A recipe for spiritual freedom

1. take at least one profound moment of spiritual reality and mix it with a spark of truth. Knead it into a solid flat base.
2. allow to ferment into faith, spicing and seasoning with truth at regular intervals.
keep the ratios of experience and truth one-to-one, regardless of quantities
3. mix in a solid group of companions, as much as is perceptible, who also have a moment and a spark (see step 1).
4. mix thoroughly and for an extended period of time until the faith and the experience coagulate and combine
5. once such task has been achieved, mix some more, for an even longer time, while the by-product and unusable parts of the recipe separate and rise to the surface as dross.
6. use the solid-mixed faith as a scoop in order to remove the refuse from the surface, all the while continually stirring in order to generate more.
7. repeat the process continually and slowly the recipe will harden into one rock-hard measure of spiritual freedom.

A side note: recipe works best with fresh ingredients and in smaller portions, although these portions can be recreated an indefinite amount of times (home-made apple pie always tastes better baked in a local kitchen as opposed to poured out of a tanker into an assembly-line vat).

Eat up and enjoy!

The Sacred

It sort of happens on the indirect route, really.
When I’m at play, chatting.
It is like the span of my vision becomes a screen,
Controlled by remote and slowed.

- Like I’m suddenly aware of the situation,
- Like I’m watching me from behind,
From something else’s eyes.

It is as if I was going about my business,
And somewhere back there at the edge of my radius,
A power moved by, and I sensed it.

And it is the same scene before me - nothing changed.
Yet it somehow becomes all sacred,
The walls, sidewalks, and cars going by exist in a sort of meaning
- not normally experienced, as if they hide some great -

Presence.

Indefinable, misunderstood, but inevitably “here.”
No words of thunder, no revelation
- just the faint sense of mysterious wonder.

As if in another dimension, God walked by
And the vastness of His presence bled through the boundary
- I caught a whiff of it on the drive-by.

A sacred moment – in the everyday,
And the picture returns to normal and life gathers pace again
And the moment fades.

Yet still I wonder, what was that? What did I miss?
And how do I get all of my moments to tinkle with that Magic,
- All of my times to freeze
Like the climax of the movie’s turning point:

Profound meaning is injected into the story,
And it all becomes special, it all becomes real.

"The other gods were strong, but thou wast weak

They rode, but Thou didst stumble to a throne.

But to our wounds only God's wounds can speak,

And not a god has wounds, but thou alone."

Edward Shillito