THE NAME FOR OUR GOD IS OUR OWN TO CHOOSE

It was unsettling to me to learn that there are many people who believe that you cannot change when you get old...I've never yet heard the cut-off age for young-enough or too-old, but I suspect the cut-off is when you decide that you don't want to try anymore. As long as you're willing to try, you're young enough...or not too old anyway.

My contention is you can be 99 and if you decide to try something, you're young enough. Word of caution...at 99 to try speed skating may not be wise, but most of us have a modicum of common sense...or just want-to. Who wants to take up speed skating at 45 much less 99?   

The conversation that put my thoughts on this train was with a friend who vehemently denied that older people, "set in their ways," can change their attitude...not speed skate, not hike Mount McKinley, just upgrade their attitude.

And you know what? I expect that is true if our only hope is based on our own self and what we think we can do for our self...especially pull off a hoped-for result. If we don't have a God of our own understanding...a power for good higher than our own reach...then, yeah, an upgrade in attitude probably is impossible. 

For me, I was gifted with the belief in Almighty God...as off-putting as that name is to some. But if it's what someone calls their God that is the off-putter, we're taking our self too seriously. The name, including Allah, Jehovah, et al., is not the problem for we're talking about goodness, just goodness. No matter what we name it.

We can get over our self by coming to believe in a God of our own understanding. Then let It. Just let It. Let It by believing from our toes to our nose...from our nose up is God's workshop.

Thank you.

GIVE GOD EVERY COURTESY...LIVE FREE

I am reminded of Fr Richard Rohr's description of a teaching of Saint Paul's which states, in effect, that everything is a disguise: weakness is really strength, wisdom is really foolishness, death is really life, matter is really spirit, religion is often slavery, and sin itself is actually the trap door into salvation.

It all depends on whether we are willing to see down as up is Rohr's shorthand version.

And that, our dependence on seeing down as up, is my personal How-To manual on life itself. Positive uncertainty. Which could be the key to happiness...as simple as not being afraid to be wrong. Or not fearing looking the fool to others...but primarily our own ego.

Why does everything that starts out as simple as wind up wrapped around the monkey bars in our mind? Probably it's us trying too hard to see down as up...face it, trying itself is code for the reasoning mind in charge.

Ah, there's the ego's lair, the place where ego manipulation is birthed, in the reasoning mind. Trying.

I am taken back to my idea of the mirror image of God: If oncoming haps appear "trepidacious," hold on, God will right them for our benefit...sooner or later. Accept that and live fret free.

Acceptance is giving God the courtesy of having the last word.

Thank you.

WE STAND ON IT...REDUX

[The following is a reworked version of my post of November 6, 2016.]

If you overcome your enemies, you’ve failed. If you make your enemies your partners, God has succeeded. -- Fr. Richard Rohr, "Daily Meditation," October 9, 2016

To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill. -- Sun Tzu

I tend to accept that mental resistance is the real block to God's will, and if so, our enemy is our thinking which leads to judgments. Which is the ground floor for either/or thinking, namely, two parties married to the idea that either I am right or you are wrong.

Our daily guide now becomes to love...to love, and that is all. Like acceptance, love does not mean to throw in the towel, do nothing and wait for our gravy train to roll in. No. Learning how to love all even the fire in the forest, the plague in the village, the rot in the fields, up to and including the death of a beloved requires serious work...only now from the inside, from God's hidey hole. 

The answer is surrender...our need is to surrender. Since that very word says loser to our ego, we are forced to look deeper. It often takes grace to open our eyes to surrender as acceptance. For it is. Acceptance of what is right before us is God's invitation to ride...no, to drive. 

Our experience is often that the less we resist the picture before our eyes, the sooner we have proof that God's hand was in it all the time. We come to rely on the promise that God can and will intervene in our life on our behalf. The pearl is ours when we understand that his intervention seldom fulfills our wants, and we prefer it that way...we know our needs (his will) are far better for us that our wants. 

That realization becomes our walking around truth, slowly it moves from the head, to the heart, on to our gut, down to the soles of our feet. There it is...and we stand on it. 

Thank you.

SEEK FIRST THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN

Blinding flash of the obvious: There is only one mistake in God's world, and that is taking oneself too seriously.

It is that mistake in God's world that leads to our many mistakes in the material world. 

The taproot of ego is taking oneself too seriously. It is in self-forgetting that we find that 
there is no self to protect. Trying to spiritualize self is a self-determined objective, and there is no God there.

