The following was written five years ago and posted to a Facebook group for alumni of Emissaries of Divine Light. The metaphor of a bombed out church is used to describe my spiritual state at that time. I’m happy to say that invisible masons have been hard at work with the reconstruction, and things are shaping up nicely.
There is only one dream in my entire life that I vividly remember. It came to me in sleep some time before I left Sunrise Ranch and severed my ties with the Emissary spiritual community that I was part of for over twenty years.
The dream takes place in a medieval monastery. There is a raving madman in a cell. The abbot of the monastery, attended by a beautiful nun dressed in a white habit, walk down a long hall and peer into the cell. They look at each other, whereupon the nun opens the cell door and releases the man. He runs out into the street half naked, screaming his head off. I wake from the dream with my heart pounding.
My time in the Emissaries was like a glorious twenty year out of body experience. I am not my body, my mind, my heart; I am!
I was soaring like a bird of prey, spiraling heavenward on the wind currents until slowly, one by one, my feathers (like that of Icarus who flew too close to the sun) fell off and fluttered earthward.
I touched back down on planet earth when I reached the age of fifty, the landing softened only by finding and rekindling again a love long lost. As though the symbolism of this reincarnation needed an exclamation point, my sweetheart, her son, and I moved into an apartment right next door to the hospital where I was born.
I share this prophetic dream and snatch of personal biography as, I believe, that my story and your story may be intertwined in some mysterious way. The diaspora of Emissaries in the years following the death of its leader Martin Exeter, is akin to a great tree casting its seed abroad. As the parable goes, some seed was fortunate to land on rich soil, other seed found the land rocky and difficult of purchase.
It is not simply that the passage of years has weathered and worn down the hard and brittle edges of passionate youth. We have, I suspect, also been shaped and molded like figures of clay and become more human. Divinely human.
I often feel like a priest whose church has been firebombed in the blitz. The beautiful stained glass windows, with their vivid images and iconography, are shattered, letting in the hurly burly of the busy world outside. The roof of the sanctuary is opened up to the sky, and pigeons roost up in the rafters. The magnificent organ, it’s pipes twisted and bent, no longer trumpets the glorious hymns that once thundered from it.
There is a peaceful stillness and solemnity within this shattered sanctuary. It has endured a fiery crucifixion. The once proud temple, with its soaring spire reaching heavenwards, has been brought low. A single candle burns on its broken altar. Only God knows the plan of its restoration.
I would, however, very much like to get that old organ working again.