TRUTH PREVAILS...STAND ON IT

[Note: The following is my memory of American history...don't hold me to every word, just accept it for the storyline.]

During the birthing of America, during the Revolutionary War, our armed forces consisted pretty much of farmers, blacksmiths, store keeps...plain old folks in other words. All they knew of shooting was hunting for rabbits, wild fowl and the like for the family dinner.

When the British soldiers came to our shores, wearing their bright red coats and shiny black boots, they marched in formation down the roads, with their rifles on their shoulders and ample ammunition, prepared to get their job done. Our home-grown militia wore the clothes they owned and had only their own rifles and ammunition...which meant none to spare for sure.

Their instructions:  "Don't shoot till you see the whites of their eyes."

They were not told, "Don't shoot till you see their backs." That would have been a much safer way...a coward's way, but safer.

To me, that reflects the very foundation of the United States...the first brick was laid with honor, fairness...equality, actually, no matter the better equipped versus the home-grown. Our forefathers believed right is might and truth prevail, and they were willing to stand on it.

I personally believe God knows naught of war, but since humans tend to love it, our free will brings it. I further believe that since we bring it, we do best when we rely on God's word, will and way to get the most honorable results.

According to me, we're heading in the wrong direction...almost like we're using "shoot 'em in the back" as our guide. If that be true, we'd do well to start our U-turn now for that change is like turning the Queen Mary...it takes time, a steady hand and heart, and more than anything, that reliance on God's word, will and way.

Thank you.

THE GIFT OF GRATITUDE

Today my plan is to take a risk...a personal, inside, no-big-deal-to-you-but-huge-to-me risk.

As I opened my "God Calling," the words with God all things are possible were there before me. It just so happens that seemingly every time I have a challenge to meet, those words are given to me, and sometimes from the most unlikely places.

It's not surprising I'd find them in "God Calling" but on this particular day with no preplan or thought? When in doubt, assume the best is my mantra...my risk just transmuted into God's will which makes it feel less risky. Thank you, Lord.

Now, even if my action turns out less than wonderful to my ego's eyes, I can know God's hand was in it...meaning,  there will be bennies. I'll get to sit and wait on the Lord.

If the results are close enough to wonderful, I'll have the gift of gratitude to wrap me in...no better feeling.

God is so good to me.

Thank you.

GET, BE AND REMAIN AVAILABLE

Just as there are levels of consciousness, there are levels of learning then relearning the same thing. In the normal course of the day, when we make the same mistake we've made before and thought we'd learned our lesson from it, we often beat our self up with "Will I never learn?" 

It's a great gettin' up morning when we realize that relearning is not necessarily proof of no growth, it's not even relearning. What is happening is proof that we did learn our reasoning mind lesson well, but now we are being moved on up to a deeper level. Here we learn the same lesson from a new dimension, i.e., from a spiritual point of view.

This is where and why the reasoning mind balks. We well know that the spiritual point of view is all about giving over, letting go, putting the other first...which at first feels like pulling heavy tape off bare skin. Like, it smarts.  

That's how we know we are being moved. We believe we're willing, but we have not a clue where, why or how to start. That's why our willingness is not to feel the pain of the change, but to quit with our incessant thinking, analyzing, mental meandering of how to change. We have become willing to detach from our own thoughts with no mental time limit set. We never know the hour or day the bridegroom will come.

That's our lesson, in toto: We must be willing to detach from our reasoning mind in order to realize that each relearning comes at a deeper spiritual level, and we have no say in when that realization will come...our job is to get, be and remain available. Which is never easy, but it is, indeed, the pearl beyond price.

Thank you.

SEEK THE SPACE BETWEEN

It occurs to me that just as there are planes of consciousness, there are various levels of right, of being right.

There's rigid, righteous and right...when we're there, self, the ego-victory self, is the driver. That way only strengthens ego, by-passing spiritual growth completely, and we know (or should know) that we are going down that wrong road again, old Route 666. 

Then there's being right with no personal attachment to it...that way is of God. I like to picture the Sistine Chapel with the two forefingers almost touching. That space in between the fingers is where we need to be. There is no self there. 

Since being right represents our peace of mind, we'd best get off Route 666, get on the path leading to still more spiritual growth and become willing to seek the space between...everything.

It is in the space between that we find God.

Thank you.

SCRUPULOSITY...WHAT A HOOT!

