church

The following morning, I made sure I had time to go to Barton Stacey church before visiting my father. He has lived in the village for over twenty years, as did my sister until she died. She is buried in the graveyard of the church close to a lovely old yew which has snowdrops blooming beneath it. It is a very peaceful place.

To get into the church, I had to get the key from the shop. However, getting into the church created challenges that felt like a spiritual message, or quest. Sometimes, doing this kind of work necessitates opening your awareness not only to the energies of place but also to other communications. Everything means something, and usually, when receiving this information, usually through actions you might be taking, a ‘recognising’ happens that tells you what you are doing is a message you need to take onboard.

My message that morning came in the form of keys. Having retrieved the key to the church from the shop, I made my way back to the main door. I was surprised that there was only one key as there were two keyholes, one old keyhole for an old iron key, and a yale lock. But the key in my hand was a chubb, yet I couldn’t see where it fit. I thought perhaps it opened a door around the side and so walked around the church to find it. There were two doors, but the key fit neither. Yet the key was definitely for the church, so it must fit somewhere. I walked back to the main door again and looked harder. Then, above the yale lock, higher in the door, I noticed a brass disc and realised that there was a third keyhole behind it which, lo and behold, my key fit!

I was aware of the message here: three doors, three keys but the key fit only one keyhole. The higher one. OK. Message logged, and door unlocked, I continued into the church.

Although All Saints is an old building, having been recorded in the Domesday book, it is not the original church. The original Saxon building was in a lower field behind the current site. My brother-in-law told me that they’d excavated the original site and come to the conclusion that it had been moved because the lower field flooded in winter; being too close to the River Test. The current building is on the higher drier, ground which proved to be far more successful.

However, history notwithstanding, there was an energy in the building which was quite ‘’regal’. My usual process is to make my way to the Altar. This is where, anciently, the feminine energies of water beneath the ground, or of earth vortices, are to be found. But, in this church, I heard someone telling me to ‘Approach’, in a rather regal tone, as though there was already someone waiting for me and who was worthy of my respect. It felt like other times when I visited ancient sites and was greeted by the Guardian-protector. It also felt strangely, more like a temple than a church.

At the altar, I stopped and noticed the stained glass window to my right. It depicted Mary Magdalene being told by an angel at Jesus’ tomb that he was no longer there; that he had ascended. Interesting, I thought. And a nice synchronicity.

Tuning into the energies, I saw a Pelican. Then I heard ‘An impediment stands in your way’. The pelican is an older Christian symbol of a pelican making its chest bleed so it can feed its young with the blood. Self-sacrifice. I thought that it might be a personal message and took it onboard. But, was the impediment a personal message or might it refer to something else? As it turns out, it did.

Continuing with my intention, I placed the Magdalene Flame on the altar and expanded it with my breath. When it had grown, a woman with the Magdalene energy appeared behind the altar. In each hand, she held a flame. Her left hand held the Magdalene flame and in her right hand sat the Brigit Flame. She transferred the flames to my hands so I could take them somewhere else, but I didn’t know where, yet.

Next, she handed me a gold chalice filled with communion wafers and a goblet of wine, as though she was a priest. Then she said, ‘THIS is my church. Go amongst my people. Share my love with all. Give freely.’

I did not know what she meant. Did she mean I was to do that, and if so, how? And what did she mean by THIS is my church? Did she mean this physical building or the beliefs around her as a Divine Feminine energy? It felt esoteric, rather than purely physical. Her church felt energetic, like a thoughtform of her. I didn’t really understand. But I did understand that the communion wafers were the bread of the Mother and that when energised, fed the people spiritually. The wine, when consecrated, represented the energy of the Father and did likewise. These wafers were her energy.

Sometimes, when the energy of the Mother is to be shared, I am given it in the form of communion wafers, but this didn’t seem to fit that message. It felt too ritual-y. More like for a mass or a church service. But, needing to trust what was given, I held the energies anyway as I knew it would make more sense further down the line.

Which of course it did.

