Wondrous — Chapter 3: Incarnation, part 2
(An experiment in writing in installments)
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Previous chapters:
Chapter 1: Eliza, in which we meet Eliza and share her vision-impression of Christ handing her a newborn. The introduction also contains background for the overall story.
Chapter 2: Threshold, in which Eliza, somewhat distracted at work, takes the afternoon off, visualizes her future as a mother, and, feeling that she is about to conceive, senses a soul with her.
Chapter 3: Incarnation, part 2
Outside once again, Eliza finds a bench and reflects on her experiences of the last hour. Distinct spaces, a few distinct individuals, distinct responses from the soul-sphere. Pieces of the puzzle. She looks around at the other businesses in the little shopping district here and figures that its perhaps enough to connect herself to them mentally and listen for any twinges of response from the soul. Yes, there, the hardware store—it has—what would she call it? She watches several denim-clad customers going in and out, each one emanating a kind of practicality and hands-on know-how, each one leaving the store with tools or supplies that imbue them with a greater capacity to alter their physical world—a power, really. Yes, a power—power and energy, like a human-level echo of the Creator’s own omnipotence, something that the soul-sphere finds attractive even with a general disinterest in the more mundane qualities of plaster, paint, and pipes.
The scent of fresh cinnamon rolls draws Eliza’s senses to Antoine’s Patisserie, a veritable fount of deliciousness, that, unlike Naomi’s, she’s visited more frequently than she wants to admit. Yet the soul-sphere pays no attention, as if the sensation is but a gross reminder of a more subtle mellifluence, the almost imperceptible touch of the divine that’s as soft as the plumules of a feather.
A gaggle of laughter meets her ears, and Eliza turns toward the theatre from which groups of schoolchildren emerge. The marquee tells her that they’ve just enjoyed a selection of the world’s classic folk tales. The soul-sphere delights with the children, though with a faint melancholy—the joys of the world are but wisps of cloud, tangible yet forever impermanent.
Observing all these heterogenous feelings, along with those of the stationer’s, the jeweler’s, the music store, and the restaurants, Eliza understands that such an admixture isn’t what this soul needs, isn’t what it truly resonates with. There’s just too much noise, too much interference. Maybe, then…
Eliza rises from the bench and heads to the city park two blocks over, a serene, well-tended space in which are preserved some of the old native trees amidst the pavement, concrete, and other monuments of civilization. When she arrives, she takes a deep draught of the fragrances of fir and cedar, of oak and maple, and of the various flowering bushes beneath the canopy. The soul-sphere seems to breathe, too, contracting several times. Here, unlike the art gallery and, for that matter, every other place she’s visited or contemplated, the atmosphere is relatively free from the assertive presence of human egotism. Plants may not be rational and may boast only the faintest stirrings of sentience, but are thus closer, in a way, to the primordial essence. “Not that I want to revert to a rose-bush,” Eliza chuckles to herself, “but there’s something to be said for that desireless purity.” The soul around her pulses its agreement.
Eliza sits on the grass in the middle of the park to buffer herself as much as she can from the surrounding city. She closes her eyes, stills her body and mind in the pervasive calmness, calls again to the soul, and waits…and waits…and waits. But just as she’d first noted outside the bookshop, the sphere remains in frustrating constancy.
What more must I do? she prays, to God and the soul both. What is keeping you from—
Just then the bells of a nearby church announce the hour, and the soul gives a jolt. Eliza focuses on the resonance of the bells, listening for the higher harmonics as well as the deeper subtones blending with the glacial heartbeat of the earth. A few minutes later, when the lingering sound within her inner perceptions have faded into a background hum, she turns her mind to the church and the impulse she’d felt with the biographies of saints in the bookshop. Is that it?
She thinks to visit the lofty church next, but even as energy gathers in her torso and legs to stand, she stops, for a twitch in the soul-sphere, a slight turning away, conveys a clear message: No, not there. Though it is a God-house, it is yet tainted by self-satisfaction rather than the simple sweetness of—Eliza feels another twitch in the opposite direction and remembers that across the street from the east side of the park stands a smaller chapel that once belonged to a funeral home but is now owned by a non-sectarian spiritual community. She’s crossed paths on occasion with members of that community, each of whom impressed her with their unassuming joy and their—yes—their humbleness, present even with the kind of quiet assuredness that comes naturally with the surrender of selfish prerogatives into attunement with God, with the Beloved, with the Higher Self.
Heeding the prompt, Eliza hastens to the chapel, pauses at the entrance to compose herself, then enters. The soul assents with its strongest contraction yet.
“Hello, and welcome,” says a cheerful man seated at a reception desk who has looked up from whatever work he’d been doing on a computer. “Can I help you?”
“I just wanted to meditate and pray in your sanctuary.”
The man beams a smile of blessing at her, glancing briefly above her and to either side, as if he senses Eliza’s ethereal companion.
“By all means,” he says, gesturing to a set of doors to his right. “Take whatever time you need. We’ve no events scheduled for today. And feel free to leave your coat and shoes here in the entryway.”
