We have, in our Judeo-Christian culture, managed to associate the season of Spring with redemption; rebirth with freedom and saving. Saving a whole people. Saving souls. Redemption offers a promise of life everlasting through acceptance and forgiveness. Redemption offers, as well, personal sacrifice as an opportunity for completion.
These are interesting linkages to contemplate and consider as implants in our psyches, and much more, perhaps. How can we structure a spiritually driven map which outlines a new definition of giving, receiving, healing and development?
It has been said that the New Millennium offers us awakened consciousness. To me this means being reborn as an aware, fully empowered being, taking full responsibility for myself as part of the All That Is (God/Goddess). To cast ourselves as mythical characters on a journey through the Exodus story, through the Easter story, opens wide the possibility of accepting what one feels guided to understand as a divinely dictated path of sacrifice, courage, love, surrender and reawakening.
How would your life play out with this dictate? At this moment, what might you imagine you are being asked to let go of? Do you sacrifice for the greater good? Can you love beyond yourself? What will you courageously stand for?
Can you surrender a whole way of doing, being, thinking, for a fully re-birthed, divinely conscious self? What do these words mean to you? Can you bring yourself to stretch your understanding, acceptance and capacity to forgive yourself and all others, all history from a place of compassion, of irrelevance?
The Exodus and the Easter stories teach us that all of this doesn’t come cheap. It costs on many levels. There is great pain and suffering as a kind of exchange, perhaps, for the vast, terrible pain and suffering that comes through slavery, ignorance, missing information, missing guidance. Results, though, are bathed in light, ascension, celebration, affirmation. In return we enter the other side.
Can you find and envision your other side? Ask what it costs you to get there. Ask what support you need from spirit. Ask what it is you are willing to do, or perhaps, what you can simply no longer avoid. Let yourself be recreated as something larger than anything you ever dreamed you were, or were capable of becoming. What is this loving sacrifice that comes from a new place of understanding, trust and spiritual grounding with which you may redeem yourself and others, as you are called?
The personal sacrifice is, of course, the ego. We are nothing in the physical world, knowing our bodies are literally dust. We prove, through evolution, awareness, and commitment that we can wholeheartedly offer ourselves to another as a brother or a sister from a deep place of honesty, caring nothing for our own conditioned need for external security and validation.
Speaking what the heart knows to be true transcends cultural, societal boundaries and dictates, and does not demand obeisance or come from preconceived requirement. We can therefore let go of expectation and fear of loss, moving beyond ã carried into what our Judeo-Christian world calls the divine plan. When we feel part of a great mystery we are transmuted, and can be as a divining rod to support others transformations. New relationships are formed, and we feel the capacity for soul connection and a seamless coming together for the common good.
So think, dream and act, trusting in mysterious, loving plans that offer rebirth and sacrifice of old pain and limitation, and needless, ego-driven, violent suffering which diminishes and submerges larger consciousness. Answer your own call to set yourself free and step up to the plate by courageously choosing your greatest responsibility, in a way that lifts and lovingly envelops you. Let guidance find you in this new land, and open all parts of yourself down to your very cells — receiving, letting go, understanding and offering yourself as a reborn, seamless part of creation.
By Marjorie Baker Price, April 2001 Newsletter