Friday, December 25, 2020

The Soul’s Beloved

The following is excerpted from The Celtic Spirit: Daily Meditations for the Turning Year by Caitlín Matthews.

The incarnation of love in our lives is a special miracle. Our capacity to recognize and receive love is closely associated with the soul’s beloved – the spiritual being whom our soul recognizes as supreme. The soul’s beloved is not an earthly or human lover that we may have – although we may look for the features of the spiritual form in the human person; it is spirit. For followers of defined religious paths, this figure will be the lord, lady, or spirit from whom spiritual revelation flows; and this figure will be central to their prayers and practices. Religious iconography may provide specific, traditional images of this figure, or the practictitioner may have his own special insight into the appearance of his soul’s beloved.


There are now many among us without any formalized spiritual path, people who are still traveling between the rejected images of childhood faith and the unknown potentialities of their soul’s country. They may be unaware of any living mystery. This is nothing less than the inapprehensible glory and splendor of spirit that is both formless and has many forms, that is immanent and transcendent, known and unknown to our experience.

The conscious awareness of the soul’s beloved is not a continuous awareness for the majority of people: it is fleeting, glancing, glorious, exciting, rapturous. The metaphors we draw upon to describe the feelings and perceptions that we have of this beloved are not always human: sometimes a beautiful animal, a shining lamp, a great tree, a planet, a complex pattern, or a subtle music in the soul is a true reflection of the mystery that we each experience.

Contemplate your soul’s beloved. Even though you may have no form or name for that beloved, be still and ask your soul to help you share this living mystery.



See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
Meeting and Embodying the Lover God
“More Lovely Than the Dawn”: God as Divine Lover
An Erotic Encounter With the Divine
The Gorgeous One
Sometimes I Wonder
The Cosmic Christ: Brother, Lover, Friend, Divine and Tender Guide
Vessels of the Holy
Redemption in the Sensuousness of the Moment
Real Holiness
No Altar More Sacred
The Holy Pleasure of Intimacy
Never Say It Is Not God
The Many Manifestations of God’s Loving Embrace
Beloved and Antlered
In the Abode of the Heart
Prayer of the Week – August 1, 2016
Prayer of the Week – April 4, 2011
Prayer of the Week – December 9, 2010
In the Garden of Spirituality – Hazrat Inayat Khan
In the Garden of Spirituality – Beatrice Bruteau
The Most Sacred and Simple Mystery of All
Celtic Spirituality: “A Fluid, Transmutable Affair”

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