[This is a reprint of my blog of August 23, 2016.]

The literal level is one of the least fruitful levels of meaning....A heart open to the power of metaphor ("that which carries you across"), a heart open to the feminine and open to intimacy, will leap every time. A heart trapped in historical literalism, or closed to the power of poetry, will remain bored, reactive, and trapped in critique. -- Fr. Richard Rohr, "Daily Meditation," September 28, 2015

That I believe defines those of us who talk in exaggeration. We are poets, weaving fun in and out of the daily-ness of life. Which reminds me of the point made in The Cloud of Unknowing by an unknown 14th century monk to "be wary of the overly scrupulous."

The overly scrupulous use a one-inch yardstick to measure us by...and our saving grace is we let them because that's the stuff we use to weave our fun in the telling of it.

God loves me so much...and the overly scrupulous, too.

Thank you.

LOVE AND LAUGHTER RIDE AGAIN!

Give the Father his due for the devil will for sure take his.

That blinding flash of the obvious came to me this morning as I was again arm-wrestling with my better self about spending the full twenty minutes in meditation. I do that when I peek at the clock, and there's only a minute or two to go.

There are times when I exceed the twenty minutes which is always lovely, but when I don't, the last couple minutes do take their own sweet time trundling by. It's like the last two minutes of a tied football game...I've had years go by faster.

It is important for me to give to God the full twenty minutes I have committed to God, not to please him, but for my own self-discipline. That lesson...learning to keep my promises to my own self...seems to be the hardest to hold to. Yet I have found if I don't keep my promises to me, there are  promises I make to God and to others that fall by the wayside. The bitter pill being that I never know which promise that may be. Inevitably, after the fact, it will feel like the most important one ever, and "coulda woulda, shoulda" sings at 3:00 AM.

I just reread my first sentence...the part where this morning I was again arm-wrestling with my better self about spending the full twenty minutes in meditation. See? I know the importance of keeping my commitment and yet  here's me this morning mentally justifying dropping a couple of minutes.

Ah...there's my pearl beyond price. Love and laughter come through again...specifically, laugh at myself and love me anyway.

Thank you.

SO OTHERS MAY EAT

To rule aright is to rule from poverty.

Another way of saying that...we rule aright when we rule not from plenty but from lack. Whoa! There's my blinding flash of the obvious, and I no sooner put the period to the sentence than my reasoning mind is softening it. Not poverty, surely, Lucy whispers...lack, maybe, but not poverty!

If memory serves (and mine seldom does anymore), the majority of the members of our Congress (if not every one) is at least a millionaire. I am not a hater of money, and I am all for capitalism, but I have a strong suspicion that our Congress got on the wrong track when they opened the boundaries to their raises and bennies.

I fear that the only thing that will reverse that decision is the downfall of the House That Greed Built...which, to the builders' mind, was not a matter of greed but the need for personal security. There are few...very, very few...who have voluntarily given up the source of the expansion of their material security for the well-being of others. No matter how noble the cause.

Bottom line...would I? Would you? 

Having plenty of lack, or lacking plenty, I could kid myself into believing I'd be noble, but factually every year when Social Security raises are announced, and recipients get none, I am seriously (justifiably!) lacking in noble.

It ain't easy doing spiritual...also known as, judge not lest ye be judged.

Thank you.

KNOWING VS. DOING, AN ACT OF GRACE

Morning blinding flash of the obvious: That which I seek from God I must give to my enemy.

My BFO came in response to my chat with God this morning. I was in the midst of praying for my only desire to be to love him...heart, soul, body and brains, and I heard,  That which I seek from God I must give to my enemy.

There's a clear case of knowing that and doing that being two entirely different things.

Knowing that and even agreeing with it is a far cry from the actual action of being willing to love my enemy. That action can only begin by an actual change not just of my mind but in my thinking. To accept that there is no personal enemy to overcome changes everything within and without.

I have made a start...I have found the promised peace in silence in the face of provocation. Not always, but more often than not. Oh, a biggie I almost missed...I did not resist my BFO, nor did I feel put-upon by the reality of it. There. That's grace a-grinning.

 The Father knows our needs.

Thank you.

TO BUILD OUR TRUST IN GOD...NOW

We must needs build our trust in God; God's perfect will for our own self must be built within us...and daily.

