Several years ago I attended a five-day retreat focused on Sophia, an aspect of Divine Feminine expressing Wisdom. This was an intense workshop, with sessions sometimes going late into the night. I was fortunate to be able to stay and sleep at the retreat center itself, so the late hours were not a problem for me. However, one of the men attending was camping out at the state park, which was located a few miles away, mostly up, on a hill atop the river bluff. He would ride his bike up there at the end of the day, sleep in his tent, and glide down in the morning.
One night we completed our discussion and prayers quite late, near midnight. I thought he couldn’t possibly get a good night’s sleep and be back at 8 a.m. So I offered to drive him and his bike up to the park. It was a stunningly beautiful July night. I dropped him off at the campground, and walked along the road away from the lights to see the sky, feel the cool breeze and smell the clean air. I’ve never seen the stars so close and so big, almost like I could reach skyward, touching them at the end of my finger. As I looked at the stars, I felt an energy come down into me. It was a sudden shift in my solar plexus and gut, a new feeling that I couldn’t put into words. It was a profound feeling. I sought to hold that feeling while I went directly to my car, returned to the center, and crawled into bed.
I lay awake in bed holding and focusing upon that feeling. I wanted to be able to find a symbol or key to help me return to it, or be able to put its meaning into words so that I wouldn’t lose this profound experience. It took three hours of focused attention before I found words to describe the meaning of the feeling: “You are the fulfillment of my evolving perfection.”
The next morning in our group meditation, I told the story, and relayed the message that I had received, presumably from Sophia. It was clear to me that the message was for me, and applying as well to every human. The minister leading the meditation honored the story by leaving a long silence at its completion.
I’ve wrestled with the meaning across the years. What does it mean to have perfection evolve? How can a midpoint in a time-line that leads to perfection be a fulfillment, a perfection itself? And how can a limited male human like myself be a fulfillment of an evolving feminine Divinity?
Yet, that feeling is within me, available occasionally through the access provided by those words, incomplete though they are to express the mystery behind it. It is clear that I, we, exist beyond the limits of our constraining time and space. Each moment in our lives, maybe in a holographic way, encompasses or touches into our Divinity within: a point in time that accesses eternity, a point in space connected integrally into infinity, a point in development that contains the perfection implicit in its original creation.
How valuable, then, is each moment, each event, each person! Such thoughts, feelings and realizations move me to continuing wonder and appreciation.