Baring her arms and feet, Eliza steps across the threshold onto a soft blue carpet underneath a peaked roof and takes a seat in one of the padded chairs. As the doors close noiselessly behind her, their momentum checked by dampers, the tumult of the city and the streets falls away into stillness and silence. The chapel itself celebrates modesty: no ornamentation, no seasonal colors, no decorations, even, save a tasteful arrangement of flowers upon the altar, resting beneath not a cross or a crucifix or any other symbol, but a backlit portrait of Christ—from one of Henrich Hoffman’s paintings, she figures.
Eliza gazes at the portrait for several minutes, calming her thoughts as she breathes evenly. She closes her eyes and repeats those practices she’d done on the day of her vision-impression. The soul-sphere responds, contracting once, twice, and then begins a regular pulsing, almost the two-step heart rhythm, a rhythm that quickens as Eliza recalls, once more, the thrill of the Christ handing her a child.
It’s time. Beloved—O Beloved! The moment has come.
Holding to that vision, she recalls also the books that had stirred this soul, now almost two hours ago, and with that recollection—with the sense of devotion and wisdom in those volumes—the soul comes closer, like a piece of the puzzle has snapped into place.
With this coupling she recalls the peacefulness of the tea shop, and another piece locks itself alongside the first, giving shape to what seems to her a portal whose outlines have become clear.
The soul-sphere pulses with an even greater fervor, with a joyful anticipation. Eliza holds her concentration fast upon the growing gateway that stands before her inner sight, bringing each of the soul’s contractions and recognitions and delights back to mind, delving beneath the attendant forms to the fundamental quality of each encounter: the peace, the wisdom, the resonant sound of the church bells, the energy of tools and equipment, the lightness and beauty at the art, the calmness of nature, and the love—oh, the love!—that has brought her to this instant, this timeless connection between matter and spirit.
I am Thine, Lord, forever Thine, she prays. Forever Thine.
The soul-sphere’s racing pulse has blurred now into a bursting vibrancy—the stuff of life itself—waiting, waiting, all but ready to animate, guide, and fashion the microscopic body as it begins its relentless expansion from inside-out.
Just one piece remains—the keystone to the portal.
Eliza gathers her own life force from throughout her body—the vitality of every muscle and cell, of every molecule of oxygen coursing through her bloodstream, of every emotion, of every feeling and sentiment, of every thought, of every experience that has led her life-path here. In gratitude and devotion she offers them all, all that she was, is, and will be, into the waiting portal. Streaming like an eager flux, her purified love seals every joint in the assemblage until, with a sudden luminance, it becomes a flawless, unified whole.
In that instant, Eliza lets out a delicate laugh, accompanied by a flush of her face, for a clear voice has presented a question to her mind: “Are you sure?” She laughs because it’s the same question she’s seen so many times when deleting layers in her various architectural designs, a question that is invariably accompanied by the warning of finality, “This action cannot be undone.”
And her reply—far more emphatic than any she’s ever given on a computer—leave not the least toehold for doubt: Yes! Yes! A thousand times, yes!
The soul, crescendoing to a magnificent tempest of joy, now freezes and flattens onto the portal before both begin to fold themselves like origami, each crease and bend assuming ever-more complex fractal patterns even as they become smaller, smaller, smaller, twisting into a tunnel, its tip but the tiniest of points, reaching down within Eliza’s waiting womb…
Then, all motion, all swirling ceases as the last of the spinning vortex collapses into but a pinprick of radiance within Eliza’s abdomen, a pinprick that yet suffuses her entire being with a warmth and a knowing. She brings her palms together at her heart in wordless prayer, bathed in a stream of joyful tears. The fertilized egg, the newly awakened zygote, has finally welcomed its host. The body process is now underway, the allotted time for this incarnation has started its relentless march. But the true life—Eliza smiles with the thought of how all the arguments about when “life” begins miss the point entirely. Yes, the physical body has its beginning at conception, and yes, it takes a couple of months before that body is viable outside its incubating womb. But the true life that animates it has no beginning or end. Life is and always has been eternal, a spark of the ever-existing, ever-conscious, ever-new bliss of God.
And to her mind comes, in a clear voice, another strange and complex word, but one that brands itself upon her awareness: atmanivedana.
Chapter notes and comment prompts:
In this chapter I’ve visualized conception not as a singular, sudden event, but as an extended process because the incarnating soul, in this case, is very particular about the circumstances under which is comes into its nascent body. What are your feelings about this drawn-out account?
What is your response/reaction to the various people that Eliza encounters in this chapter? Are they given enough life and detail, or not enough?
As with Chapters 1 and 2, most of the story is Eliza’s inner perception and thought process with only an occasional thought that’s clearly verbalized (and italicized). How does this work for you, or not?
(I’ll repeat this last question in every chapter.) Based on this chapter (along with the title and the one hint about what the story is about), what questions do you have that you hope the story will answer in future installments?
Please also report any typos or passages that you find unclear or problematic.
(If you like this post, selecting the ❤️ to bless the Algorithm Angels.)