Looking back, I realize it was my own words seeking understanding from others that are now my bane. For others can only hear from their own self, can only interpret as their own self speaks to them. Which explains the stricture, 'Tell no man.' (Matthew 16:13-20).

Seek not the understanding of others...tell no man, tell no woman...do that which we are asking God to do for us. Instead of seeking the understanding of others.

Thank you.

FEAR NOT UNPOPULARITY...IT'S OUR GLORY!

From the February 23rd comic strip Candorville: I agree with Cicero. He said, 'I have always been of the opinion that unpopularity earned by doing what is right is not unpopularity at all...but Glory! 

How delightful is that? Cicero, who was born B.C., which was even before they changed it to B.C.E., or C.E., knew that and said so!

At any rate, that quote led me to the thought that the egoic reasoning mind careens, bringing either self-satisfied glory or self-inflicted pain (my ego Lucy's world); the spiritually centered mind expresses at a snail's pace (Jesus carrying The Cross).

From my eyebrows up, I know that I have all the love, all the patience, that there is to have. It is using that love, that patience, that seems to Lucy like The Cross. The reasoning mind gets stuck in imagining the thorns, the pain...the hassle! Ah, but it is in actually carrying The Cross, i.e., giving in, giving over, giving up, that we realize that love is weightless and brings only peace. He ain't heavy, He's my Father.

Thank you.

NOW...START NOW

[This is an edited reprint of my post of January 23, 2018.]

I have a long way to go and a short time to get there. -- from "East Bound and Down"

There's a good reminder for staying in the Now. Face it, there is no shorter time than now...actually, no longer time either. Now is all the time there is...literally and esoterically. Interestingly, esoterically causes us pause and brings peace. Literally, it's kind of a throw-away truth. According to me.

If we're going to start...anything...we just and must start Now. Whenever we finish...there it is again: Now.

Knowing the truth of Now is all well and good, but I suspect we don't get the gift of realization of its gut-bucket reality until after we've completed whatever task we're doubting we can do. And we are doubting or we wouldn't be needing the golden goose of Now.

My rule is whatever tool it takes that the God of my understanding would approve of is a good tool to use. Pray for peace and go for it.

When (not if) wrong, promptly admit it. Ah, the key that opens the door for God to perfect whatever it is we've screwed up. Win-win.

Thank you.

ON LOVE OVERFLOWING

He insulted me, he cheated me, he beat me, he robbed me...those who are free of resentful thoughts surely find peace.  -- The Buddha

Those are the words, and more like those, that I must return to repeatedly and yet again. Setting our self on the path toward still more spiritual growth is a fairly constant NO to our ego.

I was gifted with an opportunity to give over, give up, give in to Gertrude recently...and I took the opportunity, as in, I resisted not.

My ego Lucy has been arm wrestling with the fact of it since. I suspect that is the why of my blinding flash of the obvious this morning: A self-determined objective is God's will unrealized...with grit and grime attached. It is the root of love aborning...when it is ready, when ego is caught unawares, it shows forth clean and pure.

I realize this is me still in the self-determined stage of my spiritual growth...I'm doing my nonresistance, sometimes by grace, sometimes by grit, whichever matters not. Do away with regretting that I didn't slap her silly, do away with regretting that I regret that I didn't slap her silly. Just do it. Which I did.

The most important thing to remember is that we cling to the fact that it's all the root of love aborning.

A simple analogy: We plant a beet-seed in our garden. That seed takes root and begins growing into a beet...still covered in dirt unseen by our eyes even as we carefully tend to it. It is our tending and Nature working together that grows the beet with Nature having the final word on its readiness. Ah, then it comes forth...to nourish us.

Same goes with love. The seed of love takes root within, we tend to it with God ever guiding. When we are ready, love fills us unto overflowing...and we are nourished.

Thank you.

MAINTAINING AN OPEN CONSCIOUSNESS

In our drive for still more spiritual growth, we often mistake a spiritually based life for a fret-free life...or an unquestioning life. What do I do now? no longer exists in our spiritually fantastical world. Isn't that what all the training our own self to detach from our own self is about? Living certain.

Well, no it isn't. It's the old lesson dressed differently...we go to God for God and that is all. If we go to God praying to live free of uncertainty, that want becomes the invisible, the untouchable...our God in a word.

