This was first published as the Eleventh Inner Christmas Message on January 4th, 2020.
Impact in the context of prebirth promises is a forceful impression of I Am on earthly existence in such a way that this Spirit of Self actually materializes and can be perceived and felt. It serves and connects. It pays forward.
As I said in the beginning, we cannot help but keep these prebirth promises. The variables that make each of us unique are the degree and range of the keeping and the consciousness of the keeping. If we focus on the promise to spiritualize matter through the making of beauty, some of us will relate that to beauty as a personal aesthetic about what surrounds us and how we form and arrange matter, others will make beauty as a devotion to awakening the beauty of
truth in their thinking and experiencing the beauty of truth in the thinking of another soul. Some will make many beautiful things. Some will have many beautiful thoughts. Same prebirth promise, different and unique ways of keeping it. Some might even keep this promise in the shadows: bringing negative beauty or distortion or untruth so that others can incarnate their promise through the force of resistance to the lack of beauty.
I get clearer and clearer about the complexity of how these promises manifest. I see the difference between the karma of our stories and the qualities/virtues of our destinies. I don’t want my impact to be about the story of my contributions, relationships, well-being or inner development, but about the external manifesting and internal increase in the qualities or virtues of my soul.
Right after I posted the 10th message of the promise to make solitude, I read an email informing a group I am a member of about the sudden death of another member. At his funeral, the priest will share the stories of his life and some thoughts on his personality but there will be few or no words describing his spiritual impact.
I did not have a close relationship to this individual. In eight years, I probably physically encountered him maybe 10 times and never had a private conversation with him, but I always felt his extraordinary Presence. He had an impact on me. I never thought about it as an impact but when I even read his name I felt an impact of light, warmth, tone, life-force and love from his Being.
This morning questions about his impact illuminated my thoughts about what I would write in this Inner Christmas Message. I thought about how very little I knew about his story and how irrelevant his story was to his impact on my soul. His impact was on my soul, not my story! Now this story-free impact of this individual is having an impact on you and will have reverberations in all our stories going forward.
There is no way this man would have been willing to “own” his impact on me. I do know about his work with severely disabled young people and how devoted he was to impacting their well-being and the way the system defined their treatment. He could see this and tell about his impact in stories. But his impact on me would never be part of his story as he told it.
In a small group meeting to discuss a Michaelmas festival that I was facilitating, I asked the others what they wanted from the day. His response was he wanted a sense that others knew him so he could know himself. My heart trembled when I heard that. I wonder if I could have written about Solitude and Impact if I hadn’t asked that question and received his response. (His body was found while I was writing about Solitude. He had died alone in his
home from a heart attack.)
I have a feeling this man spent much of his inner life sitting at the Edge, The Great Threshold between earthly consciousness and spiritual realities. It was not just during the Holy Nights that he found himself there.
Now a few words on the impact that needs to be freed from stories. There are many key players/actors in our stories. If we strip away the stories, especially the victim/perpetrator stories and the romantic stories, we will be able to see the impact that materialized the spiritual virtues and qualities we needed.
I don’t want to dismiss stories but I want to see through them. We do not incarnate to have a story or to tell a story. We incarnate to impact and be impacted so spirit can shine through matter.
Two more thoughts on Impact:
- Our stories can be small but our impact can be immeasurable and vice versa.
- Some of us want to keep our stories small in spite of our prebirth promise to make impact. Take heart and take courage. Don’t sabotage your impact. This is where we need to spend time making Solitude and find ourselves connecting to those who are making Kindness and will hold us kindly why we recalibrate.
