Shadow Puppet Storyteller

Graduation Visioning

Congratulate me. I have put in ninety hours as a Religious Science practitioner student. The first year class completed tonight. In about 120 days I will begin again . The one-on-one counseling and active listening skills will be taught. The discussion about what each of us felt we had learned in this time led into a prayer circle in which we visioned how our practice unfolds from here.

I have several impressions to document. Every sensation and thought has some meaning. I needed to clear away an uneasy feeling about myself scheming to deal with finances, wanting instead to know that God will direct me. Because there was no initial prayer to clear intervening thoughts, (like my example) it intruded a few times during the visioning. I was able to push the interruption aside.

I experienced a movie theater setting and several snipets of favorite movie moments. The first was David Bowie as Nicholai Tesla in The Illusionist. Hugh Jackman was on-screen too. Harrison Ford cornering Princess Leia to steal a kiss, and later donnig a Fedora and running straight to the camera for his first Indiana Jones close-up. The darkness of forbidden sexual power being portrayed in a scene with Rutger Hauer in Flesh and Blood.

Then I am on-screen. It's the ol' "life flashing before your eyes." I am in some situations of my own from my youth in the late-Seventies related to church gatherings involving Chris. I see flowers. The dark pink Oleander bushes from my home on the hill. I am seeing the sanctuary of my home church in Newhall. I am speaking to others and relating that I was married in the same building.

I hear two footsteps in a stone or cement corridor. I smell a faint smoke odor and identify it with burnt unscented candles. It persists in the background almost the entire time. I hear the outside traffic only twice in the entire time of the twenty minute visioning. And I wonder if it is due to just a couple of large vehicles passing during that time, or that I am more deeply "under" most of the time. If there was more coming to me visually at this point, I've forgotten.

Rev. Kris asks what is it we are to develop. I revert to the kind of closed-eyes color-seeing that I used to experiment with when I was a child being told to nap or sent to my room. The colors swirl and are almost exclusively yellow with an orange aura. I try to put some reasoning behind it and interpret it as a light or lamp of knowledge shape. Then I tell myself to stop interpreting. It is flame-like. I think Wisdom might be what's trying to come across. Later Kris mentions that it could also represent illumination. It was like a light without heat. I had no sensation of heat from the visual representation. I am (now) later thinking it is like a description of the qualities of the Burning Bush, an encounter from which God called Moses forth into service...Hmmm.

Shortly after this, I experienced a close presence. A warmth inches from the entire right side of my face. It felt like it had the contours of an oversized face. It did not disturb me. I was not feeling at all threatened or wanting to back away or start. This is interesting given how jumpy I can get when in sudden close contact with a passerby or my proximity anxiety when I am driving/but usually as a passenger.

Kris asked what was ours to avoid in preparing or developing and to determine if this was something we truly were committed to; "was ours to do or not do." Here, it was much more vague. But I am remembering more now as I write it than I did in discussion at class. My field of vision lost its sunny glow and went to deep blue-gray. A kind of crumpling upon itself occurred and some areas were more shadowed. I thought something was spoken. It was a darker, shadowy view but not frightening. I believe there was nothing further, as we moved to a conclusion. Perhaps nothing stands in my way to serving. Serving as a church practitioner, and maybe more beyond that practice, is mine to do.