DESIRE

Recently, at my spiritual center, I attended the annual New Year’s Eve Burning Bowl Ceremony. This is always a profound event watching the explosion of flame, gone in an instant the written burdens that have been recorded on flash paper. The perceived “thorns in our vibration” are given to God and gone in a one-second flash as God has no receptacle to be aware of our self-imposed flaws. It was just us and our desire to have these qualities or events gone. And so they were.

Part of the ceremony was a reading from John O’Donahue, author of my favorite book, Anam Cara. This particular line of the reading stuck with me, “may you have the courage to listen to the voice of desire.” I think of ceremoniously moving our acts of desire, to usher out what we see as a hindering of our being and doing better, and a written desire of certain elements to be manifested in our lives. Everything was a prodding of our desire.

I think that desire is the voice of God exploding from within. This is guidance from the Higher Self, saying that this desire points to a possibility. It points to a new direction. We must listen, pay attention, and see what this tiny voice of inspiration is trying to tell us. I remember one of the first people I ever encountered that one might consider mystical. This must have been early in the 1960s, An older lady told me that whenever she had to face a problem or a moment of unsurity she would ask herself, out loud, “What have we here?” Her purpose in saying this was to remind herself that there is a hidden truth behind what is physically apparent.

I would encourage each of us to be on high alert when we feel a desire, to analyze it and discuss it with God. Just start the conversation, the inner dialogue with the question, “What have we here?”

Rev. Pat