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Praying with the Elements for Advent: Week 1: Fire

Praying with the Elements for Advent: Week 1: Fire

Last updated on: November 28, 2015 at 9:29 pm by Jason M. Brown

Praying with the Elements for Advent: Week 1: Fire 2015-11-28T21:29:13-08:00 Jason M. Brown

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Over the next four weeks I will share one of five sections from a workshop I ran at this year’s Parliament of the World’s Religions in Salt Lake City, Utah that correspond with the four elements of Fire, Earth, Water and Air plus Spirit. It is meant to be read aloud in a small group, but it can also be prayed in solitude. Ignore the quotation marks and citations during prayer, I just want to make sure folks know where I am getting the some of the words. Brackets indicate instructions.

Needed this week: A small candle or tea light.

It has been said: “True religion is the original umbilical cord that binds our individual selves back to our larger, universal source.”[i] We gather to celebrate that Source, our dwelling place in that Source, to contemplate the Mystery of being, and to meditate on the creative beauty of the Web of Life.

Settle your minds as we participate together in this sacrament of the present moment.

“It was the Beginning of all Beginnings. It was a time of no time, for time did not exist, a place of no place, for space did not exist. It was a beginning like no other, for there was no ‘before’. There was only the Infinite, and the Unfathomable Mystery.”[ii]

Fire

Reflecting on the Infinite, we celebrate the element of Fire in our bodies, in our world, and in our hearts. Fire is the element held by the south; it reminds us of the season of summer, the sacred sun pulsing with nuclear heat, feeding the spark that gave rise to life, falling in love with life through photosynthesis; fire is the energy in our muscles when we work. Fire is love burning in our hearts.

The universe began with a Great Flaring Forth, 13.8 billion years ago**.** A single point, trillions of degrees hot. “And out of the Unfathomable Mystery, the infinite called forth unto itself. It called forth space. It called forth time. It called forth being. And in that ecstatic instant, the Universe slammed exploding outward into existence, with the jubilant and breathtaking beauty, brightness, energy, violence, power, and glory of a trillion new born stars.”[iii]

“If the rate of expansion had been slower…even one millionth of a percent slower, the universe would have collapsed. If the universe had expanded more quickly, even one millionth of one percent more quickly, the universe would have expanded too quickly for structures to form.”[iv]

“We awaken to existence and discover ourselves in the inner circles of [cosmic] creativity. Held by the embrace of a spiral galaxy, we enter into a multilayered and seemingly infinite fecundity.”[v] We discover that like the ancient ones of this earth believed, the stars are our ancestors; we are made of star stuff. Super novae, “womb[s] of intense creativity give birth to the elements that form our planet and our bodies…Our bodies [have] passed through countless vast explosion[s].” [vi]

The sacred element of Fire is an agent of creative destruction. Just as supernovas collide to produce stars, so too does fire in its very violence and destruction cleanse and renew the earth.

Joanna Macy calls our difficult time the Great Unravelling. For with our mastery of fire, has come the industrial revolution, and the burning of fossil fuels. “The [Great Unravelling] in not just a problem ‘out there’. It [has] inscrib[ed] itself in our bloodstreams, our breasts and prostates, our very mother’s milk, all of which carry [its]…toxins.”[vii] And it threatens to displace millions and affect millions more of the poorest among us.

[Light candle, and say a word or phrase that the element of Fire invokes for us.]

[Sit with the warmth of our own bodies. The candle. The light in the room.]

SOURCES:

[i] Matthew Fox, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance (San Francisco: Harper Row, 1988), 11.

[ii] David Christopher, The Holy Universe, 41.

[iii] David Christopher, The Holy Universe, 42.

[iv] Brian T. Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker, Journey of the Universe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 10-11.

[v] Ibid., 24.

[vi] Ibid, 34.

[vii] Robert Gottlieb, Oxford Handbook of Religion and Ecology, 6.

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