As Fr Richard Rohr has written, Silence and solitude may not always be what we most need. An admittedly big surprise to me was learning that going to the reasoning mind for the Right Thing To Do is not always the wrong way.

I guess this is all about learning the value of Now...there is no future way to know when our answer is not silence and solitude and relying on the reasoning mind is.

Our self-driven spiritual surety is turned on its head, back on its tail, twisted and turned in order for us to be opened, for our consciousness to be raised higher to a deeper level. That's when we're doing it right.

Can I get an Amen?

Thank you.

THE BOOK OF HOW-TO...LOVE

Go beyond reason to love. -- "The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment," Thaddeus Golas

I suspect those five words incorporate all my spiritual conclusions...reached after hours unto years of pondering, talking, analyzing love itself.

To me, going beyond reason to love is the Book of How-To. How to resist not evil, cease fighting anything and anybody...yes, and give over, give up, give in.

It is the reasoning mind that rejects each of those slivers of gold...that will not or cannot recognize they are the bedrock of serenity. It is our own reasoning mind that stands between us and the peace of mind we seek.

Our reasoning mind rejects these pearls because they do not make sense. Duh. But it is in that big reveal that we are gifted with the BFO that spiritual truths are not for the reasoning mind. The entire Sermon on the Mount goes against common sense...agree with your adversary quickly? Someone slaps you upside the head, turn the other cheek? Love your enemy? I don't think so.

That word think tells our tale. Which is not to say that thinking is bad. No. Our ability to think...to use our mind...is as essential as our ability to walk and talk. Our mind is our wheelhouse. We need to use our mind, to hone it if you will for it is in the honing that we are brought to understand that all our thinking will not get us to where we need to be...ah, but it keeps us headed in the right direction.

We use our mind, our thoughts, our thinking to turn us away from relying on our intellectual, usually egoic, answers toward the perfect answers which are of God. There it is that our mind cedes control, and we are enabled to make the decision to turn our very self over to the care of God.

God loves us so much...our reasoning mind has to work at it.

Thank you.

HONESTY REQUIRES INSIDE HELP

I've been living for awhile now in the memory of my glory days...back when first I heard and believed the Kennedy brothers, back when they promised that one person could truly change the world. Ah, and the inner hope and, yes, challenge that brought me.

Of course, the idea that one person can change the world was not original to the Kennedys, but I first knew it then. Seems to me that the premise is the same as the man with the lantern looking for one honest person...look in the mirror, there s/he need be.

The fact is we are not going to be that person without considerable work on our own self. I found that honest person when I heard Kennedy. I believed it, but live it? Not so much. My first lesson in learning was that honesty does not come cheap. Dishonesty, no problem. It is always available in fibs, white lies, ego-justifications, and outright lies. Honesty, however, requires a boatload of help...until we surrender, i.e., accept inside help.

Accepting inside help...and that acceptance comes slowly...is our deal, our path up to a deeper Self. The Way is our willingness to turn inward toward still more spiritual growth, away from personal wants ever masquerading as needs. Welcome that new life-slant.

What a comfort it is to live a welcoming life...to experience less-than-wonderful and not respond in kind.  Pray thank you and feel the blessing of outflowing love. There. That it is that brings the spiritual change that manifests in the material world.

Thank you.

TO AGREE WITHOUT RESENTMENT...AH, PEACE

Agree with your adversary quickly.... -- Matthew 5:25

Since our instructions are to agree with our adversary quickly, we need to learn exactly how do we do that. One thing we understand fairly quickly is that just agreeing so the other one will shut up only grows resentment...that which we cannot afford.

Our spiritual willingness opens us to the realization that being misunderstood is the gift for us to work with, to study, to make our own. Being misheard and misinterpreted, too.

Trying to correct the many mishits in life is our ego's workshop...wherein ego is given sustenance, as it were, by our attention being focused on trying to fix the mishit. There is no God in mishits.

To agree with our adversary without seeding a resentment rests in our awareness unto acceptance that we are not responsible for how others hear our words, nor are we responsible for how they choose to interpret what we say. Depending mostly on their investment in what they have heard, we can clarify  once...if we're met with resistance, we make polite listening noises and move on.

When something less than wonderful comes from what is passed on, we have our tools to use for our deeper spiritual growth for this is an answered prayer. We pray to be relieved of our attack mind, and here comes fodder for our attack mind. That fodder is an open invitation to agree, to turn the other cheek, to resist not evil, etc., and then some. Or, short cut: Teach me to adore it by seeing you concealed within it. -- Teilhard

The pearl beyond price is the peace of mind we receive when we realize we have ceased fighting anything and anybody...we're living it, Babe! How great thou art.

