Saint Modumnoc - 1998

A few years ago I was invited to spend some time in Wales. One day I was introduced to a poet, and we spent hours tramping the commons area around "Arthur's Seat." I had my dowsing rods along, and was sharing earth-healing energy and information with my new friend. It was an amazing day, and so full I was quite exhausted. In fact, I was somewhat tired to begin with, having stayed up late watching videos with my hosts. After they retired I had held out until three a.m., pulled to re-watch Brother Sun, Sister Moon - and I had found myself suddenly bursting into tears during parts of it.

Those episodes of bursting-into-tears during movies about saints of any religion, I've come to realize, are calls from my soul. "Pay attention!" So - I'd been called the night before, and the next installment of the call was soon to materialize.

After a full day of traipsing the commons, my poet friend and I got into his Land Rover. He was driving us along those narrow country lanes the way the Welsh do: very fast, ready to swerve into the bushes should another vehicle with a bigger cow-catcher come around the one-lane curve head-on. I can laugh about that now. That style of driving definitely kept me awake, tired as I was. My friend very much wanted to show me just one more thing: the site of some ancient healing springs. Wearily, I consented.

We drove up to park outside a fenced churchyard. The moment we stepped inside the gate, my arms felt a little strange: sort of lit-up and buzzy, from fingertips to elbows. I mentioned this to the little old lady who was greeting people by the door of the stone church. People in the British Isles are fairly cheery about psychics, intuitives, and healers, whereas, in the more puritan USA, people like me are thought of as odd or exotic. In the British Isles they're simply trained and licensed, and put to work helping folks. So I was not worried about mentioning the strange feelings around my forearms to this lady. And she was not the least bit put off by my words. She simply said, "Oh! Maybe that's the old Vicar."

I must have looked puzzled. She explained that the Vicar had passed away some thirty years earlier; but he used to keep bees, and would sometimes walk around with "bee gloves" - with bees covering his forearms, that is. As soon as she explained this, the funny feeling went away. I'd been given my official "welcome" by the old Vicar and his bees.

My poet friend took me down the little hill to the ancient healing springs. He said they'd been used long, long before the Christian church was built on the land. I ended up doing some more earth-healing around the energy of the springs, removing ancient curses and so forth.

Soon the little old lady was motioning us to come up to the church. My friend was not happy with that prospect, since he had negative feelings from other lives when he'd been persecuted by religious torture. I had some such memories, but I also am an ordained Christian minister and a refuged Buddhist, and had quite positive feelings about the church, especially after the Vicar's warm bee-welcome. So up to the church we went, just as a local ceremony was about to begin.

The moment I stepped into the church, my hat got too small for my head. I know that sounds strange, but the intuitives among you will easily relate to this experience, especially if you're empaths like me! The hat I'd been wearing on and off for the last three days suddenly felt so small and tight I had to take it off. Somebody big - BIG - was merging with me.

My friend and I found a seat in an ancient rough-wood pew near the front, and the service began. I had a bit of a hard time paying full attention to the service, since the spirit who had merged with me was so intriguing. It was male, a large man, and a monk. I could feel the rough robe, and the haircut - the monk's tonsure. And more than that, I could feel that this was a saint. How did I know that? This is how: the woman leading the service said something like, "You might want to consider the trials you've been through earlier in your lives - notice how they've strengthened you for other later tests and trials...", and the monk, the saint, who had merged with me, glowed. I could feel that glow so hugely and so intensely, that I had a terrible time not bursting into tears! The glow was quite lovely, but really overwhelming. It happened several times.

As the service went on I found out who this saint was. The youth group put on a little play about an ancient monk, one of the very earliest Christians in the British Isles, Modumnoc by name. Modumnoc had been in Wales, and then God called him back to Ireland. He set out in his coracle to cross over to Ireland, and halfway over he was joined by a swarm of bees. When he set up his mission in Ireland, he taught not only basic Christian principles, but beekeeping. As I heard that, of course I wondered whether perhaps St. Modumnoc had influenced the old Vicar!

After the service was over, I found the woman who had been leading the event, and told her about the monk and the glow. In a situation like that, it's not considered appropriate to get excited about such happenings, since that excitement may lead to spiritual egotism. I understood that, and was grateful for this woman's sensible grounding energy. She helped me come back-to-earth. I asked her what denomination this tiny village congregation in this ancient stone chapel was. She told me they were "Third-Order" Franciscans.

AH! St. Francis - Brother Sun, Sister Moon, and the tears of the call the previous evening.