To start building, we might imagine a possible less-than-wonderful oncoming event, say, that we run out of money in our old age, or Alzheimer's comes upon us, or war comes to our shores. Then we hold that possibility till our heart starts to stutter, till dread is hovering at the edge of  consciousness.

How long does it take to begin our prayer to God? More important, are we thinking, "Please don't let this happen," or words to that effect? Or are our thoughts, "Thank you, Father, thy will, not mine, be done?"

And if they are the latter, do we really mean them? Or are they "should" words...as in, we're saying "thank you" and thinking, "I should say 'thank you,' but how can I welcome what I do not want?" Or "How can I welcome God's will, not mine, when if this is God's will it is unwelcome...and unwelcome to any sane person?"

There it is. The entire answer to our fear, to our inability to trust God's will, is right there in that one word, "thinking."

Trying to wrap our mind around the ways of God will always short sheet God.

I suspect detaching from our reasoning mind is difficult because our conscious mind can't grasp the concept...we see detaching with nothing to replace it...fourth  dimensional consciousness is just a concept to our reasoning mind.

It is our personal reliance on God's will that opens us to fourth dimensional consciousness...which even then is not guaranteed. That, too, rests in God's perfect will.

Thus our ever and always need for still more spiritual growth...now.

Thank you.

AND I HEARD

the meek shall inherit the earth

nonresistance is the gold
nonviolence, the pearl beyond price
the reasoning mind alone can never accept that
we must go beyond reason to love
love is God
God is love

Thank you.

IT MAKES SENSE...UH-OH

I wonder if unbelievers' inability  to accept God doesn't rest in their taking themselves too seriously.

For that matter, I suspect that's the problem with most believers...our inability to rely completely on that God we profess to believe in is rooted in our taking our own idea of God too seriously. We fail to realize that it is that idea that is our God...because it is our idea, we own it, and it makes sense to us.

There it is. It makes sense to us...which, of course, is the same reasoning unbelievers use except that it does not make sense to them.

The reasoning mind is a wondrous thing, and we would be in a world of trouble without it, but detaching...just a tish...from our reliance on it must be in order for us to know still more spiritual growth.

Just as an exercise in willingness, it is interesting, when a fairly minor decision needs to be made, to open our mind for God's input. We don't spin our self into a headache trying to think what the next right thing is, we thank God for making that call. Then we do something else...and we've just begun our training in relying on the Father within as our decision-maker.

Here's the kicker: All it takes is patience. I must admit that very word tries my patience...but there it is.

We must try with a will or fall by the wayside. -- Anonymous

Thank you.

UPGRADE THOUGHTS, UPGRADE PROBLEM

I have a recurring half-awake dream: I walk into a room and someone is really bad-mouthing me to a group of others. That someone is standing with his back to me so he does not see me enter...all the others see me and don't know how to shut the talker down.

I count my progress by how I, in my dream state, respond. Originally, I teared up, looked pitiful and felt unloved, unwanted, unneeded, unappreciated...and, best of all, justified because the talker looked mortified that he got caught, and the group poured pity-love all over me.

I had that same dream-stream this morning, and I'm inordinately proud to report my progress.  I saw me walk over to the talker, gently pull her out of hearing of the group and ask if I could share my understanding of this vignette.

I explained that to me this entire episode represents our angels at work...her angel bringing her defect (gossip) out at the perfect-to-the-angel/worst-to-her time; my angel doing likewise with my defect (fear of public criticism). This is exactly what needed to happen for us to experience the effects of the very defect we've been praying to be relieved of.

I wonder if not getting found out  in the middle of our defects isn't the glue that holds them to us. We can pray till our face falls off to be relieved of them...but we're usually praying at home alone and after the fact. Getting caught right smack dab in the middle with our whole world watching...even in a semi-dream state...is heart-stopping, or heart-stuttering at any rate.

I'm counting my progress, however, on the advancement of my thoughts about this happening. We  often hear that our thoughts determine our fate, but then we continue to judge our self on our actions. No. We must train our very thoughts where our actions are aborning.

There will never be a permanent change in our less-than-wonderful behavior until our less-than-wonderful thoughts are upgraded. Maybe that's the necessary process in detaching them from ego and passing them on to God. Whatever. I'm glad I had my unself-pitying dream this morning.

Thank you.

ON CHANGING OUR MIND

It is interesting the many times we are certain sure of our rightness...in the face of a hundred, a thousand, name a number, a big number...in the face of all of them, and all saying NAY...we will not be moved. For we are right.

