Four elements of human harvest: faith, hope, love … and conscience.

Those who sow in winter reap in summer; winter is this world, summer is the world of Openness. Let us sow in the world, so as to harvest in summer. To pray is not to prevent winter, but to allow summer. Winter is not a time of harvest, but of labor.
Gospel of Philip, Saying 7 (Leloup)

What God Harvests

What is harvested in the world is composed of four elements: water, earth, wind, and light. What God harvests is also composed of four elements: faith [pistis], hope [elpis], love [agape], and contemplation [gnosis]. Our earth is faith, for she gives us roots. Water is our hope, for it slakes our thirst. Wind [pneuma] is the love [agapē] through which we grow; and light is the contemplation [gnosis] through which we ripen.
Gospel of Philip, Saying 115 (Leloup)

“FAITH is the experience of divine breath; HOPE is the experience of divine light; and LOVE is the experience of divine fire. There is no authentic and sincere religious life without faith, hope and love; but there is no faith, hope and love without mystical experience or, what is the same thing, without grace.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p71

What Has Atrophied

“Go back to the crucial story in Beelzebub’s Tales of Ashiata Shiemash, the great sacred cosmic messenger sent from above, probably an amalgamation of many cosmic messengers, including Gurdjieff’s alter ego himself …when he was sent to the earth on the mission to discover what is going wrong with these three centered beings on the planet, or in other words, our earth, he discovered that the three sacred being impulses in them, faith, hope, and love, had atrophied to such a state that they were unrecognizable, they were basically gone. But he discovered … that the impulse existing under the name of objective conscience is not yet atrophied in them and remains in their presence almost in a primordial state.

“And his wonderful little hymn, a few pages later in the chapter called appropriately, The Terror of the Situation, talks a little bit about why we can’t begin to deal directly with love as the agent that we’re working with. It’s called Faith, Hope, and the Love, and it talks of each one of them. Love of consciousness evokes the same in response…

“ …we see people rushing in, trying to wield what they think is love in the situation, and getting only the result of increased hate and increased battle. And the clue there is that we’re working with the wrong caliber of love… conscience, objective conscience is the bridge. It’s the one thing we still have to work with.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Encounter with Evil, February 2023 CA, 6:42 Day 4a Morning Teaching

The Wrong Harvest

Logion 63

Yeshua says…

There was a rich man
who had expendable wealth.
He said to himself,
“I will take my money
and use it to plant, sow and harvest,
filling my barns with the produce,
then I’ll have everything.”
These were the thoughts occupying his mind
the night he died.
Listen, if you are paying attention!

The Cost

“Rather than the cost of your arising being exacted at your death by the harvesting of all the constituent elements that once upon a time were you and returning them to the biosphere, you pay in your continuous willingness to step up to the plate and take on the pain, the woundedness in your own self as well as anyone else. To be humus, to be humiliated, to move through the terror, to live in the collective and in the greater relational field in the midst of a life which is pushing you and forcing you in the logic of world 48 now infected with 96 fear to, no, isolate yourself, segregate, protect, you know, it’ll cost, you know. You have to move forward, you pay.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Imaginal Wisdom School, August 2020, 30:47 0820 IWS Thursday PM Teaching

The Offering

[Cynthia reading from Teilhard’s Mass on the World]
“Once again, beneath this moving sheet of fire, the living surface of the earth wakes and trembles. And once again begins its fearful travail. I will place on my paten, O God, a harvest to be won by this day’s renewal of labor. Into my chalice I shall pour all the sap which is to be pressed out from this day’s fruits and from its sufferings. My paten and my chalice are the depths of the soul laid widely open to all the forces which in a moment will rise up from every corner of the earth and converge upon the spirit.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2016, Three-Centered Knowing, 2:17, Saturday Morning Liturgy

“This is the material of my sacrifice, the only material you desire. Once upon a time, men took into your temple the first fruits of their harvests, the flower of their flocks. But the offering you really want, the offering you mysteriously need each day to appease your hunger, to slake your thirst, is nothing less than the growth of the world born ever onwards in the stream of universal becoming.

“And so I ask you all to rise. Make your offering with conscious attention. Receive, O Lord, this all-embracing host which your whole creation, moved by your magnetism, offers you at this dawn of a new day.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2016 Three-Centered Knowing, 7:07 Saturday Morning Liturgy

Elements of Harvest

The earth receives what is given,

holding without knowing

what stirs beneath the dark.



Thirst is older than the rain. 

The body opens before the water comes. 

We have always been this waiting.

Wind moves without asking. 

The grain bends, recovers, bends. 

The field is never still.

In the long light of late summer 

the fruit opens to the ripening.

Fullness past all effort.

The fields are full. 

Few have gone in.



— William Britten

Logion 73

Yeshua says…
The harvest is abundant.
The reapers are few.
Implore the Master of Harvest
to send out workers.

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Quotations from the Gospels of Thomas and Philip are from Lynn C Bauman, Ward J Bauman, Cynthia Bourgeault, The Luminous Gospels (Praxis 2008)

Quotations from the Gospel of Philip from Jean-Yves LeLoup, Gospel of Philip, (Inner Traditions: 2004)

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