I inquired further, and she explained that Franciscans now fall into three categories: First-Order Franciscans are those who lived and worked with Saint Francis himself. Second-Order Franciscans are the order founded by Francis, and taken over by the Catholic hierarchy. Third-Order Franciscans are of the ordinary people: not ordained by the church so much as directly called by the saint.

That day, in a sudden flash, I considered my life so far - including the book I'd been reading on the plane over from the USA. It was a book about the Atlantean metaphysical way of seeing / being in the world. With all my shamanic studies, trainings, and practice, and rememberings from past lives, I comprehended that way of seeing things easily. But, I realized, after my call from St. Francis and my anointing by St. Madomnoc, that the Atlantean way of thinking and analyzing no longer engaged my heart's desire. In this life, I realized, I wanted the gift of the simplicity that comes from complete devotion to the love of God-in-all-beings. Because I had been allowed to feel what it feels like to be a saint, now nothing else but to travel the path towards sainthood would do.

I understood, during that merging with St. Modomnoc that the reason holy people don't need much in the way of material stuff, is because every teen-tiny good thing feels so incredibly great - indeed, so overwhelmingly fine and beyond that - way, way beyond - that to have too much stuff is unbearable. Who needs it?!

Climbing Tree In The Glen - 1990

In my days as a naturalist in Eco-Camp at Glen Helen*, I alternated between Discovery groups (age 5-6) and Arts Camp groups (young teens interested in a combination of nature and arts). I loved both ages. I only had one really difficult group, and it was difficult simply because the young teens were so overloaded with sophistication that they were bored with the simple good things of life. Perhaps "bored" is the wrong word to use here. Actually, they seemed to have some sort of barrier against receiving the feeling-experience of Nature.
During most of their week of camp we did the usual things, which had always been rich and fascinating for my other groups: we hiked the Glen, found the bee tree, drank from the iron-golden waters of the yellow spring; we found snakes, walked the creek, and of course, made plenty of art. But there was no spark! The kids got most of their excitement from putting each other down and shifting little clique energies. The one thing that seemed to light them up just a little was our quick-time hike back for lunch on Wednesday: we passed the Climbing Tree. The Climbing Tree is a large old osage orange, long dead - and it's the only tree in the Glen that the campers are allowed to climb. That particular day we had no time to stop and climb, so I promised my young folks that we would hike to the Climbing Tree on Thursday night, which was always our no-flashlight hike night.
Thursday dawned, and my teens were again moody and clique-y and generally unpleasant in some elitist way I still could not break through. We were discussing our skit for Friday's end-of-camp performance. The skit the group was brainstorming was just plain unpleasant. I worked to open the kids to other ways of seeing, but had no real luck with that.
Finally evening came. All the groups of campers and their naturalists were gathering and heading out on the trails. The naturalists all had their stash of Wint-O-Green Lifesavers, the kind that, when you crunch down on them in the dark, produce flashes and sparks - our little bit of night magic. My group was eager - for once! - to get on down the trail. We got to the Climbing Tree, they began to climb into its limbs, and soon all six teens were up in the top of the Tree. Then - an act of God! I don't know how else to describe what happened. As soon as all the kids were up in the Tree, a whirlwind came and shook the Tree! Nothing else around was touched by that Wind. Not even I, standing at the base of the Tree, was touched. The Wind shook the Tree furiously, and scared those young people so that they all screamed for help!
I said, simply, "BREATHE." My presence, my voice, everything about me, was directing those kids to find their calm center, stop screaming, and breathe.
As soon as they did, the Wind stopped. Everything was perfectly calm. The campers came down out of the Tree and were in a hurry to get back to the dining hall and cocoa. We had to hike until it was pitch dark, first, of course, so they could bite their magic Lifesavers. I have to say, that little human magic was nothing compared to the holy terror they had just experienced in the Tree.
On Friday we hiked out to a good place to practice the end-of-camp skit. The kids had a lot of ideas, but mostly, they were developing something secret. I'm a theater person - I love directing improv and on-your-feet playwrighting - but this time the campers wanted to work without me. It felt all right for me to wait quietly at a distance down the trail. Their secret felt like a good one, not exclusivity.
Time came for the final cookout, whole-camp picnic, and all the skits. When my group got up, they amazed me with what they did - not because of how talented they were, or because of the quality of their work, but because, in the space of the last twenty-four hours they had made a sea-change as a group. They had been truly and deeply soul-shaken at the Climbing Tree. Their skit? They acted out what had happened to them in the Tree the previous evening. When they got to the part where I told them to breathe, the one who was playing me said, "BREATHE!" Something came through her voice and her presence. Something good, something right, something powerful - and the whole audience was still. We all felt it.
I think of that group of kids every now and then. Who could ever forget such a dramatic visitation? Whenever I feel discouraged about all the separativism and elitism and this-and-that-ism of divided, warmongering humanity, I think about that moment: the youngsters in the tree, the power of the wind, the strength of the breath - and I get very still inside, knowing that Love itself WILL intervene when the time is right. And then I just breathe.