Thank you.

FREE-FLOWING THOUGHTS ON AWAKENING

You are a child of God, and always will be, even when you don’t believe it. -- Fr Richard Rohr

Same goes for atheists...God is whether we believe God is or not. Not believing in God does not block God from our good...nothing blocks God...we just call it by another name...usually, luck. Makes no never mind, and I wouldn't want to try to change a non-believer's mind...that would just give them permission to try to change mine...my believing does not make me right, but it sure does give me peace...and, apparently, same goes for atheists not believing...that makes them comfortable...why deny anyone their inner comfort?

Then there's love...all that is necessary to love everybody is to get over our own self. We waste our prayers and God's time asking that he help us love someone we have an aversion to...seek love within and it will flow out...seeking to change another so we may love them is seeking for love in the miasma of our own resistance. Doesn't that have a tinge of a self-determined objective to it?...and haven't we learned that is an uh-oh, turn around don't drown?

Seeking out there to change in here is like trying to make rain fall upward. No. Best buy an umbrella and get over our self.

Life is simple. It is living life that's the complicator. Living life invites us to want, and our ego pushes the magic button that swings that door open.

Life alert: We must never deny our ability to want. Face it, it is a toss-up which sends us to God quicker...wants or fears. There it is...the circular firing squad with self as the target...we want, we fear our wants won't be met, we hop into the mix, and there we find the truth that, indeed, hurt people hurt people. 

Quick like a turtle, we turn to God...who has never, not ever, ever said I told you so. Don't tell me God isn't love.

Thank you.

ON ANGEL WINGS

And what is love? Love is the ability of the Christ in me to speak to the Christ in you. Love is the ability of the Christ in me to recognize and bear witness to the Christ in you. Love is the ability to know that God is just as much your life as He is my life. Love is the ability to recognize that God's grace is bestowed upon you as well as upon me. Every truth I know about me is the truth I know about you, and that is how I love you--by knowing God's truth about you. -- "The Gift of Love," Joel Goldsmith

My mental quandary: What if I knew that as truth, knew it from my toes to my nose? Then to live it...ah, would it be there for me if I were taken by, say, the Taliban and was being marched toward my beheading?

There. I wonder if that isn't the infinitely raised consciousness that we seek. Not the beheading, not the crucifixion as our price to pay, but the ability to recognize God's grace as we go toward our fate. Was that the prix fixe at the Last Supper?

What if that's it? And we think we're willing? Okay...how?

First, we bring it down to our level as our spiritual objective, our sliver of gold, that we contemplate unto realization that this, too, is of God.

Second, we get another life-lesson...our getting there can be head knowledge only until we are actually being marched to our beheading...or our crucifixion. Which explains our less-than-wonderful experiences in life; i.e., we lose a child, we are wrongly accused...of anything, a friend betrays us. To meet those experiences with equanimity may be our It...our testing ground in this life.

To get through those and/or like experiences with love...nonresistance...in our heart and our head, is likely as close to God as we are supposed to come in the here and now. That's what testing grounds are for.

We've all had not wonderful life experiences...I've lost a pet, been betrayed and wrongly accused...and getting to the other side took a lot of cooperation with God. Meaning, me learning how to let go, detach, give over, give up, give in. The pearl beyond price is if we are willing, we will be moved forward to the place we need to be.

Resist not evil. That's how we become willing. That's our ticket to ride.

Thank you.

TO UNDERSTAND vs. TO REALIZE

If God gave the soul his whole creation she would not be filled thereby but only with himself. -- Meister Eckhart

There it is! In one sentence, the answer...the explanation...the How Can That Be? diagrammed, dissected, laid open  and sewn back up again. We go to God for God and that is all being the puzzler, of course.

Further, the difference between the reasoning mind understanding and intuitively realizing is likewise diagrammed, dissected, etc. As in, I do not recall ever reading that quote before albeit it is today's reading in a book I have  read every day since 1996 (so I understood the words). Today, without thought, I realized the meaning.

Which isn't to say that this day next year I won't be writing about it with an even deeper realization and as if I'd never read it before...and I hope that's true, too!

But isn't that a beautiful...deeply comforting...thought? If God gave the soul his whole creation she would not be filled thereby but only with himself. In my world, all my trials, Lord, soon be over says much the same thing...only with less assurance.

