; we are blessed. Light, not darkeness, is the fundamental reality in which we live. And God is light. (p. 38)
LIGHT
A great effusion of light, a dazzling incandescence. Light cascades from the image in great force and quantity, and floods the churches. It is the first-day light of Genesis, and he light that enlightens every person who comes into the world. The light does two things: it exposes what is sinful to the healing warmth of the light. The light reveals and heals. (RTp. 50)
LIVES DEFACED BY SIN
Light with the colors of precious stones (jasper, carnelian,emerald) bathes everyone gathered in worship. Lives that have been defaced by sin into blurred charcoal outlines arenow seen in their true colors. Every faded tint and wavering line are restored to original sharpness and hue. Precious stones are precious because they collect and intensify light. Light is full of color, all colors. But our dull eyes are unpreceptive. (RTp 63)
EVIL IS CONTAINED
War is social evil; famine is ecological evil, sicknss is biological evil. War attacks the goodness of community; famine violates and ravages God’s bounty sickness destroys and wastes God-given bodies, sins against society, sins gainst the land, sins against the body. (p. 80)
Nothing that we experience as evil is unnoticed or unacknowledged. It is all out in the open, included in the preached meaning of history. Christians do not shut their eyes to the world’s cruelty in themselves or others. (p. 80)
The first seal is revelation of Christ triumphant over evil, and the seventh is a revelation of the attentive silence in heaven in which the prayers of every believer are carefully heard and answered. All evil takes place between that beginning and ending. Evil is contained. (p. 85)
SILENCE
The silence prepares the imagination to receive an incredible truth. (p. 87)
ATTENTIVENESS
He was in a prepared posture of receptivity before God (p. 90)
Passionate waiting that bring us to the point of hearing, seeing and receiving God’s fullness. (p. 91)
