THIS, TOO, IS GOD'S WILL

Fr. Richard Rohr quotes Ken Wilber as teaching: It is not what a person says, but the level from which they say it that determines the truth of a spiritual statement.

There it is: "...the level from which they say it...." That's also known as "walking it, not just talking it."

Too often we hear a truth and we just spout it out as if it is our own...as if we earned it. We didn't; we merely learned it. We have to move it on down...from the head to the heart to the gut to our Soul...and it is moved by our acceptance of our daily life experiences.

We've all heard the one about love begets love, hate begets hate. Then we perceive our dear friend Gertrude whom we love showing us an attitude of disrespect, and whoa! In a heartbeat, her name is on our mental "unfriend" list. It takes a lot of patient practice to head our own perception of disrespect off...to not immediately marry ourselves to our own hurt.

The biggest detour to our simply getting over our own self is that we stop and beat the living be-jayus out of ourselves for feeling hurt, for wanting to retaliate.

There's where we get on our merry-go-round...never going higher in consciousness, not really going lower where it would be more apparent even to us that we're on the wrong ride. We just get on and go around and around and around, gathering more mental evidence of hurt, of betrayal. Saying all the while "Please, God, bless her, change me." And we throw another log on our fire of resistance.

It is in disciplining ourselves to live and breathe an attitude of gratitude that we are given the gift of choice in our initial response. We learn to welcome whatever comes rather than resist it, then try to overcome our resistance. Overcoming our resistance means we keep the object of our resistance as our focus. No. We welcome whatever...then let our higher good make it welcome-able.

We have learned "God can and will intervene in my life in my behalf." The rest of the story is that there's a lot of inner work we must do daily in order to accept that intervention...in other words, to upgrade our thinking so that our first thought is: "This, too, is God's will."

Thank you.