Then when all pretty much wash their hands of us, we feel a niggle, perceive a glimmer, hear a sigh...and it is the soft sound of "maybe" that causes us pause. We choose to believe that it is too small, too lightweight to be significant. And besides which, we've won the round, we'd best just move on.

But the little insignificant thing is growing wings and circling in our head. It is making the sense that all the innumerable nattering voices could not make...or that we chose not to hear. Because we were right.

Blinding flash of the obvious: All of that is true when we're doing it right! Further, just because we're doing it right doesn't mean we can't do it better...or that it doesn't need to be done better. There's the door inching open, the beginning of our mind changing.

What makes learning so hard for our reasoning mind to grasp is ego...ego always standing in the doorway of our mind blocking our acceptance of being wrong. No wonder...that is the humility step in our learning process. What a surprise to discover that being wrong is one way (often the better way) of learning...experience makes it so much harder to forget.

We waste God's time and our energy regretting our mistakes. There is no instruction in my book that says, "If wrong, do thus and so;" mine says, "When wrong, etc."

And get grateful in the process.

Thank you.

KARMA...AND THE JOY OF LAUGHTER

We often forget that the action we are contemplating contains the seed of its result. -- Eknath Easwaran, "Words to Live By," June 17

I underlined that I know not when so there's my proof to me that I have read it before, but not until this morning did I realize that defines the birth of karma.

Say that we're contemplating setting Gertrude straight with a few well-chosen words. We can be sure Gertrude will return the words with a few more of her own well-chosen ones. Thus begins the back-and-forth...then the argument, the fight, now the battle unto war.

Instead of contemplating how we can stop and top Gertrude, why not contemplate letting that Force for Good within us have our perceived problem with Gertrude? 

Our first step is to deny our ego-based reasoning mind free rein on the source of the problem...which, we need accept, was our reaction to Gertrude. We need to make a decision to turn our mind around, to aim our thoughts toward gratitude for all the unseen love that flows freely in the universe...and how we are already a channel for that love.

Then our karma is born into the fact and the act of  receiving and returning love. That is another step in spiritual growth...it is really simple, but never easy. Until we do it. And that's our showing forth God who doeth the works, and it becomes easy-peasy.

We learn that we need to stay focused in gratitude, the grace of gratitude, and we are given the gift of love and laughter. We'll need it when we give over to ego yet again...which we will if we're doing it right.

According to me, God gave us ego so we could learn the power of love and laughter. Personally, I'm convinced that is the only thing ego will ever bow to, specifically the joy of laughing at our own self. There...that is love.

Thank you.

LOVE NOT THE APPEARANCE, LOVE GOD

Recently I read Saint Francis's description of perfect joy which boils down to our being kicked around, spat upon, shunned, cursed and reviled...and, with the love of Christ in our heart, blessing the evil doer.

That must have been the basis of my dream (nightmare?) last night: Here's me, trudging across the Sahara, all alone. Out of nowhere, here's a band of really ugly, dirty, evil-looking terrorists encircling me. The leader grabs me by the neck, saying he is going to behead me.

I reply, "Thank you, you are paving my way to heaven...the only surer way is if you do not behead me, but rape me with rattlesnakes, beat me with barbed wire, shove hot pokers down my throat."

He turns to his men and says,"Set her free."

And they disappear...with which I knew I had failed.

I had failed for I had said all of that not with the love of Christ in my heart, but with the goal of getting me into Heaven...not out of love but out of fear...to get me into my reasoning mind's safe place.

There. The nightmare turned into a God-dream by the realization that no matter the fearsome apparition before our very eyes, it is love, not of the apparition but of God, that will set us free.

Thank you.

CLOSE ENOUGH...RIGHT NOW

When our own mind-power is all we choose to depend on, we are ever caught in that mind's inability to lift us out of self. To be lifted into God consciousness is not an as-wanted thing. I'm guessing, though, that "want to" helps loosen our will to be more open to God's will.

That may well be the fine line we walk between self-determined objectives and seeking God's will. That fine line is known as "Now."  Here is where we make the turn away from our own objective towards God's perfect objective. There is but one requirement as we make that turn, and that is that we stay focused on what is...now. And we remember: God can only be found right here and right now. 

Ah, here's comes "Thank You!" to save the day.

