Witness to the Fire - Linda Schierse Leonard

(Reviewer D. Brady) April 2000

Fire is the warmth, heat, light, illumination. Fire purifies; it consumes; it nurtures; it destroys. Fire is eternal movement; it is a rising and falling cascade of sparks and flames; it is iridescent, evanescent, mesmerizing; it is a shimmering kaleidoscope of colours, hues; raging, dying, leaping, letting go, clasping and dissolving into the eternal world of spirit. It originates outside of Time; it presents itself in materiality; its residue is smoke and ashes. Fire is white heat; it is blue light; it is flickering yellow tongues; it is raging red fangs. Fire spans the spectrum of colour and it pervades the universe of human hopes and desires.

Ms. Leonard's provocative work explores some of the forms and functions of fire as it burns in the human breast. She invites the reader to witness its fantastic phenomena in the soul gripped in the powers of addiction and in the soul which soars through the bright skies of creativity. Both forms of fire are born of the same urge; both are hatched in the same nest and nurtured in the same breast; both threaten to consume the body and soul in which they rage.

For every shade of the spectrum, she identifies a companion archetypal urge and image which reveals an aspect of the elusive nature of the cosmic fires's force within the human being. The author has emphasized the male gender editorially in this context. The fire of lust stretches to become the force of love; the light of the soul seeks expression as the light of truth; the heat of passion yearns for consummation in an act of self-transformation. Fire fosters the trans-substantiation of mortal flesh into the divine metanoia; it presses towards its transfiguration, towards the act melting into infinity, into the ultimate immolation and at-one-ment with the Divine.

The reader is summoned to witness to this Fire - not as a passive observer, not as a victim consumed by circumstance, not as an indifferent outsider, but as a torch-bearer, a guardian of the eternal flame, a kindler of new creation. Ms. Schierse-Leonard's call is a call to action, a command to seize the fire in one's own soul and to master its frightening forces. The reader is goaded into taking a stand for and against the ever-ambivalent urges which assail him and which threaten to destroy him and which tempt one also to become a co-creative partner of God.

Read this book; study its patterns; understand and apply its blueprint for self-revelation and revelation. Grasp its import; take up your torch of self-discovery; brandish the flame of self-purification. Yield to its light; surrender to its might. Let your every waking hour be a steadfast endeavour to dispel YOUR darkest night.