NOT FOR ME, FOR THEE

We seek still more spiritual growth. That search has been our motivating goal for many years. Looking back, we understand that it takes as long as it takes to nail the idea of our goal...not to put too fine a point on it, but to just agree with it is tough enough.

I give myself airs when I think that I've been studying the Sermon on the Mount for years and years. I've been reading it for years, but studying it, no. But always I have read it with the goal of coming to agree with it...and that, trust me, has not been easy. 

According to me, The Big One, the verse that turns us around or leaves us behind is Matthew 5:38-42: "You have heard that it was said, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,' But I say to you, Do not resist one who is evil. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the  other also, and if any one would sue you and take your coat, let him have your cloak as well; and if any one forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to him who begs from you, and do not refuse him who would borrow from you."

Thank you! Welcome! Yes! or Whoa! Stop! No! Choice-making time...choose or lose.

Here is the complete break with the egoic mind...the sacred U-bie...where we exchange our free will for God's will. When we accept this one as truth, and not from our eyebrows up but within our entire being, we can make the decision to turn our will and our life over to the care of God and begin our journey back to God.

There it is, the kicker...agreeing unto accepting unto doing nonresistance. That requires a subservient  reasoning mind since, face it, none of it makes a lick of sense to our rational mind. Which is precisely why we must willingly exchange our reasoning mind for the mind that was in the Buddha, Christ Jesus, Gandhi, Martin Luther King and others. 

That is the mind that I want to be in me. Which I expect to get several lifetimes from this one. That's why I seek it now...to shorten the timespan if for no other reason.

ABTW, another Sermon verse too tough for the unaided mind to comprehend is Matthew 5:11-12: "Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so men persecuted the prophets who were before you." My BFO clue: Look to the words, on my account. They tell the tale.

Here's my today's glimpse of glory: Getting out of the reasoning mind is an everyday ideal until it becomes an everyday option until it lives every day in every way in our heart, our soul, our body, our newly refurbished brain.

With that as our everyday goal, we walk forward welcoming our humbling missteps, errors, flubs and fibs...grateful that we get to God by doing it wrong, not by doing it right (with thanks to Fr Richard Rohr).

Thank you.