That's the down-and-dirty (so to speak) way to learn the art of living in the Now. Whatever our fretting mind sees coming, stop that oncoming train with a "thank you." Whatever our giddy mind is expecting, stop that gravy train with a "thank you."

Once again, it sounds so simple...these basic steps for learning to let go and let  God.  Only after doing it for X number of years does it become simple, however. I can't say for certain how many years since I'm not there yet. 

Right now, I am closer, thank you very much, and heading in the right direction. Which is close enough...right now.

Thank you.

LIKE...JUST LIKE

I awoke this morning to a blinding flash of the obvious: Give up your desire to love and be loved. Like. Just like. 

What freedom!

In truth I do like most people I meet. Here's permission to not take it further, no need to agree with their every weird thought, or to disagree for that matter. Just like them...that is enough!

My stated goal has ever been to love and be loved...and I've spent way too many years trying to find the exactly right sense of what that means, what "love" means to me. I can give up the search...just like 'em.

That's the difference between a self-determined objective (to love and be loved) and a spiritual objective (like...just like). It occurs to me that's also why a self-determined objective is so difficult to let go of...doesn't "to love and be loved" sound better, deeper, MORE, than "to like...just like?" Which sounds kinda puny, doesn't it? But it feels...well, like freedom. And what's to hate there?

God loves me so much...God loves. I like that.

Thank you.

ON RELEARNING LESSONS LEARNED

We who have another in our life who arouses our anger, frustration and resentment are blessed for that one is our own angel, the one who leads us up the stairway to Heaven within. 

Obviously, anger, frustration and resentment take us away from anything spiritual and are apt to lead us to a self-willed result...where even if we win, we lose.

This is where we remember that the only change necessary here is to our mind about the irritating one...our now goal is to appreciate this irritating angel. We get to change our mind about her, and the only chance of that happening is to start upgrading our attitude about him. There. That's our first step in giving it over to God...our willingness to open our mind or to quit resisting changing our mind. 

It may be counterintuitive but we are on our stairway to Heaven when we learn, and relearn many, many times, that the self-determined path is trying to do spiritual growth while depending on our reasoning mind's ways.

We get to take heart in the fact that we are on our stairway to Heaven even then. Just because we must needs remember to get out of our own way doesn't mean we have learned nothing. That is ego-victory thinking that if we  don't do it perfectly the first time, quit. And find someone to blame.

Lesson learned: The one who arouses our negative side to our reasoning mind is our nemesis...to our spiritual mind that one is our angel. There. We've changed our mind...now we stay with God to keep it changed.

Thank you.

WITH GOD ONLY LOVE IS POSSIBLE

Say we have a race-race, run-run mind that is racing against a friend's snarky comment and, in particular, what we shoulda, coulda, woulda said. We know we can get relief from our screeching thoughts in an instant by pushing back, by standing up for our self...in short by spitting out a snark in return.

Our struggle begins (again)...do we want spiritual growth at some point, or do we want relief from our ego-victory nagging mind now? It's a matter of our integrity, old Lucy, our ego, will cry. Yet, we have come to realize and accept that there is no spiritual growth there.

That's the nut, the core problem with spiritual growth...it rarely if ever comes in the moment. Plus, it will not ride us like a crazed banshee as our ego does.

We must want spiritual growth to the exclusion of all else. And that presents another paradox: We do want spiritual growth, we do not want to obey our ego-victory dictates...yet we do what we do not want all the while praying God to give us what we do want.

We begin the change when we accept responsibility for our own thoughts. We learn we must stop entertaining thoughts of how we have been, or soon will be, wronged, and what we can say to stop/top the wrong doer. We realize we must give up the game of win/lose.

That realization lifts our mind to a higher plane. There it seems to start by proving we are the wrong one, then ends by proving there is no wrong one, nor is there a right one. We realize with God there is only love.

Thank you.

THE FATHER WITHIN DOES THE WORK

According to me, the only thing we will ever need to overcome is our own self...our own reactions, our wants that we perceive as needs, our logic, our belief in our own intelligence, the reasoning part of our reasoning mind. The swift kick is realizing that the new meaning of to overcome is to lose.

Because all of those legislate for self; none recognizes a power greater than self.

If we are ever going to trust unto dependence on our inner Self, we must accept that we are looking at our life as in a mirror (example, our hair, parted on the left, in a mirror looks to be parted on the right). Quite often, what looks to life like bad business, God sees as good...and vice versa.

