GIVE TO GET

Our world today seems to me to be going backward with "peace" seen as merely a panacea to speak of but not a reality to achieve. Which seems to prove the truth that everybody decries the bully and his ways, yet when the bully turns his hard eyes on them, they quick line up with the bully's ways.

"When will we ever learn? When will we ever learn?"

Truth to tell, all the pretty words have already been written, spoken, sung...now we're just looking for new ways to string them together.

It's not the learning we're lacking, it's the will to do.

Many of us go weekly to church, synagogue, temple, mosque hoping to hear new ways to do the words we already have heard and know to be true. Many of us just study our navel hoping enlightenment will spring from there.

It could not be surprising (shocking, maybe, but not surprising) to find 50,000-year-old graffiti on a cave wall saying pretty much what the Sermon says. The Sermon, which was spoken some 2,000 years ago, that we're still quoting, but not doing. I myself preach it way too much in comparison to how often I walk it. Seems like I'm forever catching disrespect from someone and responding in kind. And I know it is not what is said or done, it is our reaction to it that causes our interminable pain. Apparently, it's just that I know it for you...it's still elusive for me.

The doing is so hard, of course, because its only requirement is that we give over, give in, give up...GIVE.

We cannot get God until we give up our sense of self...hug it and kiss it and let it go. For self alone is the block to the higher power within...ready to flow forth.

Thank you.