I love that God loves you as much as he loves me...and my mental adversaries equally.

Thank you.

LOVE...RADICAL INCLUSIVITY

Love's radical inclusivity is a threat to power and arrogance. -- an idea born from Fr. Richard Rohr's "Daily Meditation" today

I give thanks this morning for my attack mind. For it is my attack mind, fear in disguise, that so quickly returns me to my Center, ever closer to my Father. It is in that nearness that I realize that my nemesis and my divinity are One. Ah, my nemesis is my angel, fear it not.

Our nemesis is our deepest fear, our unresolved dread, that which often we know naught of...until it catches us unaware. Too often, when surprised by our nemesis, our egoic reaction is a fearful certainty of this as proof that there is no God...or that there is no loving God.

When it is our spiritual search that has brought us the realization that God is love/love is God, this sneak attack by our nemesis is not a little scarifying to our reasoning mind. Hey and yea!..here comes our Father freeing us immediately by the reminder that underneath are the everlasting arms.

We feel love for our nemesis, a warm acceptance. This radical inclusivity is indeed a threat to its power and arrogance. 

God loves us so much.

Thank you.

PAYBACK IS...AND AS...THE PRIZE

I am reminded that one of the hardest thing life asks of us is that we change our mind, and then the kicker...we cannot do that all on our own. If we remember that sooner rather than later, we save our self  hopeless exasperation, and we do that which we were told to do originally: Go to God for God and that is all.

An example of the pearl we receive from God's upgrade of our thoughts comes from the line in the 23rd Psalm about thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. That read blah, blah, blah to me for a long, long time.

The time I meditated on each word and/or phrase of the 23rd Psalm brought my awakening, and I caught the inner meaning of that phrase. My BFO: We say payback is a bitch...no, payback is the prize!

For sure, payback as the prize required long and deep talks with the Father. Or, in truth, long and deep silences with him. Our Lord is not available on demand, just as needed, and only he knows our true need. If we're just wanting to debate, we have a long wait...I've found.

Coming to acceptance may have been when my mind was opened...I realized the opposite of my view is the way of spiritual growth. From my own life's experience, I know that to be true, and I use it often to find my sliver of gold in whatever woe is appearing.

Surely, though, not when Comcast screws up my bill...again! Yes. Even then...and I still must call Comcast. With possible exaggeration, I have often said that I'd rather be nailed to the cross then call Comcast for anything, yet call I must. Before I call, I remind me that this is the road toward my prize, and the call most often gets completed with less hassle than I projected...or at least never with more. It all starts with me changing my mind.

It's a comfort to think of changing my mind is letting God do my thinking for me. He's not overly quick on the uptake, according to me, which is probably why I once had the blinding flash of the obvious: God has to go slow in order for me to keep up.

Thank you.

DIFFICULTIES TRANSMUTED

Matter and Spirit must be found to be inseparable in Christ. -- probably from Fr Richard Rohr

A morning prayer of mine has the line take away my difficulties that victory over them may bear witness to those I would help of Your love, Your power and Your way of life.

It's another awakening when we realize that the Lord does not take away our difficulties. No. They are transmuted by our willing efforts and his love into love and laughter. Ah, love and laughter...God's gifts realized as we give up taking our self too seriously. That begins to happen as we learn to live the inseparable-ness of Matter and Spirit within us...birthed by our decision to turn our very self over to the care of God.

It is with that decision that we receive the surety that he knows our needs, can and will come to our aid before we know we need his aid, intervene in our life in our behalf. In short, we realize there are no difficulties, there is only the invisible, mysterious love and grace of God.

The rest of our life if we live to be 120 is spent forgetting that...remembering, thanking God for remembering, and loving and laughing at it and us.

Thank you.

GOD GOES BEFORE AND HAS OUR BACK

According to me, the difference between knowing better and doing better is when we only know it, we tend to talk it...telling others how to. That's how we fool our self in believing that we "have" it.

The big reveal comes when we accept that as a necessary step for most of us. It is that acceptance that allows us to move on. Denial of our foolishness keeps us tied to our foolishness.

Our doing better is of God and largely depends on our own faith in God. We learn that God makes the crooked places straight, so on silent faith we walk toward our personal and dreaded crooked places. Here comes the paradox...we realize only as we look back that there were none, those crooked places we dreaded, denied and delayed, gone.