It has been quite a challenge, balancing the physical obligations of life with the energetic work of connecting these churches. I have to be able to dance between the two states; to move between them even though I feel very earthbound. Looking after my father means I have to stay physically focused, which means I don’t ‘feel’ the high energies like I usually do. And yet, they come anyway and I can be in the physical world without losing my connection to the other dimensional worlds. This is reassuring because sometimes when the energies are not very strong, they can be harder to read. At those times it is easy for me to think I am imagining it, wanting to see what isn’t really there. When that happens, I just watch, as I learned to do in the years of meditation and healing training I did. Being so grounded in the physical world makes it harder, as my vibration feels very ‘normal’, but remaining present to what intuitively, and psychically, appears is the key. One of them, at least.

Because this energetic feminine presence had given me these things, I knew they had to go somewhere, but it took a couple more weeks to find out where and the message about the impediment also became clear.

Before that one, I called into another church, after an impulsive detour the following day: St. Mary’s Church, in the village of Crawley. That work reminded me of the lesson about trusting my ability to manifest what I need.

But, I’ll share that with you next time.

31^st January 2023

I’ve been working with small churches for the past two weeks, connecting them with the Spring Brigit flame and the Magdalene flame energy.

Catholic Church of St Edward the Confessor.

The first work was in the Church of St. Edward the Confessor, a small Catholic place near what used to be Otterbourne Manor (the place still exists but is diminished in size). I had been driving one of my daughters to work in Chandler’s Ford for a couple of weeks and had passed the church on my way there. On my first drive, I noticed a Brigit flame in the building and wondered about it, but did nothing. I thought it meant there was already one there. Later, driving to my father’s, via Sparsholt, I passed the little church of St Stephen and saw a magenta flame there. Again, I thought it meant there was already one there, so I ignored it, wondering instead who might have planted it.

On the way back from another Chandler’s Ford journey, a full bladder forced me to stop in the church of St. Edward the Confessor to wait until the traffic subsided and to find a toilet. Inside, the church is quite modern, having been built in the early twentieth century. As I approached the table altar, behind which is a striking stained-glass window, I saw, with my inner eye, hands place a large, wide shallow bowl on the altar. It reminded me of the fire bowls they use outside in Egypt, to keep warm in winter. In the bowl was a small orange flame and I had the impulse to blow energy which ignited it so that it rose to the ceiling.

I next saw the Was-sceptre symbol anchor the flame into the lava layer below the earth’s crust. The upper part of the symbol went into the sky and there was a date palm behind the altar to which it connected. In the ancient Middle East, the Date palm was seen as the tree of the Goddess, the dates her fruit, the only food in an otherwise arid desert. I have worked with palm trees while living in Egypt and anchored many energetic palm trees, especially where people live at subsistence level. The feeling then was that the people would always be fed from the fruits of the Goddess. They would not starve but would have what they needed. (The palm tree, in ancient Assyrian religion represented the connection between heaven and earth and was sacred to the Goddess Ishtar. The Goddess, in her many guises, is often depicted as residing in a tree, giving her ‘fruits’ freely).

The Palm means Life. Pure and simple. Especially in dry times.

While I was in Luxor, I read a theory that the Was-sceptre represented a giraffe. The bottom of the symbol represents the cloven hoofs of the giraffe, which are quite dainty, while the hook at the top, represents the head. The ‘foot’ of the sceptre touched the earth, while the ‘head’ could reach up to the heights and get the fruits from the tall palms. It was a medium between the food of the Goddess and earth. The symbol, in mythology, is associated with the god Set, who is the god of the hot, dry desert, an arid place where there are few resources. It is a staff of power, wielded by the priests. It symbolises the power to bring the Food of Heaven to earth and only those who could act as mediums between divinity and humanity could use it.

Other theories abound around the meaning of the symbol, of course, but in the course of my work, the Was-sceptre is always used to anchor flames deep beneath the earth’s mantle, and to anchor the flame to a higher level of the earth’s energy field. The sceptre itself is a strong ‘holding’, a rod of power, a connector. It keeps the energies stable, and in place, because the flame is an active energy.

So why was an Irish Goddess flame of Brigit being anchored by the use of Egyptian symbols in a small Catholic church in Chandler’s Ford? As I tuned in, I tried to sense what it might mean. What came back was something about the origins of Christianity being from the Middle East. Jesus was born there, after all. There was something about reconnecting the energies of this church to its origins, reconnecting it to its roots in Jerusalem. There was something about the original, unsullied beliefs around the goddess being brought back to common consciousness. That the Divine Feminine was once an equal partner to the Divine Masculine, each one valued for its gifts.

