The gathered meeting is a table of candles, much
as one might find in some churches. Each of us is a candle, stood
shoulder to shoulder with the others, wax and wick and flame.
The wax is your body, the solid substance of being
and the source of fuel, the vessel of life. The wick is your mind, or
perhaps your soul, the connection between the wax and the flame, the
channel between the solid and the ephemeral. It allows the fuel of
gross matter to connect to the flame.
What, then, is the flame? It is not the Spirit,
for there is not one Spirit for each candle-that-is-a-person. It is
something that is individual to each of us, but is transcendent and
not truly of us, just as the flame is not an inherent part of the
candle but something that plays upon it even while it consumes it.
The flame is the meeting point of our mind/soul
and the Spirit that is shared between all. It is our experience of
the Spirit, the flame set in each of us that seeks for truth and
insight and love. No candle is unlit, as no-one is divorced from the
Spirit, though the flames may be different, just as the wax and wick
may be different between different candles.
What, then, is the Spirit in this metaphor? What
is it that the flame stands between, with what does it form an
interface for the wick? It is not hard to see, once you consider that
it is essential for the flame, but not specific to one flame; that it
stands in the same role for all of the flames, existing between them
and shared. The Spirit is the oxygen of the air, without which flames
could not burn. It feed the flame of our spiritual experience and is
the shared fuel of our religious life.
This is nice and full, and there is a danger in
every metaphor in over-extending it. However, there is a further
extension that is important and meaningful. The normal air of Earth
at sea level is a little over 20% oxygen, giving a partial pressure
of a little over 210 millibar (or 21,000 pascals, if you prefer).
Increase the available oxygen, say keeping the same overall pressure
but using pure oxygen, and the flame burns brighter and brighter –
and bigger and bigger. The fuel is used up more and more quickly, and
nearby objects may catch light – especially because they will burn
more readily in such an atmosphere.
The spiritual atmosphere has other things in it
than the oxygen of the Spirit, but they are all important, just as
our atmosphere contains carbon dioxide as well as oxygen –
necessarily, because air-breathing animals exhale it, and because it
is needed by plants. In fact, the bulk of our material atmosphere is
nitrogen, which plays no role in any common reaction, but which is
pulled out of the air and made into biologically important compounds
by specialised microorganisms. I do not know what the other
constituents of our spiritual atmosphere might be, but I am certain
that they are important, and that seeking to bathe in pure Spirit is
dangerous. The results might be spectacular, but they are likely to
be more than you might expect, and indeed more than you might want.