It is in our very trudging the road, when we meet, deal, move on, that God acts...through us, for us, with us, as us.

It is I, be not afraid. 

Thank you.

GRATEFULLY WE SEEK HIS PRUNING

Think of My trees--stripped of their beauty, pruned, cut, disfigured, bare, but through the dark seemingly dead branches, flows silently, secretly, the spirit-life-sap, till, lo! with the sun of Spring comes new life, leaves, bud, blossom, fruit, but oh! fruit a thousand times better for the pruning. -- God Calling, February 10

Maybe we'd best develop the consciousness of nature...of rain, showing no favor (judging not), falls on the just and the unjust alike, of trees growing in yards and on hills, stripped bare in the fall, showing lush and green in the spring. Nature wants naught, ever meeting its needs from within.

Our need is God's will. What we need is already ours...our job is to realize that. What we want, we may or may not get, and, if we get, will likely come to regret.

There it is...the prayer answered even as we pray it: Thank you, Father, for my everything just as it is right this very instant. Thy will, not mine, be done.

Thank you. 

WE HAVE BUT TWO CHOICES

...grant that I may seek to understand rather than seek to be understood. - from the prayer of Saint Francis

Contrary to what I've read, that it is our ego that insists on understanding, I suspect it is our ego that  insists on being understood. Which leads to my belief that we get to choose which life-path we're going to walk...seeking to understand in order to get control, or seeking to understand to come to agreement and thus to love.

I am humbled by gratitude that that part of the Saint Francis prayer spoke to me over all the rest of the prayer from the first time I read it...at least according to my memory. I cottoned to it originally since it said in a few words all the anti-war chants that ever were...all of which I love, I hasten to add. Ain't gonna study war no more...War! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing...I shall fight no more forever. etc., etc., etc.

Loving the slogans, talking love and peace, mentally preaching the Sermon, etc., it is still, and no doubt will ever be, the second thought I ever have when my ego gets the bird. Sometimes the third, fourth and/or fifth thought, but invariably the second. Yours, too?

Since our ego's hidey hole is the reasoning mind, it gets first thought...which in our walking-around, Me Human, world is always on behalf of our self. Ego legislates for itself...that's its job. Our job is to love it anyway just not take orders from it.

There it is...the crux of the matter: To love our ego, our Lucy With The Football, rather than resist her is to go to God for God and that is all. And that is all.

Thank you.

TRUST KEEP IT SIMPLE

I am reminded of a recent blinding flash of the obvious: Until my attack mind is tamed, I am a talker not a walker of the Word.  With that, came the memory of my mentor's admonition about the dangers of scrupulosity...to me, a fancy word for black-and-white thinking.

Black-and-white, either-or, thinking is a trap for those of us afraid of being wrong. It takes an adventurous soul to form our own opinions and put them out there, a necessary step in building our personal standards, actually.

In the process of building, we speak our own ideas formed by our own experience, find agreement and disagreement, discuss them, ponder them, throw away a few, hold tight to others, sit in wonderment that several are right on target and a help to others...ah, but the same goes when we find some of our beloved ideas not only unhelpful but self-centered in the extreme. Those are the ideas we come to know as our angels for they bring laughter at how perfect they once seemed to our reasoning mind.

I am a believer that those of us seeking still more spiritual growth need our personal standards. It is in the forming of those standards that we realize the proven truths of those who have gone before. We learn early enough that going it alone in spiritual matters is dangerous...or, if we keep an open mind, is laughable.

Trusting in keep it simple, I rely on my Trinity...the Sermon, my mentor and my friends.

Thank you.

THANK YOU, THE HEALER OF PAIN

I went to bed last night with roiling thoughts and feelings about current events in the Commonwealth of Virginia...but specifically with the name "Breitbart" stirring the pot. (I ignore that to my ego Lucy having someone to blame is perfect peace.)

Half awake this morning, I entertained my attack mind with old resentments. (ASIDE: Remembered mentor advice, they're not old if you're still using them). To continue, I was recalling  more than a few people in my past who were to blame for me and had never been adequately set straight (shamed) for it.

Fully awake, I mentally fell to my knees (a physical improbability today) and thanked Almighty God for his vivid calling card. I remembered that resentments are the No. 1 offender in my life, and that thank you is the sufficient healer for all my self-inflicted pains...which they all are.