Kagyu Changchub Chuling: Taking Refuge - 2000

A few years ago I was living in a small garden community in Portland, Oregon's Rose City area: Mir Cabaaning. Sid and Marilyn, who owned the property, were printers. One of their clients was Sanje Elliott, former head of the Art Department at Naropa University, and a master thangka painter. When I met Sanje I was also undergoing a profound visionary period during which I was having encounters with various deities of all religions. I was spending hours with Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, receiving teachings and empowerments. When I found out that Sanje was about to start teaching a beginning thangka painting class, I was thrilled. I signed up.

There were four of us students. Sanje's routine was to begin with a little song in Tibetan, really a prayer - which we'd say in English as well:

So nam, di yi tam chezig pah nye top ne nyeh pay dranam pah jene kye ga na chi ba lap truk pay yi si pay tso le dro wa drol war sho

By this virtue may we become enlightened, and, having vanquished all negativie influences, liberate all beings from the ocean of existence, which is turbid with the waves of birth, old age, sickness, and death. Tuji che.

We went down to the basement to watch an hour of slides of Buddhas rendered in paintings and sculptures from all over the world. Then we would go back upstairs to our thigses (basic proportioned grids/drawings), drawings, and finally, paintings. We received the previous week's drawing with Sanje's comments. We then corrected our work, and moved on to our next level. Sanje always made us chai with a little vibhuti (sacred ash) from Sai Baba in it, and there was always good sacred chanting on the CD player, and we could talk.

One morning Sanje asked if any of had ever had the experience of suddenly bursting into tears when encountering some form of Buddhism - perhaps music, movies, art.....And several of us raised our hands. I was amazed and relieved to see that others had been through this, too! For me, every time I had seen a movie about Buddhism, such as The Little Buddha, or Seven Years In Tibet, or Kundun, at some point in the movie I had burst into tears. Now Sanje was telling us that this was a typical response for those who had had a number of previous lives as Buddhists - we were being "called home."
Ah.
This made the deepest kind of sense to me, especially since I was still experiencing communication - hours of it at a time - from deities arriving in my space on huge lotuses. Through my shamanic training I'd become used to communicating with all sorts of beings in this way; but these encounters with Buddhas and Bodhisattvas were really pushing me hard. I began to think that perhaps if I were to ground myself in formal Buddhism - take refuge in a sangha in this life - that this pressure might ease.

I finally called Lama Michael Conklin of Kagyu Changchub Chuling. I had to call three times before he answered. Later I realized that it was important for me to "knock three times" before receiving an answer - an ancient spiritual tradition. I began attending sangha, and finally I had the opportunity to take refuge. There were a number of us who went through the ritual that day. We each made three full prostrations before entering the meditation room. Lama Michael gave us instructions, and then cut a lock of each person's hair. The whole sangha was enjoying the ritual, and members were lightheartedly teasing initiates about the hair-cutting. Though I'm not shy, I was glad to be only one in a group of newbies this day. After the hair-cutting, Lama Michael gave us our Tibetan refuge names.

Something did change for me, energetically. It did happen that the Deities on the lotuses began to allow me more "normal" time after I took refuge. That was an immense relief. I sometimes joke, nowadays, that other people take refuge with the Buddha - but I took refuge from the Buddha(s).

