Inner Festivals ask us, not to recall a great event in the evolution of human consciousness, but to imagine living the event in our own soul and evolving our own consciousness.
WHAT IS AN INNER TIDE?
In Christian (and Pagan) calendar, tide relates to an defined period of time in the cycle of the year between a rising and a falling of activity, focus, and interest in a festival honoring an individual or an event, such as Yuletide/Christmastide, commonly celebrated on recurring cycles in a calendar year or lunar calendar.
St John’s Tide is a seasonal Christian Festival honoring John the Baptist. In the year, it falls opposite Christmas. It is not popular, but it’s lack of popularity is not a reflection of its importance for inner development. This is a very important inner festival.
Does it feel different if, instead of St John’s Tide, I call it St John’s Inner Tide? If we think of the tides of the seas of consciousness. Does this help you relate to it in a personal way? What is an inner tide? A surge of intense pure feeling! A swelling of great moral force! A rising of deep conscious experience! Do you find inner tides in your own spiritual life? And what does an inner tide reflecting the being of John the Baptist mean to your development and destiny?
What was the inner tide of St John? What arose, swelled, and surged in his soul each time he experienced his destiny in the perceiving, knowing, and loving of Jesus? Can you imagine this in John? Can you imagine this in your own experience of perceiving, knowing, and loving another, not because you are related to him, or like her, or desire to feel good, but because unselfishly experiencing another’s karma and destiny is the greatest deed of the human spirit.
A John Imagination is not about imagining another’s story, appearances, strengths and weaknesses – John’s deed in baptizing was attending to what was coming, what was entering into the soul. He held others while the living waters washed away their past so they could meet their destiny unfettered. And to do that he had to perceive, know, and love all that they had been in light of their destiny.
Who do you hold in such a way? A John Imagination requires resonate attunement to another’s soul and spirit.
PREPARATION, THEN FULFILLMENT
June 24th is the festival of John’s birth, not of his deed. He was born with a destiny. His thirty years of living prior to the Christ Baptism were years of preparation, of inner development, of attention to great meanings, of learning how to sacrifice the selfish, and of crying in the wilderness. It was not about seeking personal bliss, peace, or success.
As we imagine the preparation, St John Imagination, it may be wise to imagine how John prepared for perceiving, knowing and loving, how he then prepared others for what was to come. John did not hold on to anything. How can we prepare to let go? Slowly. Gently. Yearly, bringing our activity, focus and interest to the unfolding of our capacity for our own John Imagination.
Take some time and think of how you prepare to truly, unselfishly love another. Reflect on your inner tide of compassion. Although this may seem a silly suggestion (it’s not) do this meditation in or near water even if it’s in your bathtub, sitting by a stream, or swimming in the ocean.
To imagine St John’s Inner Tide we cannot be sentimental which would only build a pretty picture and sweet feelings. The St John Imagination burns like the Summer Solstice sun, burning away any sense of our own wishes and leaving only the living, unselfish truth of another. Not an easy task! Certainly not one taught in Sunday School.
The burning of the Inner Solstice Sun is why we need to do this in or near water. Physical reality and spiritual reality need to be kept in balance.
A TIDE IS NOT A WAVE!
A tide is not a wave. It does not curl up, break, and retreat. Growing up close to the beach in south Florida, I could often hear the breaking of the waves as I fell asleep and I was often scared of being swallowed up by the water and pulled under and tossed out to the black sea. As I have been writing about an inner tide, I realized I was confusing it with a great crashing wave.
The Inner St John’s Tide is not a spiritual tsunami. It is not a wave. It is a tide which lifts your soul once you know how to float.
CAN YOU FLOAT ON A TIDE?
Floating requires a relaxed present awareness. In your soul, floating in the moment on the rising sea of consciousness requires a paradox: you must be fully aware of yourself and you must totally let your self-awareness go and surrender to the vast sea of the spirit. I just spent about fifteen minutes imagining floating, asking myself if this was a right metaphor for contemplation for St John’s Tide. Something in my soul kept pushing me to stay with it.