My thank you led me to today's "Daily Meditation" by Fr Richard Rohr where I experienced my proof of purchase:  The people who hold the contradictions and resolve them in themselves are the saviors of the world. They are the only real agents of transformation, reconciliation, and newness.

According to me, that is to resist not evil, and not by self-will but by the grace of the Father within, proving once again that our only need is to go to God for God and that is all.

If that be true for me, then it be true for the Commonwealth of Virginia. All is well...let it be.

Thank you.

GOD MEANS IT FOR GOOD

If we accept the theory of God-given free will (and I do). it will be difficult to accept that God is a punishing God.

To clarify, take the story of original sin...God gave Adam and Eve free will,  then God punished them and all who came from them (that's you and me) for all eternity for the one reason...they used their free will. 

Does that make a lick of sense? There is no free will if upon using it, we get punished forever and three days after that. 

Not to mention being taught that God is Love and that is all...and that, too, I believe. Whatever comes to us, no matter how scarifying it looks on approach, know that this, too, is of God. Then,  instead of sitting and shaking and continuing to watch the dreaded approach, we focus on opening our minds to how we can not resist this. 

We keep it simple...we start with our thank you prayer, and let God explain. We remember spiritual words that have come to our aid in the past...Be not afraid; it is I calms me. And, who's kidding whom. a calm mind is of God, is love enfolding us. 

And when, not if, the approaching Dread falls in our lap...and it may well for that's the material world we are born into...we fret not with why me, oh Lord? My interpretation of God's will as mirror image to our eyes is my go-to, as in, we see awful, but God sees good. I suspect I built that from the story of Joseph who was sold into slavery by his brothers. He hit the Big Time with the Pharaoh, then when the bros drove their train off the track, they ran to Joseph apologizing for doing him wrong and begging to be saved...to which he said, Pish tosh...you meant it for ill, but God meant it for good. 

There it is...the key to never needing to shame or blame again: You meant it for ill, but God meant it for good. 

That's also why spiritual thinking works better than the reasoning mind for solving personal problems. All we need do to change our life is upgrade our attitude about it. We remind our self that good can and will be born out of bad when (not if) we upgrade our attitude. Upgrade your attitude, you upgrade your problem. 

This, then, is the new spiritual reality. Our walking-around world is not necessarily changed, and we're okay with that. Through an upgrade in our own attitude, we know this is not ours, it is God's, and we're good to go. There...we have just broken the code for how to change our mind. 

Here we are back to free will. If we so choose, we can mentally sit in our own stuff, wondering why, blaming and shaming our self, him, her, our parents, et al., or we can look inward to our Power, there  just waiting to be used, and ask for an upgrade in our attitude. Or we can just say thank you.

God gave us free will and no reason to fear using it. Every mistake we make is just another call for him to come to our aid...and we never call in vain.

Thank you.

RADICAL EXPERIENCE OF UNEARNED LOVE

It [to love your enemy as yourself] is just too upending for most peoples’ minds until they have personally undergone the radical experience of unearned love. And, even then, it takes a lifetime to sink in. -- Fr Richard Rohr, "Daily Meditation," February 5, 2019.

Love, as I understand it today, comes down to resist not, put others first, detach from the results of action. That ongoing understanding indeed does take a lifetime. Our ego is ever with us, not always dictating our actions and reactions but for sure ready to, meaning there is no guarantee we will show love as needed today. Which is the good news...there's our reminder that God is on the field, we'd best rely on him.

Ever so often, we all go through our time in the lion's den. The lesson we learn is to not react in kind to the person(s) our ego blames for our being in that den. Ego is steeped in the belief that having someone to blame is perfect peace. It is not...having someone to blame is resentment's playground.

Our daily interactions with others will serve up someone at cross purposes with us and our plans, our perfectly innocent intentions. If we are to learn to put the other first, we must keep in ready reserve the thought-fact that our  intentions may well be at cross purposes with their equally innocent plans.

We give up our ego's desire to beat them at their own game, set them straight, WIN in a word. No, we love them, mentally kiss them on the lips, for they are the angels who are protecting us from our own self...they are our guides up to a deeper level of consciousness.

We remember to fear not being thrown in the lion's den for the lion is Aslan.

Thank you.