Sister Emptymind

Meriah hadn't anywhere to go, really. She stayed in one place for many years. She had a longing to be set free, but no one to partner with in order to make the leap. She thought, all that time, that she needed a partner. At least someone to notice. She had a plant she talked to sometimes, a scraggly fern in a dime-store pot. She had inherited it from her last relative, an aunt who'd been found three days dead under a collapsed pile of stacked newspapers, magazines, books, and junk mail.
Aunt Leta's apartment had to be cleaned out, and Meriah had no inclination to hire anyone. She wanted to be quiet and private and in her own sort of time with the task. There was paper money hidden in the newspapers, she discovered; and there were cans and jars of coins stashed in odd corners. The piano was filled with them. Out of all the money and odd trinkets and vintage clothing and classic books, the only thing Meriah took-to was the dime-store pot with the scraggly fern in it. She used part of the money to pay off Aunt Leta's broken lease so the landlord would quit hounding her. Most of it went to pay off the funeral costs she had put on her credit card, so she could maintain her perfect monthly payment record. She took the clothing and costume jewelry and knicknacks to a thrift store and was glad to unload them. She had no room for such things in her spotless, spare, spartan apartment. She had no room. It was emptiness that mattered.
When she thought about it one day, and said to herself that emptiness mattered to her, she realized, somehow, that she was less unimportant than she had thought. Perhaps it was something to be empty. Not something that you would get on TV for, not something anyone would care to read about in the newspaper headlines - but still, it was something. Over the years, she realized, it had become a sort of treasure.
Two days later she decided to go for a walk after work instead of going straight home to her perfect daily routine. She walked and forgot herself, wondering about emptiness. She saw an empty tin can rolling in the wind of a March day, and she tapped it with her foot. No one looking could assume that this fifty-eight-year-old empty person had deliberately kicked a can. Nevertheless, she kicked it, and it made a sound.

The next thing she knew she had turned some corner somewhere, and had come to a gateway. There was a metal bell hanging next to the gate, shaped much like the can she had kicked. It had a wooden bell-banger attached to it. She reached up and took the wood, and tapped the bell. Something in her desired her to tap it again. She did so. And a third time.
On the third tap of the bell, the small gate opened and a tiny bent-over head-shaven nun whom Meriah thought must be Buddhist, bowed and nodded a welcome. Meriah did not know what else to do. I'm here, she thought. This is where I was going all along. I am empty, and now I am here.
Days or months or years or perhaps lives later, it came to Sister EmptyMind that in her life as Meriah she had been waiting. Simply waiting. The right day, the right time, the right sound, the open door. In her life as a nun Sister EmptyMind began to paint. There were no words for what she discovered she knew. Chanting, meditating, gardening, monastery chores...and painting the sacred thangkas. Prayers in every tiny dot of color; prayers in the thigse-form of the Buddha, the Lotus, the Bodhisattvas; prayers in the jewels, the robes, the ordering of the figures, the stillness and dance, the sacred texts; prayers in the finished thangkas, with their pieced-damask framings and rich silken tassels.
Sister EmptyMind had heart for this way. It was the way she loved, the breath and sitting and ceremony and stillness, the order. Her essential being knew the Four Noble Truths, knew the Eightfold Path. It was not a human partner after all, whom she had needed to move her on her way. It was the partnering with the sangha. Once the cleaning of Aunt Leta's death-life leavings had been accomplished, Sister EmptyMind, ready-in-heart for partnering, had found what she needed: the monastery. In the sangha her heart smiled, and love poured through her hands.
At her deathing-time for this incarnation, Sister EmptyMind's fellow nuns remembered that she had brought along a scraggly fern in a dime-store pot when she joined the monastery. Over the years the fern had grown - it had been divided, re-potted, its rootlings given-away many times over; and yet it was still with the nuns. Out in the monastery garden, by the water-over-stone remembering place, the nuns took the fern out of its pot for the final time. They had already scattered Sister EmptyMind's ashes in a ceremony by the river. A small portion of the ashes, however, had been kept to mix with the soil in the hole they dug for the fern in the garden. The fern was planted. Sister EmptyMind would be back. She had taken the vow of the Bodhisattva. But for now, it was enough to be partnering with the mystery of fern-mind beingness. It was enough.
And her thangkas? Unsigned, full of prayers, they traveled. People bought them as gifts for other monasteries, for teachers, for their sanghas. All those prayers. They traveled.
May you be happy, and may all beings be happy. May the inner and outer worlds and universes communicate happiness in all time, space, and dimensional existence. And may we all be happy and free.

Rev Ruthie - 1994

A number of years ago, when I was starting my spiritual healing practice, the buzz was that if one didn't have counseling certification or a massage license or some other degree or certification, then it was advisable to get ordained, as a form of privacy protection for clients' records and information.

One of my healer friends located someone who was ordaining people under the auspices of THE COURSE IN MIRACLES. I had worked with the C.I.M. and liked the teachings. This man also said he only ordained the Inner Child (the part of us that is capable of miraculous things), using the Biblical text, "Blessed are the Peacemakers, for they shall be called the Children of God." As a peacemaker, someone with a strong love of children, and someone in relationship with my own inner child, this felt perfectly right to me. He also agreed to allow me to work with my own ceremonial tools and leadings as part of the ordination. That, too, felt right. We set the date for the following week.

