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. If you no longer wish to receive these letters, please let us know at info@Lorian.org.
There will always be light
This month, I offer a reflection on the future, one that I know will come to pass. This is not a prophecy—I don’t have that power!—but it’s not a speculation, either. It is the realization, and the promise, that within human beings, whatever the circumstances of their lives, there will always be Light.
Not that everyone will realize this, of course, nor even express it. But the reality is there, nonetheless, for we are all, outer coverings notwithstanding, beings of Light, born of sacredness and love.
What prompted these thoughts is that I am a grandfather with a granddaughter who just turned three a week ago and a grandson who just turned three months. As I’m sure most grandparents do, I cannot help thinking about their futures and the world in which they will grow up.
We can see some of the possible shapes their future can take as climate change leads to political, social, and economic instability within and among nations. It will be a challenging future for humanity and for the natural world that sustains us. The list of dangers they and their children may face is long and growing longer as the older generations put off the hard decisions of change that will be necessary.
But my generation faced dangers, too. I remember being terrified of contracting polio. It was a scourge of childhood in my day until Jonas Salk invented his vaccine. And the Bomb and the specter of a nuclear World War III were prevalent when I was growing up (something I was keenly aware of as I grew up on a United States Strategic Air Command base in Morocco, a definite target because of the nuclear bombers stationed there). For all that these and other dangers were present, it was my world, the one I knew, and I found it an exciting, wondrous place. The Sacred and its joy and Light were a resource I could tap into if I chose to do so.
When my parents and I returned from Morocco, my Dad started a consulting business. Though he was a wonderful consultant, he was not a good businessman, and his company went bankrupt. Afterward, my father had difficulty finding any employment. As a result, for much of my teenage years, we were very poor, with my mother as our primary source of income working as a nurse. I remember my bed was a mattress supported by boxes, and our dining room table was a flat board also resting on boxes, as we couldn’t afford proper furniture. Yet, it was during this time that I experienced a time of accelerated spiritual growth, coming into greater and greater awareness of the subtle dimensions. I look back on those years not as ones of privation but as years of love and joy and excitement. This was partly because of the love my parents had for each other and for me and partly because I chose to see my world in a positive light.
I remind myself of this when I think of what may be ahead for my grandchildren. Whatever shape their world takes, it will be their world because they will have grown up in it and will take it as the way things are. The effects of climate change, for instance, may seem like a new normal for me but it will simply be normal for them, the only world they know. And it will hold forth the same possibilities of joy and excitement, creativity and discovery for them that my world did for me. This is because whatever the shape of the world, they will have within them the capacity to bring their own inner Light, their own love to it, drawing forth the same from their world.
Modern apocalyptic fiction is fond of presenting visions of the future that are grim, distressing, brutish, and depressing. But this is because the apocalyptic imagination is one of loss, not of gain or of possibility. It measures the future against the past and present and finds it coming up short because the writers and dramatists are not native to that future. It is a strange, unwelcoming place because it is not their world; it is the picture of the loss of their world.
But human beings have lived joyous, creative, and fulfilled lives in the past before what we think of as “our world” ever came into being or even was imagined. The ability to do so is inherent in us. The Light of joy, of love, of creativity, and of possibility is always in us if we make the effort to bring it forth; generations before ours have done so, even in the most challenging of situations. People are doing that now. The generations that follow us will be able to do so as well. It is a matter of choice, and a matter of tapping into the depths of who we are as beings of Light.
It is in these depths that the promise of our future—and our present—lies.
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.