The Divine Exchange

Tags

consciousness, Cynthia Bourgeault, divine exchange, encounter, giving, great exchange, Guerillas of Grace, receiving, soul to soul, Ted Loder, Thank You For Each Moment, The Sophia Center for Spirituality

Sometimes it’s difficult to express the depth of meaning in seemingly ordinary events that make up the flow of our lives. Reflecting on the past few days, I could describe two such happenings in sentences like the following:

1. “We had an extraordinary group of girls (ages 10 to 17) and their teachers here at the Spiritual Center this week. They came from Florida to have an experience of life different from their norm and were going from here to New York City before returning home.”
2. “Our Wisdom Practices Circle met yesterday and the sharing was extremely rich.”

What’s missing in both of these examples is the energy of the sharing that can only come in the encounter – soul to soul, we might say. It happened on Wednesday evening when the girls performed part of their dance and poetry recital from the school year. Moreover, their enthusiasm overflowed in every moment of their visit; their joy and interest in everything they saw or heard and shared was intense.

Although it was quieter in our Practices group, the depth was palpable yesterday as we pondered a text entitled “Thank You for Each Moment” written by Ted Loder in his book Guerillas of Grace. It was a powerful poem as was our reflection following the reading and the silences that punctuated the sharing.

As I sit here pondering the effect of these experiences, I am reminded of the teaching of Cynthia Bourgeault on the divine exchange and grateful to understand the experience “from the inside” more today than ever before. In a summary of her work on this concept Cynthia writes the following:

…In the great exchange of giving and receiving, we are fed by and feed other realms outside our earthly reality. We come to see the relationship among the visible and invisible realms not as a ladder of hierarchical steps to climb and escape lower states of being, but as an inter-abiding round dance of self-giving love. As we allow ourselves to participate in the freely flowing exchange of Divine creativity, love is made manifest. Moreover, we humans, as the embodiment of consciousness, are responsible for making that Divine love manifest in this time/space realm. [We] learn how, in following Jesus’ way, we release our essential Self as we help fulfill the deep yearning of the Divine. (The Contemplative Society at http://www.contemplative.org)

My thanks to the “Diamond Mind” girls and their teachers as to my companions in the quest for wisdom for the gift of their presence and example to me.