As I questioned, considered, and poured into the picture of floating, my memories of actually floating on oceans, seas, lakes, and pools surfaced. I realized that I have always thought I was only floating on the water surface right below me. But the wiser, more living truth reveals the entire body of water supporting me and that experience links me to the archetype of water and waters, and the archetypes of floating and sinking, levity and gravity, rhythms and flows and tides. It’s taken me over sixty years of floating to learn the lesson that when I float, I float on all water.
When you learn to let your soul float on the tides of loving consciousness, you float on all love!
Floating will never be the same! As you meditate on the Inner Tide of St John, float and be lifted up.
Blessing on your inner experience of St John’s Tide.
In many ways I feel that I’m floating now into my destiny, towards my larger vision, as I build a sturdy little raft (Reimagine Your Money) on which to lie.
“A John Imagination requires resonate attunement to another’s soul and spirit. Who do you hold in such a way?” After a painful 2-year breach in the relationship between my youngest daughter and me, I had a totally unexpected shift in my own consciousness where I “became” her and witnessed myself through her eyes. For 3 months I lived in this mixed state, beholding her soul qualities which had been unseen by my underdeveloped ego self in her younger years. Then one day “out of the blue”, I received a phone call from her asking me to come to her house for dinner. No words were spoken between us about the 2-year communication break, but much love and warmth flowed in the field between us, and continues to do so.
After that I realized that I had to open up to a shift in my perspective on her father (my ex-husband), whom she has more sympatico with. For years I held memories of how his lower nature had manifested, which had solidified into totally negative beliefs about him. I had to open up to see his true soul and spirit qualities as well. The truth does bring one to a greater degree of freedom.
Thank you!
I needed to be made aware of the internal preparation required to repair broken relationships. My natural inclination is to leave them behind stuck
in the negative memory. There is no healing in that place. That I actually have the ability to visualize anothers light clouded by the wall of my reactions to actions and release myself from the bondage of expectations
is awakening. Let’s hope I can follow through.
I felt a glimpse your freedom prior to reaching the word freedom at the end. I want that! And, I appreciate your unspoken reminder to do the work and let go of the outcome.
St. John is a favorite of mine and that grabbed my attention to read the article.
It has been a tender few days – raw almost. This burning feeling that something is coming has had my attention now for a while and thought it has been fodder for many good stories, I find myself feeling confused and even vulnerable. Your framing of St John’s tide helps me feel right in my sensitivity. I shall share a link to this post tomorrow morning – thank you.
It’s a powerful time of Solstice–the longest day since the End of Time–and Midsummer’s day or St. John’s Tide (June 24th). The tide is high and expanded this Full Moon.
I have a friend who I’ve been witnessing through crisis, escalating crisis, a melt down, a crucible of transfiguration that has him on Disability and experiencing the disintegration of all the constants in his life story. Given the passage I’ve been going through myself these past years, he’s quite a mirror. And he helps me see this beautiful relay or chain of support Grace has set up, as each of us on this evolutionary journey is witnessing and offering light, space and wisdom for those down the ladder a peg and receiving that support from someone up the ladder. Calling it a ladder smacks of a linear hierarchy I don’t want to give weight to, but there is a sense in which the witness must have familiarity, resonance, empathy with the one witnessed, must have walked in some very similar moccasins, and mastered that stage just enough.
There have been times, when witnessing this friend, or others, when all the anxiety about my purpose have vaporized into a sense of attunement, of being a channel of Grace; a phenomenon I associate with few other activities: writing, certain healing work, and QiGong or mindfully practiced yoga.
When I recently saw my friend in person, I’d noticed thoughts, as I sat in his presence, that maybe this was my sole purpose in life, just to witness for him. I didn’t fully buy that, but it was compelling.
Last evening I happened to find a cache on Google of the leavings of my friend’s life-interrupted as a promising pop musician: slick and hunky head shots, tasty electro-pop songs, etc. It stirred much in me. Among the many emotions I observed was a grief akin to that a mother feels as her child leaves the nest, the sense of expired purpose. It felt otherworldly somehow.
