The Little Flame in All Things
The Spirit-fire is the little flame, the creative life, at the heart of everything.
- Roland Faber
Many a time I walk into a sanctuary because I need a place to feel with something more than me, with God. I will pray. If there is someone I want to pray for in a special way, I light a candle and hold that person in my heart through the candle.
There's something about the light of the candle that is illuminating and life-giving. Perhaps it embodies the spirit of what Roland Faber calls "the little flame" in each heart and in all things. He calls it the spirit-fire and compares it to the sun, suggesting that everyone, everything, has a sun in its heart. The little flame, the sun inside each heart, is a magnetic force that is gentle and loving.
Here is how he puts it in his book The Cosmic Spirit: Awakenings at the Heart of All Religions, the Earth, and the Multiverse (Cascade Press, 2021).
There's something about the light of the candle that is illuminating and life-giving. Perhaps it embodies the spirit of what Roland Faber calls "the little flame" in each heart and in all things. He calls it the spirit-fire and compares it to the sun, suggesting that everyone, everything, has a sun in its heart. The little flame, the sun inside each heart, is a magnetic force that is gentle and loving.
Here is how he puts it in his book The Cosmic Spirit: Awakenings at the Heart of All Religions, the Earth, and the Multiverse (Cascade Press, 2021).
This understanding of the spirit-space and spirit-fire, if it is taken seriously, harbors fundamental spiritual insights that will change our perception of the reality in which we live...The divine dimension of this encounter lies in the attraction to beauty, harmony, intensity, and mutuality...God is the Eros of mutual appeal at the heart of all things, ever so gently suggesting itself as the ever-greater respect for, preservation of, transformation with, and liberation to the little flame of creative life in all things. (Roland Faber, The Cosmic Spirit)
In the spirit-space, there is no external force of compulsion, only the compulsions by which we resist this process of the embodiments of spiritualization. Indeed, if the heart makes itself the spirit-place, there is a great power in this little spirit-flame. At the heart of everything is the place of the encounter with the infinite “suns” of the Spirit, the place of the revelation of God in an infinity of creative power. (Roland Faber, The Cosmic Spirit)
It is the grace of this mystery that its infinite “suns” are enfolded in the little flame that must be accessed in humility, in sym-pathy and with compassion to all things. To access this spiritual flame in modes of altered consciousness and with a pure heart in states of contemplation and through actions of love and compassion transfigures our view—if only for a time, until impermanence prevails, a process of enfolding veils the heart again and “seamless” exteriority takes over the punctiform multiplicity of the inner heat and light. These are the moments when we can see the heart of another being and act in sym-pathy and in a creative harmonization with it. This is the state in which we might experience God in all things (like St. Francis of Assisi), or release and realize Christ in the excluded (Matthew 25), or find Krishna in the overwhelming cosmic multiplicity (Bhagavad Gita, ch. 11), or encounter the Buddha as our nature, or be struck with the Sinai experience (Exodus 33) that might shock us with a force that, in the Qur’an, caused Moses to faint (Qur’an 7:143). (Roland Faber, The Cosmic Spirit)
There is a quietness, an aloneness, when I am in the presence of the candle flame. Sometimes all of our talk about relational selfhood forgets the reality of privacy, of being alone with a candle. To be sure, even the aloneness is relational. As Faber makes clear, the little flame is an invitation to be with others and with the whole of creation. It is connective. But the connectiveness is felt in private and quiet way. I feel this in the natural silence of the sanctuary, too.
The silence of the candles and the silence of the sanctuary go together. They create a mood of silence which also dwells in the heart. It is a place of listening and care, love and concern. If you have similar feelings and needs, the passages below from John O'Donohue may give you words for the experience, as they do me. He speaks of this silence as a threshold where the visible meets the invisible. I agree. The silence of the sanctuary like the silence of the candle lead us into the little flame that holds all things together, all the time, in love.
- Jay McDaniel, 5/25/2021
There is a quietness, an aloneness, when I am in the presence of the candle flame. Sometimes all of our talk about relational selfhood forgets the reality of privacy, of being alone with a candle. To be sure, even the aloneness is relational. As Faber makes clear, the little flame is an invitation to be with others and with the whole of creation. It is connective. But the connectiveness is felt in private and quiet way. I feel this in the natural silence of the sanctuary, too.
The silence of the candles and the silence of the sanctuary go together. They create a mood of silence which also dwells in the heart. It is a place of listening and care, love and concern. If you have similar feelings and needs, the passages below from John O'Donohue may give you words for the experience, as they do me. He speaks of this silence as a threshold where the visible meets the invisible. I agree. The silence of the sanctuary like the silence of the candle lead us into the little flame that holds all things together, all the time, in love.
- Jay McDaniel, 5/25/2021
The Natural Silence of a Sanctuary
Excerpts from John O'Donohue's Beauty: The Invisible Embrace
THIS SANCTUARY HOLDS A SPECIAL PRIVACY. WITHIN THIS EMBRACE there is no barrier between you and the intimacy of the divine heart. Nor is there a barrier between you and the dead. The outside world is relentless in its urgency and stress; the politics of the obvious dominates everything. Subtle presence is largely unable to register its companionship with us. The dead are abandoned in their graveyards to grow deeper into the stillness of the forgotten. But in this sanctuary their subtle presence hovers nearer; here is where time deepens to reveal its eternal embrace. For eternal life is eternal memory. In its natural silence and deep rituals, space opens here to coax the eternal more fully among us. Within this sacred space, time loses its linearity, its loneliness. It opens up and suggests itself as an ancient circle of belonging in which past and future, time lived and time to be lived, form ultimate presence. From ancient times people have understood the house of God to be the sacred ground from where it is wise to begin a journey:initiation as the journey of life in Spirit, and requiem as the beginning of the invisible journey.
In a great religious tradition, the house of God is a special place. The church, the temple, the mosque is where a community gathers to hear God. Cumulatively, over years the interior becomes threaded with the desires, intimacies and longings of a community. The interior of God’s house is not a vacant space; it is the place where the spiritual Eros of a community collects. This interior is richly textured with the aura of those who have worshipped there. When one enters there one does not simply enter a building; rather one enters unknowingly the gathered memory. This house is a living archive of transcendence. This is the space where the voice of God became audible, where that tranquillity which the world cannot give waits to comfort the mind. People have come into this house with burdens of heart that could find healing nowhere else in the world. They have come in here for shelter when storms have unravelled every stitch of meaning from their lives. And they have come in too to give thanks for blessings and gifts they could never have earned. The house of God is a frontier region, an intense threshold where the visible world meets the ultimate but subtle structures of the invisible world. We enter this silence and stillness in order to decipher the creative depths of the divine imagination that dreams our lives. Somewhere in this kept-darkness the affection that created us waits to bless and heal us. (John O'Dononue, Beauty: The Divine Embrace)