"Light my fire..."

"The time to hesitate is through.
No time to wallow in the mire.
Try now we can only lose.
And our love becomes a funeral pyre.

Come on baby light my fire,
come on baby light my fire,
come on baby light my fire...."
- Jim Morrison

I was sitting here in the Hub (the camp office) asking if anyone could recommend a song to go with a poem about self-immolation [Webster defines this term as: "suicide by fire"], and my friends broke into a very cute rendition of "Light My Fire."  So, here it is...the song, and the poem. 

This poem fell onto the page as I considered what it would take to truly embrace Mary Baker Eddy's use of the word "self-immolation" in statements like:

"Prayer, watching, and working, combined with self-immolation, are God's gracious means for accomplishing whatever has been successfully done for the Christianization and health of mankind."

as well as her references to the mythical Phoenix in this passage from The First Church of Christ, Scientist and Miscellany:

"A great sanity, a mighty something buried in the depths of the unseen, has wrought a resurrection among you, and has leaped into living love. What is this something, this phoenix fire, this pillar by day, kindling, guiding, and guarding your way? It is unity, the bond of perfectness, the thousandfold expansion that will engirdle the world, — unity, which unfolds the thought most within us into the greater and better, the sum of all reality and good."

Ahhh...living love...this is the phoenix fire that leaps and licks at our ego selves...bring it on!! 

I am a
nestling
a Phoenix
a sweet
something
emerging,
emerging
emerging...
never born
and never dying

only self-immolation
and resurrection

self-immolation
and resurrection

self-immolation and
resurrection,
resurrection,
resurrection...

over and over
again...
and again..

I am ready.

Sometimes it is the
heart that burns,
white hot and
fervent...
smiling,
eager for the resurrection

and sometimes
it is the body...

the body of selfish desires
the body of spectred dreams
the body of wants and woes,
sorrows and imaginings

I am not afraid
of the
immolation,
but
I
refuse to
live in the
in between,
the space
where the ego
still stands
pained
by the
letting go

I welcome the
Phoenix fire
let it burn
thoroughly
fervently
hot and
scrupulously
an
all-consuming
incineration of
what would
keep me from
loving without reason,
unconditionally,
and with abandon


Let its flames engulf
the me,
the my,
the mine
of
success...
and failure,
of what I think I've earned...
and what I'll
never be...
let the veneer,
the paint
the flash of self
blister and
peel
in the
heat of unselfed
loving...

I am weary of
carrying around
the 
"not quite" 
incinerated ashes
of resistance,
the "almost" immolated
still peppered
with bits of bone
and broken incisors
fragments of
all
that once
gnashed and gnawed
at the details of
who's to blame,
good human choices made,
and what went wrong...

a limboed
state of
regret and pride,
of what we wanted, or
what could have been...

I want,
I long for,
I ache to know
the
complete
dissolution of
the veiled ego,
the clouded past,
the "what never was"
and is no
longer,
and really
  shouldn't be...

I can do this...

I can walk so fully into the
fire
that there is nothing
left
to carry back out
but the gold,
the silver,
no rust...
no dross...
no smell of fire...
just a sweet nestling as pure
as the
"form of the fourth"*

There is no flickering ember of
the past's tinseled
moments of selfish
indulgence and accomplishment,
neither the grime
of dark alleys
filled with ghosts and
sorrows waiting
to pull me down
down
down
further and further
down....

no bits and pieces of
another time,
a former me,
a maybe him...
or what if her 
to
cling to new
downy feathers
soft and wet
as we
emerge from the
clean, white
ash of
this
God-stoked
Phoenix
pyre.

Just dust and
ash...
fine as silt
to soften the journey
like a powdery
Colorado
snowfall...
just a dusting,
quickly blown away by
Spirit's,
Pneuma's fresh winds of
I am..now
always
now.

yes,
I am!

I am
innocent
pure
good
willing
open
eager
unsullied
sweet
gentle
kind
new
I am
the I AM
that never was a
"was"
and seeks no promise
of
who
she
will be.
But sings the
sweet silver 
song of
I am
I am
I am
I am
all that
the
I AM
is
today...in this moment
of grace...

"here am I, send me..."

hungry for more grace...
Kate
Kate Robertson, CS

* Daniel 3: 25