ONLY OUR THOUGHT SEPARATES US FROM GOD

The chief thing that separates us from God is the thought that we are separated from Him. If we get rid of that thought, our troubles will be greatly reduced. We fail to believe that we are always with God and that He is part of every reality. The present moment, every object we see, our inmost nature are all rooted in Him. But we hesitate to believe this until our personal experience gives us confidence to believe in it. This involves the gradual development of intimacy with God [through contemplative prayer]. God constantly speaks to us through each other as well as within. The interior experience of God’s presence activates our capacity to experience Him in everything else—in people, in events, in nature. We may enjoy union with God in any experience of the external senses as well as in prayer. -- Father Thomas Keating (1923-2018). Keating was known as one of the principal developers of Centering Prayer.

Thank you.

I FEEL ENCHANTED...WHOA! AND WOW!!

From my "God Calling" of February 3:  If man's petty opposition still holds good, it is only because I choose to let it stand between you and what would be a mistake for you. My note to me: So worrit not, all my uglies are God's beauties to lift me up...embrace them.

Same day, from a prayer in a daily reader: I believe that my faith and God's power can accomplish anything in human relationships. My inserted note: [not my will and God's power]
                            
And from Eknath Easwaran's "Words to Live By,"  As we begin to live more and more in the present, we make the exhilarating discovery that past and future exist only in our minds. It is a tremendous realization, for it means that we are released from any burden of guilt about the past and any anxiety about the future. And my note to me: '98 Ah, but we must move in that fact...live in that truth...to walk free.

I read all that this morning, and I feel...whoa, here comes a word I never thought I'd be able to apply to me without lying: I feel enchanted. I feel enchanted because none of it is true one hundred percent of the time, and I am good with that!

I know that to be best for my soul which is the most important part of my existence. And I will need to go back there to remember, to reinforce...and to give thanks that I need to go back to remind me of the surety I feel right now. Otherwise, I'd be living by rote and rote is just words...pretty words, but there is no...ah-ha...enchantment...there.

God love us so much...singularly, plurally...makes no never mind, we are One.

Thank you.                                                    

LOVE ALL...AND THAT IS ALL

Want of love will block the way. You must love all. Those who fret you and those who do not. -- God Calling, February 2

I feel an inner nudge every year when I come to that instruction. I consider it one of my first gifts of a-borning intuition...it affirmed my suspicion that the deeper my resistance, the deeper I must love. When I read that, I intuited it to be true without having a glimmer of why or how since my then understanding of love being boy-girl love. Period. End of thought on the matter.

It began my desire to learn more about love...it upgraded my walking-around understanding of love. Gratefully, that continues to be an ongoing upgrade.

Just as a matter of...back in the early '70s a friend and I made a study of love and the many levels of love. Which we had sheepishly admitted (swearing each other to secrecy) that we did not know there were levels of love. We took ourselves a tish seriously, so we all but made  a pilgrimage of it, winding up over at the Statue of Grief in Rock Creek Cemetery, praying and meditating. My friend has gone on to his glory now...I hope he's remembering with a smile as I am our so very earnest searching...for which I be more grateful every time I remember us. 

I suspect the reason this gives me an inner nudge every year is that there is most often someone or something fretting me. For many years, I'd write out to the side the name of my fretter, but I had to gave that up...I ran out of room.

I am grateful today when that appears that my first thought has become thank you, Father, that you know my needs. I no longer need name my fret or my fretter...I can (not do) walk free of me. And when I don't, I circle back...it's never a lesson too late in the learning.

Thank you.

GRADUAL REALIZATION

I awoke in the night with a blinding flash of the obvious: We think positive thoughts not to make it so but to realize that it is already so. 

Pondering that, we can understand if our positive thoughts are true, we need not endlessly affirm them. It would seem that an affirmation repeated endlessly could well be fear in disguise, concreting itself. To know a truth is to live it without having to constantly assure our self of its truth.

As a for-instance: I am a beloved child of God is truth, but until we realize it, it is a hope. Affirming it endlessly is probably fear that only I am not a beloved child of God.

Equally important, with regard to our inner truth, is the fact that we must needs tell no one (Tell no man. -- Matthew 8:2-4). Face it, if we "got" it, there are no words to tell it. Those who are ready will see it in us...those who are not ready will form their own opinions. Let them. Let it be.

Plain words: We won't need to tell others, they will tell us. If they don't, chances are we ain't "got" it...yet. Or they're not ready...yet. Either way, our words will just muddle it.

And then I read today's "Daily Meditation" by Fr Richard Rohr, The only salvation worthy of the name is a gradual realization of who we are already in this world—and always have been—and will be eternally. 

Thank you.