All Things Curve Toward the Centre Where Love Is

On the Spiral Cross and the Deeper Magic

There are seasons when our maps stop working. The routes that once felt trustworthy—beliefs, practices, goals—begin to fray, and it can seem as if we’re losing the thread. I no longer read this unraveling as failure. It feels more like the moment when the cocoon thins and the creature inside can finally sense light. Something in us is trying to be born into a truer shape. Out of that sense of thinning came a simple mark that has become my compass: the Spiral Cross.

At first glance, it is nothing clever—just a loose spiral that turns toward a small cross, and from the cross a few strokes of light spill outward. I drew it absent-mindedly at the corner of a page and then again, slower, until my hand knew its path. I realised the gesture was saying something I had not yet found words for: life is not linear, love is the still point, and light does not end at the centre—it begins there.

The spiral refuses the myth of the straight line. We do not grow by moving forward in tidy increments. We circle and return; we revisit old questions with deeper eyes. A spiral allows for recurrence without condemnation. It honours the truth that the soul learns gradually, by turning the same truth in different light. When I draw the spiral now, I can feel the whole of my story folded into it: departures and homecomings, resolve and collapse, discoveries that arrived disguised as loss. The spiral says, “You are allowed to be unfinished and faithful at the same time.”

At the spiral’s heart, the line meets the cross. Not as a collision, but as recognition. The cross is the axis of love, the still point in the turning world. It is not merely a symbol of suffering; it is the place where self-giving love reveals itself as the structure of reality. Here, the old enchantments fall away: the belief that power is control, that worth is achievement, that God is elsewhere. At the cross, love stands unarmed and unafraid and calls everything back to itself. This is what C. S. Lewis meant when Aslan spoke of a magic deeper still—a law older than fear, woven into the world before its first morning. The deeper magic is not a trick; it is the world’s true gravity.

From that centre, light moves outward again. The spiral does not end in self-absorption or private illumination; it widens into a life given. We come to the hidden heart to be re-oriented—then we return to the day with different eyes. If I were to summarise the whole gesture in a single sentence, it would be this line that arrived like prayer: All things curve toward the Centre where Love is. The sentence sounds devotional, but its claim is ontological. It suggests that love is not one option among many; love is the final contour of everything that is. Even our refusals and ruins cannot change the direction of the curve.

This is not naïveté. The spiral includes descent. To say that all things bend toward love is not to deny that some paths pass through shadowed valleys, hospital wards, or the long winter of silence. It is to say that even there, the hidden gravity holds. If you have ever sat in the dark and discovered that your breath still knew how to find its rhythm, you’ve felt it. If you have ever come to the end of strength and, somehow, kindness remained, you’ve witnessed it. The deeper magic is patient. It does not panic. It keeps folding the world, turn by turn, toward healing.

The Spiral Cross belongs to that trust. It is not an emblem of superiority or a badge of certainty; it is a pilgrim’s mark. I drew it for the year I turn fifty, not as a brand but as a vow: to walk the spiral consciously, to keep choosing the centre, to let the light that’s found there govern my return to ordinary hours. In a culture addicted to velocity and spectacle, the Spiral Cross insists on a different cadence—slow enough to notice, brave enough to stay, free enough to give.

There is a Celtic instinct in this symbol too. The old stones and the sea-torn monasteries teach that holiness is not an escape from the world but a way of being in it with unguarded attention. The spiral has wandered across the lintels of ancient churches and the edges of pilgrim stones not because it is decorative, but because it remembers a truth the modern mind forgets: the journey changes us by bringing us home. The home is not a place but a presence. The presence is not an idea but a Love that hungers to be known.

“Deeper magic” can sound fanciful until you sit quietly enough to feel it moving through your own life. The conversation that arrived just when you had given up. The song that found you on a day you could not pray. The stranger’s kindness that held you together when your last answer failed. None of these prove anything in the laboratory sense, but each of them points toward a Centre that keeps shining through the seams. The Spiral Cross does not make that Centre appear; it helps me remember.

If there is a practice implied here, it is simply this: let your days become the drawing. Begin at the margin and turn toward the middle. When you reach the cross—however you name it—pause long enough to let love speak. Then carry that tone back into emails and dishes, into walking and work. The point is not to perform serenity but to live from a truer orientation. We do not have to force the light into the world; we have to stop resisting the way it already desires to travel through us.

I sometimes imagine the whole of creation moving in that same gesture: galaxies wheeling, tides returning, seasons leaning once more toward spring. “All things curve toward the Centre where Love is” is not a guarantee that life will be painless; it is a declaration that meaning is older than our chaos. The spiral teaches patience. The cross teaches trust. The light teaches generosity. Together they whisper, stay with the turn; it is bringing you home.

So this is the emblem I’m carrying into the next chapter—a spiral, a cross, and three small strokes of dawn. When I lose my way, I will trace it again and let my hand instruct my heart. When I am tempted to outrun my life, I will let the line pull me back to the centre. When I feel useless, I will remember that light is not measured by audience but by radiance. And when I am asked what I believe, perhaps I will simply say: that love is real enough to bear a world, and near enough to find in the middle of an ordinary day.

All things curve toward the Centre where Love is. May we be curved with them. May the deeper magic have its way. And may the little compass we carry—inked on a page, carved in a margin, remembered in the body—keep drawing us, turn by faithful turn, into the quiet heart of God.

May Peace, Love and Inspiration fill your days.

Rob