Rev. Victoria Thomas, Spiritual Director

Theme for November 2020

IMAGINAL KNOWING

I am writing this monthly theme letter weeks before November of 2020 begins. This is the ninth month that we have navigated a pandemic, spotlighting a longstanding, underlying infection of social and racial injustice and violence. Is this presidential election going to be the onset of labor pains, the birth, or the marker for the conception point? It seems like a pivotal moment in our nation’s history, and no matter the result, divisiveness and passions have been exposed.

We can never underestimate the grace, glory, and mystery of what appears like confusion, pain, or suffering. There is always the Presence of God and the Nature of God at work in all, through all, as all. This is Truth Principle. God is Omnipresent, Omnipotent, Omniscient and Omniactive as Absolute Love, Absolute Wholeness, Absolute Life. The Eternal Nature of Life, Love and Illumination is always in back of any outer conditions. Out of the dark mud comes the beautiful lotus. Out of the liquefied caterpillar comes the flight of the butterfly. Out of the pain of labor comes birth.

Our theme, Imaginal Knowing, is how things in our unconscious come into our conscious awareness. It happens on the right side of the brain, free of language, rational thinking, concepts, logic, and measurement. Imaginal Knowing is a right brain activity, the stuff of dreams, intuition, fantasies, symbols. Imaginal Knowing is not subject to conditions, time, and space. There are no hard lines in Imaginal Knowing. It is a wisdom and understanding that the conception becomes the labor, the labor becomes the birth, the birth becomes consciousness individualized, on and on. Suffering becomes wisdom and wisdom decreases the ignorance of Knowing Who and What we really are, the Presence of Love.

I believe it was Dr. Martin Luther King Junior’s experience of Imaginal Knowing when he said, “I have a Dream.” Steeped in his true nature of Christ Love, he caught the height of a mighty vision for humanity during a time when the steps to get there, the process was obscured and seemingly impossible. Imaginal Knowing can be challenging to lean into when the environment, circumstances, and phenomena are painful or overwhelming. But his surrendered life was lived in the Name of Love, making his dream vivid enough to articulate and share.

Spiritual leaders, which we all are, are the midwives of these moments. Now it is our turn to surrender to Christ Love and make vivid our Imaginal Knowing of a Grace that opens the heart of every man, woman, and child.

In Love and Light,

Reverend Victoria J. Thomas