David's Desk is my opportunity to share thoughts and tools for the spiritual journey. These letters are my personal insights and opinions and do not necessarily reflect the sentiments or thoughts of any other person in Lorian or of Lorian as a whole. If you wish to share this letter with others, please feel free to do so; however, the material is ©2023 by David Spangler.
A Balrog Moment
“I am a servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the flame of Anor. You cannot pass.” Thus spoke Gandalf the Grey standing on Durin’s Bridge in the abandoned Dwarven city of Khazad-dûm deep in the mines of Moria. The target of his denial was a Balrog, a fire demon, who, in Tolkien’s timeless Lord of the Rings, was attempting to catch and destroy the Fellowship of the Ring who were escaping over the bridge. Only Gandalf stood in the Balrog’s way, but, in Tolkien’s cosmology, Gandalf, though in human form, was actually an angel of Light. The “Secret Fire” was the Sacred itself, and the “flame of Anor” was literally the plasmic fire of the sun, the light that gave energy and life to all the earth. The Balrog, a fallen angel itself, had met its match.
From time to time, I ask my subtle colleagues, “Given the world situation now, what can we do that would be helpful?” I always get essentially the same reply: “It’s important for you to be and to hold the Light. Be a radiant presence of Light in your life in all that you do and in all relationships. Be a Sun!”
Interestingly, this past month, I had a letter from a dear friend, Susan Stanton Rotman, who is a wonderful sensitive with her own inner contacts. She said,
“I had received a message from one of my inner contacts recently. It said, ‘Be Light. That is the most important thing.’ I asked what that means, how to be light, and got this response: ‘Joy. Hope. Love. Laughter. Optimism. Patience. While you do whatever you do, be the Sun. Light actually is transmuting, transforming, and restructuring human circuitry. It is not nothing! Holding its resonance is supporting the reworking of the human mind/body. It is a long game. But it is real. Understand you are an electrical transformer.’”
It’s not surprising anymore to me that often when I’ve received a message from one of my invisible subtle colleagues, I’ll get some form of confirmation of that message from an independent outside source, as happened here. Even some of the words were the same in what I received and in what Susan received: “Be the Sun!”
The consistent message I’ve had from the spiritual realms is that each of us can be a generative source of Light in the world. We are each essentially beings of Light. The challenge, of course, is making this real in practical ways in our daily lives and in the life of the world.
In the world of the Lord of the Rings, Gandalf is seen as an old man, a wizard. No one save a few of the elves know that he is an angel in human form. His angelic nature is hidden, and his power veiled so that he can interact with men, hobbits, and elves as part of their world. It is only when confronted with a Balrog that he shows his true self, for then it is needed if the Fellowship is to survive and save their world.
I find in this story a parable for who we are. We, too, are beings of Light whose sacred nature is cloaked and hidden as we live our lives in the physical world. But we are now confronting a Balrog moment in our world. The planetary and social consequences of our greed, our fears, our hatred, our violence, our selfishness, and our divisiveness are rising like Tolkien’s demon to confront us. If we and our world are to survive, on the bridge of this moment in our human history, we must stand in our Light and let the better angels of our nature say with courage, “We are servants of the Secret Fire, Wielders of the flame of Anor! You shall not pass to shape our future!”
An Experiment
One of the advantages of David’s Desk being digital is that I can do things I couldn’t if it were printed. My Lorian colleague and friend, James Tousignant, and I do podcasts together. He thought it might be interesting to you, my Reader, if he and I were to have a discussion around the theme of that month’s essay and then add the audio at the end. That way, you could both read my thoughts for that month and also listen to me talk about them with James. So, without further ado, here is this month’s conversation. I hope you enjoy it and the added dimension it brings to David’s Desk.