The Fourth Healing Miracle

In the summer of 2021, I attended a retreat in Copake, New York hosted under the auspices of the Sophia Foundation. Led by the ever-wise Joel Park, it was a special and memorable experience the memory of which I still treasure to this day.

Our dear friend from beyond the grave, Valentin Tomberg, speaks of the solitariness of the Hermetic vocation, studying and practicing all too often alone. I certainly have experienced this solitude, and an accompanying sense of loneliness, more frequently than I would like to admit.

But Tomberg does not stop with his description of solitude. He also speaks of the joy of meeting other Hermeticists engaged in the same inner work and practicing the same spiritual exercises. It was exactly this enthusiasm and joy that I felt meeting a community of souls who truly understood me at a soul level, and who moreover welcomed me into their circle of friendship.

While all the details of the retreat are too extensive to relate here, the theme was the seven archetypal healing miracles of the Gospel of John, with a special emphasis on the first three miracles. For those unfamiliar with this subject matter, these archetypal seven miracles were performed by Christ during his earthly ministry: the transforming of water into wine, the healing of the nobleman’s son, the healing of the paralytic at Bethesda, the feeding of the five thousand, the walking on water, the healing of the blind man, and the raising of Lazarus from the dead.

Channels of Healing

In his work Lazarus Come Forth, Valentin Tomberg presents a deep teaching on these seven miracles, presenting them as healing remedies for the seven stages of the fall through which humanity passed. In so many words, they are healing channels or doorways opened by Christ back to paradise and communion with God—portals that pour out healing grace for wounded humanity.

Put simply, these miracles are archetypal images of the healing of not only the individual human being, but all of humanity. With that background in mind, the retreat in 2021 focused on the first three healing miracles and their unfolding in our times.

The healing manifestation, the activating enzymes, of the first three miracles were to be found in the teachings of three teachers of humanity in the 21st century: Rudolf Steiner, Valentin Tomberg, and Robert Powell. While there were many more teachers and great souls active in the 20th century, these three individuals brought teachings necessary for the continued evolution of humanity, each building on the teachings of his predecessor while also introducing a new element.

Put simply, for this is an extreme simplification, Rudolf Steiner brought an emphasis on thinking as a path of spiritual knowledge. Valentin Tomberg revived the Hermetic tradition and baptized into the light and warmth of Christ and Sophia. Robert Powell synthesized teachings of both Tomberg and Steiner, while contributed a special emphasis on astrosophy (star wisdom) and an expansion on Tomberg’s Sophia teachings.

As the retreat unfolded the various manifestations of these first three archetypal healing miracles, I felt my being set afire by another idea: that of the fourth healing miracle and the feeding of the five thousand. I was so enthused by my thoughts that Joel graciously allowed to present a brief explanation towards the end of the retreat. Below is a summary of some of the thoughts that came to me.

The Fourth Healing Miracle

Tomberg’s Luminous Holy Trinity—a hexagram representing Father, Son, and Holy Spirit united with Mother, Daughter, and Holy Soul—revealed the creative union of Divine Masculine and Feminine.

This hexagram portrays an image 3 x 2 = 6, or the creative union in love of Above and Below, Divinity and Creation—the Masculine Trinity and the Feminine Trinosophia. Due to its trinitarian nature, this hexagram evokes the first three healing miracles.

But how could humanity pass from 3 to 4? Or taken further to include duality, from 6 to 8? How could humanity progress from the 3rd healing miracle to the 4th? What was the next step in our collective healing and evolution?

The Feeding of the Five Thousand

The feeding of the five thousand is an image of diffused mediation. It is an image above all of participation. Christ performs the miracle of expansion, multiplying the loaves and the fish, but he leaves it up to his twelve disciples to distribute the food to the hungering people.

Twelve is a number of cosmic mediation between extremes, and the twelve disciples mediated and diffuse the power of Christ to the hungering people. Interestingly, to this day, Catholic churches both and ancient and those built in a traditional style contain twelve pillars, six on each side, diffusing and mediating the weight of the building’s weight into the earth.

Moreover, five thousand is a multiple of five, and five is the number of the free human being composed of five limbs, five digits on each extremity, and five senses.

When meditating on the miracle of the feeding of the 5,000, then, we see a relationship between the mediation of the twelve apostles diffusing the light of Christ to humanity, and humanity receiving and assimilating the food of divinity. It is a miracle of participatory communion.

