You may be wondering about my blog’s title. It comes from this passage in the Mormon Doctrine and Covenants:
“The Angels do not reside on a planet like this earth; but they reside in the presence of God, on a globe like a sea of glass and fire, where all things for their glory are manifest, past, present, and future, and are continually before the Lord.” -D&C 130:6-7
I first read this verse in high school, and it dumbfounded me. Not in a bad way, though: it hit me with all the weight meaning can have. In that verse, the “the glory of all things” is laid bare. Reading it, you see the light and life buried beneath all things hesitantly emerge from their hiding place before they, startled, dart back into hiding once again. So it’s worth exploring for a bit:
A Sea of Glass
A sea of glass: what an image! The sea–what separated humankind from one another for thousands of years–is now no longer a barrier but instead a means of connection. All things become present through it. In a way, it’s like the Internet: largely invisible (or transparent) in itself but able to show us all things. The sea of glass, as the next verse makes clear, is also “a great Urim and Thummim.” Buried beneath soil for millennia, it will one day become unearthed and show us the meaning of what we have forgotten.
If earthy ground is the muladhara or root chakra–the roots of our bodily existence–the earth of the glassy sea is the visuddha or throat chakra. When our earth becomes transfigured into its millennial condition, matter won’t mean the same thing; what “matters” will change. The ground beneath our feet will no longer be soil, stone, or sediment but instead the words that issue forth from our throat. Things will no longer be “just things.” Their surfaces will become transparent to the meanings shining out from within them. We will realize that “the Word” is not a leather-bound set of pages or an abstract metaphysical concept but a very real earth in itself. The dirt-encrusted edges of things will be wiped clean; the Word, what eighteenth-century mystic Emanuel Swedenborg described as “a mirror in which [we] see God, although each in a different way” will replace soil as the ground, what “grounds” us.
The Sea of Fire
And yet the glassy earth is still only the ground. Regardless of how clean or pure it is, it was “made for walkin’.” What walks on this earth made of glass? The answer, of course, is fire. The sea of glass is a way to contain the fire that would otherwise get out and consume everything. Glass comes from fire: it already knows the fire’s tricks and how to take them. Our fiery passions, obsessions, lust, or anger would run rampant if the sea of glass didn’t vessel them, and the way today’s earth has become a worldwide fire-hazard of desire speaks to how desperately we need the glassy sea that keeps the flame in place.
For the sea of glass vessels the sea of fire. The former envelops, contains, and grounds the latter. Without a glass vessel to contain the desirous flame, it would flare out without limit in a desperate attempt to find itself. But of course, a fire can find itself only in a mirror, something that is not itself fire or desire. The glass sea lets the fiery sea see and know itself; it enables desire to step back from itself enough to know itself clearly.
The New World
The vessel for the fire is already here. Modern spiritual teachers like Sufi master Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee talk about how a “network of light” has been woven around the earth to contain the energies of a new age. These energies are the fire spoken of in that Doctrine and Covenants verse. The sea of glass’s vessel shows itself physically in the Internet’s free exchange of information. As Vaughan-Lee explains in many places, the Internet is the world of energy, of fire, of love, waking up, since love and its fire can only appear between two separate-yet-connected beings, the bread and butter of a network like the World Wide Web. This is, again, Visuddha or the Throat Chakra: speaking, connection through spoken and written word, interconnection, dialogue.
The sea of fire will join with the sea of glass when it consents to be vesseled by it. We will no longer desire things but see ourselves and things from the perspective of desire, or rather, from love. Connection and love will become the ultimate principle, not the things juxtaposed by connection. Fire becomes vesseled in glass when it becomes conscious, and it becomes conscious whenever we see from love and not from the sham of our egos. Things must die; the fiery love between things must come into its own.
This blog is, hopefully, a way to help vessel the sea of fire in the sea of glass. By making connections between things and evoking the unspeakable depths of the sacred, I want to contain the unspoken in a network of light that becomes ever more intricate. And that union between glass and fire happens within, through, and between you, me, and anyone (or anything) else.
A Sea of Glass and Fire 