There's where the reasoning mind balks...because, just as Freud pointed out, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

And there it is...the very why that we can hold and hone our reasoning mind for it has its perfect uses just like our hands and feet. But, just like those appendages, they are never in first place...we can't trust any of them to the exclusion of the Father within. For it is the Father within who doeth the works.

That is the key, the end goal of our search for still more spiritual growth...to come to believe in the fact of the Father within us, then to trust unto relying on the Father, the Father who does our life's work.

Thank you.

TRUST OUR REGRETS...GOD HAS OUR BACK

Until we learn to trust the wounds and the failures of life, we almost all try to gain moral high ground by obeying laws and thinking we are spiritually advanced.  [Words, entirely lifted and rearranged, from Fr Richard Rohr's "Daily Meditation," June 10, 2017.]

There it is...to try to gain moral high ground by obeying laws describes the reasoning mind's endless (and fruitless) search to gain a seat in Heaven all on its own...i.e., without God.

The reasoning mind cannot...will not?...accept that the wounds and failures of life are grace in a shroud. They may not look pretty, that's why we keep them  hidden, but, leaning on spiritual growth, we learn that they are the purely gold evidence of God's love.

When we learn to trust those wounds and failures, our eyes are opened and our mind is cleared to the full realization that God lives in us, through us, for us.  

We come to believe that God can and will intervene in our lives on our behalf. -- Anonymous

Thank you.

ON FINDING THE ANSWER

Do not you believe that there is in man a deep so profound as to be hidden even to him in whom it is? -- Saint Augustine

There is a fourth dimension of consciousness (meaning, within us, available now) whether we believe it or not. To me, I stand at the door and knock is God asking to be let out, not in. He is in. He lives within.  Personally, I call it God's hidey hole.

The times we sit outside the door and wait...until we remember there is no door and we need not wait...are food for our humility. Our reasoning mind is running scared, crying "What to do? What to do?" 

That is when humility, that dreaded gift of grace, is born: We do not know what to do, we seek  help, and there it is. We are freed from self into our fourth dimension of peace, love and laughter...which is the answer.

Thank you.

EATING SPINACH, WANTING CHOCOLATE

I recently came across my very first spiritual daily reader, and I am touched, not to mention amazed, by the sentences I highlighted back then. Such as: Your life has been given to you mainly for the purpose of training your soul, and Your soul is being trained by the good you choose.

It seems to my memory that I've just realized those truths in the last few years. In fact, it's not that I've just realized them, it's that they have taken this long to become natural to me...without having to remind myself, or go back and correct me, every other step of the way.

Our natural mind is always at the forefront and always legislates for itself. It takes serious suffering or divine intervention (both being the same, according to me) to turn us in the direction of spiritual growth as opposed to the way of the ego.

Even then it takes a fair amount of trial and error and willingness to continue, to keep turning away from ego, heading toward a higher way...all of which need time and the ability to stay in the Now. We're learning to want God's will done in our life more than we want our will done no matter how wonderful our will seems to be...or how less-than-wonderful we fear God's will be.

I think of it as the same principle as eating spinach while lusting for chocolate. Just eat your spinach, say "thank you" and know: Your soul is being trained by the good you choose.

Thank you.

PRAY FOR POTATOES AND GRAB A HOE

On Sunday I took my aching back to get a haircut. A cut was two weeks overdue, and I was starting to feel martyred by it so I took myself to the closest salon. Which, unfortunately, is the same salon I swore never ever ever to return to after I got my "chemo haircut" there...so-called because I came out with hair so short, I looked bald from afar.

Today I find the gold in that haircut...at least it was short all over.

I once had something worse than awful happen to me, and I was graced with a blinding flash of the obvious; i.e., this is so bad, God's hand has to be in it. (Based on my gut-bucket belief that nothing so awful can happen to  us that  God  is not there for us.) My Sunday's haircut is so bad that that principle applies. It is so bad that I have been, and will be, wearing a headscarf and blessing the cool weather.

Then, just this morning, my Easwaran reader had a quote from "The Cloud of Unknowing"...By love may He be gotten and holden, by thought never. And there it is. I can recall my BFO and think on it till my face falls off, but until I love that to which I'm applying it, it's just words today, a nice memory.