The night before the ceremony I was pretty sure I knew what I'd wear. Something fairly dignified - at least neat. I knew that my inner child's name was Ruth. I had discovered that in a dream some months before. That pleased me. Though brought up Christian in this life, I relate strongly to a number of other traditions from various of my past lives as Buddhist, Greek, Native American, Celt, Hebrew, and so forth. Ruth, mother of the lineage of David and Jesus, has always been a heroine of mine. Ruth's words, "Whither thou goest, I will go. Whither thou stayeth, I will stay," have great beauty and deep meaning for me. So - Ruth/Carolion was all set to be ordained the following morning.

There was a little surprise, though, when I woke up. Ruth was running the day, it turned out. The outfit I'd decided on the night before did not suit this part of me, Ruth, and it was her ceremony. She wanted to wear a striped t-shirt and some other things appropriate, really, for a child experimenting with dressing herself the way she wanted to dress. The energy for this was so strong that I was charmed. I thought, well, it's time to love that part of me unconditionally and really show her/me how valuable she is. We - I - dressed the way Ruth wanted me to, loud striped socks and t-shirt and all. Luckily for Ruthie, as a theater person I feel "normal" in costumes which might horrify some others, and I enjoy taking on characters - a trait which might raise eyebrows in psychiatric circles.

I drove to a town about an hour away from home, where the minister doing the ordination lived. I brought my drum and rattle, my flute, and some sage. He read from his ordaining text, and I followed my intuitive leadings making sacred ceremony. At one point I remember glancing at a portrait of Jesus in the room, and feeling it was carrying living energy, and was participating in my ordination; I felt watched-over, truly and profoundly connected, and very blessed.

After the ceremony, I took my Ruth self - now "Rev Ruthie," by the way - out for a hot fudge sundae covered with whipped cream and LOTS of cherries.

I began receiving more and more direct teachings from Jesus, who is not only deeply compassionate, but also warm and often quite funny. He explained to me that my ordination was not just a legal thing, not just a piece of paper. He said more was expected of me; that I would have ministerial responsibilities. I also gained the knowing that there were certain ancestral empowerments that could only come to me if I were ordained: they came from Druid ancestors, through a great-grandfather who had been a traveling Methodist preacher in England and Wales. As a healer I value spiritual empowerments, since they allow me to do higher-vibrational work and help people in deeper ways, so I was more than happy to receive them.

As the years have gone by, I've found the minister part of me growing stronger and stronger. Several of the teachings of Jesus I learned as a child are tools in my way as a peacemaker / spiritual warrior:

• love thine enemy; do good to them that hate you

• judge not lest ye be so judged

• do unto others as you would have them do unto you

• let the little children come unto me, for of such is the kingdom of heaven

• my father's house hath many [inner] mansions

But primarily, over and over again, love thine enemy turns out to be most important for my peace work. I've been driven by something inside to find out how, exactly, to do that - love the enemy. These days I teach that practice.

I'm now an ordained Christian minister, still; but also, a refuged Buddhist. I also love singing Hindu Kirtans; I'm part of the All-Cultures Powwow; and I'm a member of our village Interspiritual Council which includes a number of religions. I find that each one, when held in the light of Love, enhances every other one. Indeed, Creator tells me that all religions are fingers on a single hand - the Helping Hand. I wonder, might that be the one hand clapping of the Zen koan?

And what of Rev Ruthie? Well - she seems to be happily integrated with the rest of me now. One might even say she's working under an assumed name: Carolion. Ah, the ways of the soul. The ways, and ways, and ways of that wanderer, the soul.

Butterfly Sutra: 6-Part Haiku - 2007

I. Heart Coccoon

Building her own Jail;

Self-sentence: death-rebirthing -

Goal? Surrendered Heart.

II. Holy-of-Holies

Prison was, for her,

A time of self-dissolving;

Emerging, she soared.

III. LoveLight

Flow, Law, Chaos, Aum:

Sleeping, Desire, Darkness, Flight -

Beauty serving Love.

IV. The Word

Rising, merged with Aummmmm,

Fertilized - Golden eggs laid -

Each, a sacred text.

V. The Portal

Flying through Love's breath,

Outer strength now fading fast,

Beauty drifting Home.

VI. Communion

Meditator sits,

Green-skinned, on his lotus pad.

Soon, a meal of Light.