And as I readied for sleep, there were some powerful issuances from the subconscious (and the Akasha, perhaps)– what felt like overlays of other lives, other relational dynamics I’d had with him. It felt, in a way, that something about our relationship this life was coming to a head. I said a few prayers, and passed out dead for a busy night on the Astral, which, alas, I don’t remember.
On this following morrow, as I continued to bask in the expanded energies of the day, watching chronic concerns about livelihood and purpose shimmer only in the distance beyond a foreground of Trust, my friend called me nearly hysterical: a very bad day of disappointments and neurological and psychic overwhelm. I witnessed him a while, and though he wasn’t completely calm, we rang off.
Shortly after, I ended up on my computer, and found a Lynn Jericho essay waiting for me, about the sacred inner meaning of St. John’s Tide. I was hardly familiar with St. John’s Tide. Here is an essential excerpt:
What was the inner tide of St John? What arose, swelled, and surged in his soul each time he experienced his destiny in the perceiving, knowing, and loving of Jesus? …Can you imagine this in your own experience of perceiving, knowing, and loving another, not because you are related to him, or like her, or desire to feel good, but because unselfishly experiencing another’s karma and destiny is the greatest deed of the human spirit.
A John Imagination is not about imagining another’s story, appearances, strengths and weaknesses – John’s deed in baptizing was attending to what was coming, what was entering into the soul. He held others while the living waters washed away their past so they could meet their destiny unfettered. And to do that he had to perceive, know, and love all that they had been in light of their destiny.
Who do you hold in such a way? A John Imagination requires resonate attunement to another’s soul and spirit.
June 24th is the festival of John the Baptist’s birth, not of his deed. He was born with a destiny. His thirty years of living prior to the Christ Baptism were years of preparation, of inner development, of attention to great meanings, of learning how to sacrifice the selfish, and of crying in the wilderness. It was not about seeking personal bliss, peace, or success.
As we imagine the preparation, St John Imagination, it may be wise to imagine how John prepared for perceiving, knowing and loving, how he then prepared others for what was to come. John did not hold on to anything. How can we prepare to let go?
I thought this intriguing. How old was Jesus when he was Baptized? Around 30. My friend is 30.
After John’s witness, Jesus would take his ministry public and John would die, having lived his destiny.
I was still mulling these strands of experience and significance over when my friend called back, more hysterical. Really in the crucible, battling insanity and so tired of it. He was besieged in the extreme with the demons that haunt us all when we lose ourselves in exhaustion or overwhelm.
I refused to argue with the demons dashing his mind from Scylla to Carybdis and back. I could feel them trying to pull both “John” and “Jesus” into the undertow. I actually did invoke the words “Get thee behind me Satan,” to him, to let all parties know I wasn’t buying into the drama. But my voice had taken on a harder edge, to meet his. While John’s baptismal jurisdiction was water. He knew Jesus’ would be fire. And this “John” had to hold the torch right now. The messiah was still just a mess.
Once I’d sent my friend off to water, food and bed, I considered the rather megalomaniacal metaphor the day had raised. I considered the demands of such destiny, and with a twinge of remorse, wrested my authority from mimicking history. I am glad to put on my Jungian cloak and plunder wisdom from the magic wardrobe of archetypes and the cauldron of the collective evolving consciousness, but the Bodhisattva and the Martyr are not the same character.
Bodhisattva is not a costume I’m convinced I own or would wear in public. But a number of people claim to have spotted it in my closet. And maybe that explains why, as an adolescent, I’d teach people things, like how to play chess, and they would soar to heights of acumen far beyond my own; and I, uninterested in competing, would be left behind. They say a good teacher, a true teacher, builds a foundation that enables the students to move above and beyond them; and that a big spirit eventually accepts the challenge of leading a a small life without complaint. So be it.
This life, I cannot sacrifice Being for doing, as has been the deadening fashion of our culture — which reminds me of another electro-pop star who escaped martyrdom at his own hand, Dave Gahan of Depeche Mode, who sang what may be our theme song, my tortured friend: “Personal Jesus.” Although, I think we’d both be plenty content to simply “Enjoy the Silence.”