This was a small community church, albeit well used, and the hub of the Catholic community, yet it was the start of a series of connections between other, smaller, churches, all of Saxon origin and mainly Church of England. I was raised a Catholic, and attended a convent until I was ten years old, going to mass every Sunday, which I hated. But out of choice, I also went to the evening devotions. This I loved. There was a sense of ancientness here, between the incense filling the church and the hymns reminding me of ‘Faith of our fathers’, my favourite hymn. All those dungeons, fires and swords! back then, I felt very connected to an energy that seemed far removed from the God we were being taught about in school and at Sunday mass.

When we relocated from the country to Dublin, I was educated in a private, protestant school and lost that religious connection but I loved the school, nonetheless. It was child-centred, as opposed to God-centred. Now, between the two educations, I had a fairly good idea of the difference between them and how it made me feel.

Years later, living in the UK and at an Initiation workshop in Glastonbury, myself and another attendee decided that, rather than go to the Goddess rituals that everyone else was attending, we would go to the local Catholic church where they were having a healing service. This was a new experience for me and a reminder of an older one. As I watched the Catholic ritual of communion and wine, in my eyes, the priests were enacting an ancient Egyptian ritual. The roots of these rituals came from the temples of Egypt. The woman who had come with me had seen the same thing, which was amazing to me. Even more interesting was that I could see the effect that the ritual was having on the wine, but also saw that it had no effect on the bread. And yet, at that time, only the priest drank the wine. Now, of course, it is different and everyone gets both. However, the bread is still nothing but bread, but the wine is charged with energy.

But that experiment taught me that the Catholic ritual was a very ancient, energetic process, with a deeper connection to a ‘Mother’. Yet it was the Spring Flame of Brigit being anchored here, in Chandler’s Ford, Brigit herself being a Goddess who became a Catholic saint. She wasn’t destroyed by the religion but rather incorporated into it. She is also a goddess of light and fertility, the returning sun after a dark winter.

I thought I was finished here, so went to look for a loo. When I came back, I was ‘instructed’ to do more so I stood in front of the altar again. This time, a magenta channel of the Magdalene descended with a small magenta flame inside. It reached to the floor and high into the sky, a veritable pillar of fire. Again, I felt the impulse to blow and when I did the magenta flame expanded until it filled the channel. I was given a portion of this flame to transport somewhere else. I already guessed that it was for St Stephen’s church in Sparsholt.

On my way out, I found the holy water font and blessed myself with it. On impulse, before I left my house that morning, I had applied holy water I had gotten from Arundel cathedral last year. This is another ritual that we have forgotten the original purpose of: the application of holy water in an equal-armed cross as you enter a sacred space. This entering ritual was to open the energy-field for the ensuing ceremony. The energies generated by the Mass fed you, energetically. After the ritual Mass, on leaving the building, you then applied holy water again, this time to seal the energy-field so that all the energies you absorbed would be retained, much like sealing the energy-field with the raku symbol after passing a Reiki attunement. Originally, the Mass was an attunement, but not in the way we pass attunements today. In the original Usui Reiki system, Mikao Usui ‘attuned’ his students every time they met. He shared the energy with them by sharing his own Reiki-field. They sat in that energy for the duration of the meeting, their fields open and receptive. In the original Catholic Mass, this was the way it was done too. The energy of the ritual was shared and absorbed. It was a ‘communion’, a sharing; an attunement. However, after the Synod of Whitby, that all began to change, Celtic Christianity, with all its blend of Christian and Celtic beliefs, was replaced by Roman rites and rituals… and control.

Having written this, but not yet posted it, I was with my father when the local village magazine came. Inside was a list of ceremonies for Lent, one being an ‘Ashing Communion’. This is where they put ash on your forehead, again in an equal-armed cross. (That cross signifies equilibrium). I wondered what the ash meant. The palm used in Palm Sunday is burnt and applied to the forehead. In Roman times, penitents wore ashes and sackcloth to repent for their sins. Now, everyone is a sinner, by all accounts. BUT it was the palm, and again, we come back to the pagan origins of Christianity, which feel far more real to me. The palm, sacred to the Goddess, is still being used in Christian religions, which has to be a good thing.

I’ve put the link at the bottom of this page so if you want to visit the church and partake of the energies there, feel free.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faith_of_Our_Fathers_(hymn)