The Sword and The Stone

Pixabay

Aversion and craving are important tendencies of collective human nature. They both give us information. When we have a slight aversion to something, like a person or a food, for example: chocolate, it may mean that exactly what we need to balance our health is a small dose of said person or a piece of bitter dark chocolate. A person that is annoying, even just slightly, is giving us important information about our own inner issues. Our ego is responding to information that can become helpful in us figuring out what rests just under our surface, or in our shadow-self that needs to come out into the light. Then there are allergies, for example: alcohol for the alcoholic, or toxic people that have terrible boundaries. These cravings full of damage and chaos are important to pay attention to. We have gentle, intuitive craving, for example: a sense about a vegetable or a fruit; that we thus need to incorporate into our diet in order to be healthier and increase our balance of the physical. This is referred to as intuitive eating, and is a helpful practice for those of us with eating issues or disorders. There is the gentle pull of love and attraction to a human being, or someone that will certainly encourage us to know ourselves and bring love; physical, emotional and mental, into our lives. Each craving and aversion has information for our personal humanity, while traveling the daily path in life.

Faith to me is parallel the myth of “The Sword and The Stone”. Perhaps the stone represents my fears. Fear in itself. It is heavy. It can feel impenetrable. But God placed action at my fingertips. God gave me choice and free will. God put a sword in my hands, in order to help cut through fear. Faith in God provides me the ability to leave the stone where I am stuck. God provided the Angel Michael the sword to offer us protection. Michael is the Patron Saint of firefighters, police officers, and EMTs. When these heroes are there for us in our most dire situations, that is the angel of protection working through our most humble and kind public servants. Arthur, I suppose, channels this faith, protection, and devotion to the human race when he finds a way to pull the sword from the stone, symbolizing an end to all fear, hardship, suffering, and sin. 

If the sword represents our collective faith, and the protection we experience when living our best spiritual lives, perhaps the stone represents all that we need to overcome. We need to remember that the sword is permanently lodged amongst our fears and hardship. Craving and aversion help us find reality, awareness, and feeling inside our collective stone, locate the sword, and thus have faith in our personal identities. Hope remains. We know that only a “heavenly” power is capable of removing the sword from the stone, along with all life’s suffering. The good thing about this is, that we must never forget that in our darkness, there is a sword, for even the most lost, to grab ahold of while trapped in our personal fear or the collective stone. Someday, we all will achieve the freedom that occurs the moment that the sword is removed from the stone; from our broken hearts, our lost dreams, the scars that we endure from abuse and war, the grief from all of life’s passages, and all sin. It is collective; our sin. We are all in this together. The prophesy states that when the sword is removed, we all will have peace. All of us. There is this one stone, and there is one unified sword.