A Personal Forward:

Through the convergence of the above four areas of interest in my life, the earlier perspective of my Christian upbringing has broadened considerably. Nevertheless, the memory of my childhood is blessed in having known a Jesus on whose lap there was always room. But then, a lap so universally available will, in time, require re-examination.

     In re-evaluating the Jesus of my personal history, it occurred to me that in order to have been so everywhere available he would have had to have broken through some barrier--like the speed of sound or of light. And that he may or may not have been the first to fully succeed in making a fully conscious return to the Source of all being so as to be everywhere present. In any event, or so it seems to me now, it is to the higher, Christic perspective that all are being drawn-- individuals and, humanity collectively. This is also the substance of the vision of Teilhard de Chardin whose evolutionary expectations permeate these pages, as similarly do those of Sri Aurobindo.

     I now even dare to imagine that none in the great sea of humanity can ultimately escape a net so broadly and deeply cast, and this because in a universe whose glue is an all inclusive love there is no place to escape to. Thus freed from the impositions and distortions of millenniums, the sacred words, themes and symbols of the past are now free to be re-clothed in new meaning. But for this to happen in a consciousness-transforming way, each of us is now called to discover the meaning they hold for our own lives, and answer for ourselves alone the questions they newly evoke.

     Envisioned as a journey of self-discovery and ever-expanding consciousness, the life of the spirit requires not only an alertness to the questions life is asking but a clarification of the choices the questions set before us. By a repetition of this discernment process, the spiritual journey is propelled. Beginning in the garden of unconscious relationship to the Whole, the journey moves out into the wilderness of separation and alienation, up the mountain of enlightenment, across the river and into the promised land. Until finally, in the words of the old refrain, "our feet are planted on higher ground," with this higher ground understood as a consciousness that knows itself inseparable from the Whole, and from where--because its spiral path is eternal--the journey is never ending.

May we journey together in peace and all good,
Ann K Elliott, TSSF
December 15, 2001