Our spiritual journey is almost like a process of play with the nature of beauty. So that in the same way that we might play with the bouquet before us, and experiment with moving flowers, adding or subtracting foliage, moving towards a greater balance, intuiting as we go the extent to which the bouquet before us is conforming to our own interior sense of beauty, so likewise, we freely curate, shape, and add to our own world of meaning. And in this way we bring into ever increasing alignment our own interior sense of beauty/intuition/character with our exterior expression of beliefs/actions, and personality. But when that process is impeded, we naturally find that deeply frustrating. We could imagine, hypothetically, being in a flower arranging class, and the teacher giving us a set of rules, the dos and don’ts of flower arranging, and we could imagine that teacher giving us a particular rule, that when applied in practice, just seems wrong to us - it seems to conflict with our own interior sense of beauty. Even if we followed the teacher’s line of reasoning, and understood her/his rationale for said rule, it would make no difference, it would still jar with our aesthetic sensibility. We would then have to determine the kind of person we were, one who followed, or one that takes the narrow way of nonconformity, and of course to go that way would be, as Emerson put it, to endure the “world whip[ing] you with its displeasure…” The scorn of a florist, I think the least of us could endure; the scorn of a community, or worse still a religion, now, that is a real test for our characters.

William Blake captures this well in his poem: “I went to the Garden of Love, and saw what [I’d] never seen…” But then… “The priests in black gowns, [that] were walking their rounds, [bound] with briars, my joys & desires.” The impulse being frustrated here, is the search for beauty, which is the search for God, which is the search for the Self, which are all one and the same. The search for God begins with looking deeply into ourselves, by recognising the small voice within, recognising the architecture of our psyche, which speaks to us, through our internal sense of beauty and intuition. And in the same way that beauty is subjective, but universally so, so is our spirit, so is our character, so is our intuition. We have our Spirit, which is in relationship to ‘the Spirit’, we have our soul, which is in relationship to ‘the over-Soul’ (to use Emerson’s terminology), and we have the God within, which in the same way, has a universal dimension to it. There is a great correspondence. This process of play then, this shaping and intuiting after our own world of meaning, represents the spiritual voyage before us, a voyage which is profoundly open, and liberating. Because unlike the art of flower arranging, in which we are somewhat limited by the constraints of the medium, within our own psychical world, within our own imagination, there are no such limitations. Our communing with God therein, within the recesses of the Self, are limited only by the scope of our own imagination.

One of the ways that our imaginal world is more liberated than our perception of things as they are upon the material plane, relates to our conception of time and space. The bouquet is bounded by both time and space. By space, in that it can only be perceived here, not anywhere else in the world, and by time, in that it will be dismantled at the end of the service. But even if it wasn’t dismantled, it is still bounded by time - every moment that passes its constitution would change, it would wilt, and ultimately it would break down entirely, and no longer resemble what it is now. But in our souls, in our hearts, the bouquet could exist indefinitely. Christianity talks about this a lot. The things which are seen are temporal, the things which are unseen are eternal. The world is ephemeral, dust to dust, but that which inhabits the spiritual realm, the imaginal realm, is everlasting. In saying that I’m obviously assuming that my imaginal realm is not bound by the material, not bound within the biological constraints of my brain, which it obviously could be, but I would tentatively suggest otherwise. In the same manner that my conception of beauty is subjective, but universally so, it supersedes me. And likewise, my intuition, character, and spirit, all supersede me. The creative possibilities then within our own world, within our own imaginal realm, are unlimited, as I’ve said, not bound by space and time, but also not limited in the way that artistic mediums are limited, nor even limited by the rules of logic, for does not our intuition supersede logic?

As we delve deeper and deeper into these, our palaces of devotion within the depths of the Self, as we curate that space, that is worship. As Emerson expressed it, “thought is devout, and devotion is thought. Deep calls unto deep.” Therein we contend with ideas, and those ideas invoke from us feelings, aesthetic appreciations, which texture the landscape of this, our interior realm, and in turn, imbue aspects of it with an elevated sense of meaning. Which is a strange thing to consider - to voyage within these interior realms, and find therein meaning, and a world of possibility. What therein might we hope for, look for, what might we discover? This voyage of beauty appreciation which we can undertake within the imaginal realm, of course corresponds with the voyage of beauty appreciation that we can choose to go on here upon the material plane, but it is by nature bounded here. But nevertheless, our aesthetic encounter with beauty on the material plane is delightful to us, it invokes wonder from us, a sense of how extraordinary the world is, and as we move through the world, and see things of such profundity, such ingenious beauty, it is as we glimpse the very horizons of that which we can become, that it awakens in us the to the greatest possibility. And though here it is bounded by space and time, beyond here, within the depths of our interior infinitudes, it is boundless. That is us, that is God, that is the everlasting voyage before us.

Amen.