The fourth healing miracle, then, can be seen as a miracle of human participation in the love of the Luminous Holy Trinity. And so it is. For the fourth healing miracle is the participation of divinity with humanity and humanity with divinity. It is the dual mysteries of Incarnation and Divinization (or theosis in the Eastern Christian terminology). It is the mysteries of Jesus and Mary.

For what is the Incarnation of Jesus Christ but the intimate participation of divinity in humanity? And what what truth does the archetypal image of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary evoke but the participation of humanity healed and being taking up into participation in divinity?

St. Maximilian Kolbe, meditating on the mystery of the Blessed Virgin as the representative of the New Creation, the New Eve, speaks of this union of divinity and creation in the person of the Virgin Mary, speaking of her as the complement, the fourth element, in the Holy Trinity:

In the union of the Holy Spirit with [the Virgin Mary], not only does love bind these two beings, but the first of them [the Holy Spirit] is all the love of the Most Holy Trinity, while the second [the Blessed Virgin Mary] is all the love of creation, and thus in that union heaven is joined to earth, the whole heaven with the whole earth, the whole of Uncreated Love with the whole of created love: this is the vertex of love….

In virtue of this spousal union formally denoted by the title Complement, Mary is able to enter as no other into the order of the hypostatic union, her soul being wholly divinized, because by the grace of the Immaculate Conception it has been ‘transubstantiated’ into the Holy Spirit.

In Rublev’s famous icon of the Holy Trinity, the Trinitarian person form a half circle around the table, with the cup of divine communion between them. But seated in the fourth place is the viewer of the icon, completing the four points. Viewing the icon, one is invited to participation in the loving communion of Trinitarian life. One becomes, in a very real way, the fourth—the complement of the Holy Trinity via participation of one’s humanity in divinity. One moves to viewing the Holy Trinity from the outside (3) to participation from the inside (4). And thus one moves from third healing miracle to the fourth, from receiving to participating.

This movement from three to four, from receiving the love of the Holy Trinity to taking one’s place at the table as the fourth element can be symbolized by the movement from the hexagram of the Luminous Holy Trinity to the octogram of the communion of divinized Creation.

This, incidentally, is why the symbol of this blog is united squares and not triangles. The octrogram is the symbol of creation’s loving participatory union with the Luminous Holy Trinity, taking the fourth seat at the table of divine communion. It is the image of Creation resurrected and taken up fully into the divine life.

It is also the symbol of the eight day of a new world: this world resurrected and resplendent with divine presence. As the ancient epistle of Barnabas says, explaining why Christians worship on Sunday, or the eighth day: "You see what he means: ‘On that Sabbath, after I have set everything at rest, I will create the beginning of an eighth day, which is the beginning of another world.’ This is why we spend the eighth day in celebration, the day on which Jesus both arose from the dead and, after appearing again, ascended into heaven."

Consecration to Jesus through Mary

In the Catholic tradition, there is a practice that facilitates this Trinitarian communion and participation in the most intimate possible way. It is the practice of consecration. Consecration is an act of the will through which one lovingly unites oneself to the Virgin Mary in a spiritual union forever, allowing her to form in your soul the presence of Christ fully and completely. Just as she formed the God-Man Jesus Christ in her womb, so too she forms you into a divinized human in her spiritual womb, a Man-God so to speak.

This is a great mystery, one not to be entered into lightly. Saint Louis de Montfort recommends 33 days of preparation, a mystical number if there ever was one, followed by a day of solemn consecration. Saint Maximilian Kolbe, who lived far more recently. in the last century, was also an apostle of consecration. He recommends a far shorter preparation of a nine day novena. Whatever form you choose, you must recognize that a solemn act of consecration places you firmly and fully into the flow of love between Divinity and Creation, Above and Below. This flow is a powerful current, a current of divine participation.

Surrendering yourself to this divine flow of love may in common parlance, rock your world. You will never be the same. And yet there is no better way to pass from the first three healing miracles into the fourth. To move from three to four, from six to eight.

To enter into the fourth healing miracle one must receive and digest the teachings of the first three miracle—the loaves and fish of cosmic communion—and then become a participatory agent of diffusing and radiating the light of Christ and Sophia to all, thus participating in the transformation, resurrection, and divination of humanity and the earth.