It's the love your enemies principle. I don't need to know why...the fact is to make them loveable in my mind is to take them out of God's embrace. I need to love them just as they are. That takes them out of my reasoning mind for I cannot do that, love them just as they are...they're my enemies for Pete's sake!

We can, however, become willing to let God work his wonders through us, and our resistance to our enemies fades. We may not become enchanted with them but we no longer harbor ugly thoughts...resentments...in our mind about them.

So my job right this red-hot minute is to let God work his wonders on this haircut...on my thoughts about this haircut. And iron another scarf for today.

Thank you.

IN A PERFECT WORLD

According to today's "God Calling," it is not necessary that you see Me as others see Me...but it is necessary that you see Me as supplying all that you personally need.

Now isn't that simple? I'm half convinced that if all of us would chose that view, and concentrate all our mental, physical and spiritual efforts on taking it deeper within our self, all war would cease, poverty would be no more, happiness would reign in each individual, thus in the land.

In a perfect world.

In my world, right this minute, I sit here wishing my sciatic nerve would heal, my hair would perfect itself, Gertrude would grow up already, and my car was driverless. That's the difference between my idea of a perfect world and my life on a daily basis. None of my wishes are bad, maybe a tish judgy re Gertrude, but what the hey, I judge because I love as wonderful Glenn Brenner used to say.

But it is that quote that reminds me every year that that is the vital part of my spiritual foundation that brings me my peace...particularly the last part, but it is necessary that you see Me as supplying all that you personally need.

However, I believe it is the first part, it is not necessary that you see Me as others see Me, that gives us permission to know and to allow others to know a God of our own understanding. And isn't that the key? Then the rest of our still more spiritual growth is all about applying our self to believing in...to relying on...that personal higher power. No more quibbling about Jesus, Jews, Muslims or Jehovah, or even atheist or agnostic, all we need do is find a power greater than our own self (love?) and become willing to believe in it.

Here's the paradox, if we believe in it, it builds itself within us. It  grows in  our heart and flows out as our good always and in all ways.

Thank you.

GRATITUDE...OUR SHORTCUT TO PEACE OF MIND

Simplicity. That is the goal.

Each time we feel that negative tug in our gut, we need to back up...to mentally stop and make a U-bie in our thinking. No matter what we think we are thinking, we're in fact building our own defenses against the most recent one to have stepped on our toes. According to me.

Remember that great old acronym, KISS?...Keep It Simple, Stupid. It's a fun fact that a lot of us grin when we hear that, and the name of another, to whom it really applies, immediately comes to mind.

We often think we're pondering God and the ways of God until we stop and realize we're mentally setting Gertrude straight or, in truth, setting God straight 'cause if he were doing it right, Gertrude wouldn't be so wrong so often. Lucy alert!

Here's the simplicity of the matter...when we realize we're mentally defending our self still yet and again, we can start a new thought-train. Picture God using our defensive thoughts as his lead strings bringing us back to him, to his green pastures and still waters...and our mind has just been changed from defensive to grateful.

There it is...our shortcut to gratitude, the simple answer to most everything.

Thank you.

KARMA AND HOW TO LOVE IT

To me karma is simply what goes around comes around. Ours not to pick the time and place and circumstances and degree, etc....to me, that's Big Mac, manipulation and control. No, karma comes when karma comes, and the hard lesson alearning  is to let it...with joy ideally.

A dear friend of mine is experiencing unearned karma right now...meaning, to her, she's getting hit with mud she did not throw. And there it is, there's the hard lesson alearning. It takes some serious prying to open our mind to the possibility that we put any ugly out there to start with. We must keep our mind open, free from justifying and blaming, even when we get that first glimmer of our part in it else we will never surrender our resistance to acceptance, plain and simple.

I'm guessing we've all been in that place of self-denial of "unearned" karma. Well, for sure, I have been, and I have been enough that I've had to find an answer to me, to my ego Lucy, really.

The best I can do when my karma comes calling is to remind myself of my bottom line:  I believe that I chose the Sermon and later realized I was chosen through the Sermon. Therefore, my way is to welcome walking the way of the poor, the pitiful and the put-upon, and any incoming rotten eggs hitting their mark are God's missiles for my spiritual benefit.

And it only takes those two little words to get there...thank you.

Thank you.

GET GOD...OR LOVE

My prayer: To let go of the love I have in me...not to get love but to give what I have, all bottled up and never used.

