personic

spiritual service and the eternal song

Imagine sitting in a great cathedral. Your eyes are closed. An organ is playing. A choir is singing. You hear the sound—instrument and voices--with your ears, but you also feel the sound with the fullness of your body. Your chest, throat, eyelids, and teeth, your arms, fingers, hips, legs, feet--every cell within you is reverberating, resonating, resounding, with the sonic energy in the space around you.

Then imagine the organ and choir have stopped. The cathedral is silent. But you still feel, around you and within you, a current of energy, as present and real in your body and mind as when the audible sound was happening. The current of energy is deeper than sound, or higher than sound, it’s sub-sonic, or super-sonic, but you feel its vibration around you and within you.

It invites a kind of stillness in you. You sit down inside yourself a little deeper. And sitting a little deeper, you feel an endlessness and beginninglessness in this vibrating, resonant energy. It has the feel of eternity, and in this moment, includes and incorporates you into beginninglessness and endlessness. You are the instrument, the organ, the choir of eternal sound. You did not design yourself or shape yourself to be this way, but here it is and here you are. One of the meanings of the word “person” is “to sound through,” or “through sound,” and in this moment, the body-spirit that is you has become the silent sounding through of eternal song.

And since the eternal song carries within itself and transmits from itself powers of love, healing, and communion, while you are aware of its resonance in you, you may also be aware that it is not just you and the sound here, that there are others here with you, others in need of these powers—love, healing, communion—and drawn to them. They may be internal others—parts of yourself that are hurt, scared, angry, or otherwise tender or troubled. Or they may be external others, people you know, people you don’t, people from the past, present, or future. They may be places on Earth. But they have come, they are here, because they feel the power of the resonant field you are sitting down within, and they are in need of the love, healing, and communion that is happening within it. Your awareness of this may be subtle and whispery, or it may be quite strong.

You do not have to understand what is happening. You cannot. It is beyond understanding. It is higher, deeper, wider, and truer than we are. But it is mixing itself into you all the same, and mixing itself into all who feel drawn to its goodness.

Be here, abide here, and let this happen as long as you know is right.

What is happening now is what we might call spiritual service. You are offering yourself, your body, your time, as a place where those who need care can find and receive it. You yourself are not in charge of loving them, healing them, or in any other way helping them. All you’re doing—if “doing” is even the right word for allowing yourself to be sounded through--is saying yes to a Higher Mystery-Love-Will that seems to know how to turn raw material like you in a rough world like this into medicine for those who need it. None of this is visible or measurable, of course, and it’s not possible to prove any of it. But it is possible to sense it—sometimes, somehow--and also possible to trust it.

At some point, of course, you’ll need to stand and answer the knock at the door, or make dinner, or call your mother. The feeling of this place and this sound will fade.

But it is always here, always around us, always within us, always incorporating itself, embodying itself, incarnating itself. It is happening to us. It is happening through us. It is what we need. It is what the world needs.