There’s a part of me who reads that earlier post and says, “Oh, come on, it’s just a fire. Don’t be so dramatic.”
And, yes, that part of me still speaks up now and then. Poor thing. He just wants approval from all the “smart people”. I’ve had to remind him several times now that our life felt far too thin when we were attending to what the “smart people” had to say. He’s maturing, but he’s also good to have around because his raised eyebrow sometimes checks my worst enthusiasms.
Anyway, why does imagining building a morning fire as priestly work appeal to me? It places what is a (fun but) everyday task in a context of sacred work. It elevates it and gives it meaning.
But isn’t that meaning just made up in my head? It’s tempting at this point to quote Dumbledore:
Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?
Except I don’t think that quite does it. Because, at this point, someone could hear that line and say, “Oh, yes, you mean it’s real in the way fiction and poetry are metaphorically real. Yes, yes, isn’t that nice?”
No, I want to push beyond that. I struggle to put it into words, precisely because we’re translating between modes of perception. It might help if we locate the right organ of perception. In this case, it isn’t in my head; it’s in my heart. The center of the physical body is the gut. The center of the emotional body is the heart. The center of the intellectual body is the head. “Building a fire is a priestly act” is an image formed in the heart.
That’s actually important. Dumbledore’s line is good so far as it goes–I wish more people could appreciate it–but it’s a bad map. It’s still keeping everything neatly tucked away in the brain, except that it wants the products of thought to have some life of their own. Good, good, but let’s go farther.
The day I read that line from Baumgartner, I felt it first. The feeling solidified into an image. The image drew me toward itself. It became a longing. At no point in that initial encounter was there intellectual content. It was entirely a matter of the heart.
Why are our memories always molded into an episode in an ongoing story? Because placing the events of our lives into a meaningful context makes them richer. Memories in this way cease to be video-recorded recollections and instead become embedded narratives.
This is the work of the imaginal, which is the work of the heart. In the imaginal, links between events become clearer, and events gain a new dimension of depth. I light a fire, and that fire become a part of all other fire. Some of those fires are destructive, so I tend my fire carefully. Some of those fires are warming, so I sit by it in gratitude. Some of those fires are holy, so I light it from the secret fire, the fire of creation.