"We are knee-deep in a river, searching for water," writes Kabir Helminski, a contemporary Wisdom teacher in the Sufi lineage, using a vivid image to capture the irony of our contemporary plight. The sacred road maps of wholeness still exist in the cosmos. There is a vision large enough to contain not only our minds but also our hearts and souls; an understanding of our place in the divine cosmology large enough to order and unify our lives and our planet. These truths are not esoteric or occult in the usual sense of the terms; they are not hidden from sight. In the Christian West they are strewn literally throughout the entire sacred tradition: in the Bible, the liturgy, the hymnody and chants, the iconography. But to read the clues, it is first necessary to bring the heart and mind and body into balance, to awaken. The One can be known—not in a flash of mystical vision but the clarity of unitive seeing.
Culture has a way of giving us ladders when we need trees, reason when we need myth, and separateness when we need unity. In the music of the universe, there is harmony. The discord, the non-harmonious, is slowly drifting back in to the misty domains of our lost games. Ritual is being restored to rite. With a higher sense of the rhythms of the planet, we can recognize the emerging vision of grace. A grace to honor, not befowl, our Mother. A grace to honor each other as end products of diverse cultural journeys. A grace to become the kind of human that can embody the spiritual. A grace to blend into all that is, was, and shall be.