I found my prayer, dated June 3, 1993, this morning, and I had to smile. I've been in many conversations the last couple years about how easily I say "I love you" to all but strangers today...and not by rote but with an up-beat in my heart.

I used to find it next to impossible to say "I love you" even to my dog Ari, my first "little angel straight from Heaven," who came to me in 1979. Actually, he was likely my first living, breathing teacher of love...that was his reason for living, to love and to be loved, and he made no secret of it.

But we're moving on up to a deeper place now. It is time and past time to learn...not by rote but with an up-beat in our heart...how to begin to love the unlovable, the less-thans, the jerks, knaves, fools and freaks. (All of whom are myself, I am reminded with chagrin.) 

That came to me this morning when I read Fr Richard Rohr's "Daily Meditation" in which he said, Jesus and Saint Francis had a genius for not eliminating or punishing the so-called negative side of the world, but incorporating and using it.

The most important message  to me in that sentence is not how wonderful Jesus and Saint Francis were (like, duh) but that this is the way to do life...this is the pattern to follow, the path to walk, the goal to set...punish, i.e., hate, nothing, love...just love.

I'm reminded again of what I believe...if hate conquered cancer, the world would be cancer free. Not that love conquers cancer, just our fear of it which is close enough to perfect for me.

But who's kidding whom? We're not talking life-and-death here (but I'm guessing it is easier to love cancer when facing certain death by cancer if only to cover our bets for making it by Saint Peter), we're talking love of the one who speaks ill of us, tells lies, spits in our eye...that jerk. Cancer schmancer...how do we love the personally unlovable one?

The answer is always the same when the question has to do with others...ego deflation in depth. Forget self. Put the other person first. Elementary, my dear dum-dum. But the elementary puts quantum physics in the shade when we try to go it alone.

This is the gut-bucket first, last, always reason to seek still more spiritual growth: Not for God, per se, but to get over our own self. Which cannot be done without God, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. According to me.

Thank you.

ON MAINTAINING THE GIFT OF GRACE

There is a story in the Bible about Somebody Important desperately wrestling with  an angel. The angel says, "I will not let you go until you bless me." That never made a lick of sense to me until "Thank You" was gifted to me in a blinding flash of the obvious. (And, mind, that is my version of the Bible story.)

And there it is. My entire spiritual foundation today is basically thank you...good, bad, indifferent. Hug it and kiss it and let it [mentally] go.

I'm guessing it's the human condition that we're so slow to learn that The Way with blessing the problem is trusting the blessing but doing what we can to take care of the less-than-wonderful that we're blessing. Today, I'm blessing my spinal stenosis and getting my acupuncture treatments three times a week.

The key is to realize that to "bless" the problem, then to sit and wait to be fixed usually leads to doubting the existence of God or the efficacy of grace.

I'm reminded of the saying that God is not Santa Claus...or, grace is a gift after which we earn the right to keep it.

Thank you.

EGO, GOD'S INSIDE EMERY BOARD

Always, always, always...what we see is always our self. Again, I don't remember where I read that, who wrote it, but most likely it came to me from "The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment," by Thaddeus Golas. It is the shortened version of another of my favorites, the one about when (not if) we get our toes stepped on, invariably we will find that we've made a decision based on self that has later placed us in a position to be hurt.

I have no idea who first realized and wrote about the phenomenon of our self being our only personal problem, but I know it is found in the "Bhagavad Gita" and in Buddhist literature. I found it first in the "Sermon on the Mount."

I can know that, agreed with it almost upon first reading it, can set you straight the minute you show your lack of doing it (quick, where's my mirror?), and yet Forget Self remains at the top of my To Do list...and without a doubt will be there three days after I'm dead.

Maybe that's why we're born with an ego...it might be that it's God's inside emery board for us to rasp away our ughs, bugs, judgments and jeers. That's how we learn with each seeming failure to love and laugh...inside, at our own self.

Fr Richard Rohr wrote in his "Daily Meditation" this morning, Exclusion might be described as the core sin. If that be so, then we can't exclude ego in our love and acceptance either. Who's kidding whom? If trying to exclude ego by hating it, fighting it, resisting it worked, we'd all be ego free.

Loving our ego does not make it grow stronger; it is accepting our ego with love that gives us a constant to love...and laugh with others about.

Thank you.