CEASE FIGHTING...DANCE!

Per Dr. Diana L. Hayes, a modern mystic: God has always seemed to come to me in days of darkness and disillusionment *** I wrestled with God on my bed of pain as I do still today...I argue and shout and listen and pray and question and doubt and finally acquiesce, only to move further down the path to another fork in the road where the struggle begins yet anew. -- From Fr Richard Rohr's "Daily Meditation," December 5, 2019

I said to a friend recently that I shake my fist in God's face frequently. To say that shocked her is understating in the extreme. Since I knew better, I had to accept that I'd invited her response so I listened...or, more honestly, I made listening noises while sliding glances at my watch.

It comforts me beyond reasoning what having a "real" God means to me. We talk...or, I talk and I know I am heard.

SIDEBAR: I am just seeing that I can compare myself, albeit regrettably, to the TV commentator, Chris Matthews. I accuse him of asking questions of his guest, answering the question he has asked, interrupting himself to disagree with the answer, then setting the guest straight about the answer...the guest who never gets a chance to open his mouth. It becomes clearer with every inner awakening why the basic spiritual answer is always and ever: Love and laugh. 

All this is by way of saying until I accept, again and again, a God of my own understanding who ever and forever lets me know that he is the only one I am free to disagree with (the word I heard and believe from my toenails up is: We have ceased fighting anything and anybody...or, in the vernacular, get over yourself), I follow my own ego, feeling less-than and superior-to...occasionally both at the same time.

All this comes by way of a quote of Saint Augustine. Paraphrased, he praised the wonder and the glory of finding within himself the God of his own understanding, then falling under his ego's spell again and again, but ever returning to the beauty and the glory of his God. Which gives one permission to be down-and-dirty human even while seeking spiritual growth, doesn't it? Or maybe that's just me.

So be it.

Thank you.

A BLESSING WITH NO FINGERPRINTS ON IT

Trying to avoid suffering is probably the cause of most personal suffering. Same goes with trying to avoid making a mistake...we either wind up with a head full of worry but doing nothing, a major mistake, or we wind up causing unintended consequences which invites mistakes.

The answer, we find all over again, is to sit and wait on the Lord with the inner intention of going to God for God...and that is all.

To  sit and wait on the Lord is in spiritual consciousness the time for inner action. This is the time when we detach from our busy mind race-race, run-running on how to avoid or to fix our perceived problem.

Now we sit quietly and offer up a conscious invitation for our dreaded perception to walk right in, sit down with us and share a cuppa. Then we let our mind float to the many promises we have read of and invite any one up to do its thing.

Say that we are given It is I, be not afraid (John 6:20). Our mind's eye (I?) recognizes our dread, and our mind is changed...what we are dreading is the gateway up deeper, our sliver of gold. We realize that this, too is of God, and we hug it and kiss it and let it go.

This, of course, is not a one-shot deal...it takes as long as it takes to break completely free of our own imaginings. Often and oh so often we find it gone, leaving us wondering when we were freed.

There it is, the pearl of great price: We know we are blessed for clearly self 's fingerprints are nowhere on it. God can and will when self-protection takes a hike.

Thank you.

SIT AND WAIT ON THE LORD...IN TRUST

Here's a challenge. I recently read that Gandhi studied the Sermon on the Mount every morning and every evening for forty years. Gandhi. Studied the Sermon daily for forty years.

Holy moly.

Clearly Gandhi learned well for he turned the British Empire around purely on non-violent principles and practices.

I've talked the Sermon for nearly fifty years. Certainly not daily, much less twice daily. But study? Mercy...I quote resist not evil and turn the other cheek a lot. But I still struggle to remember them first when life calls them up for me to use.

Which, who's kidding whom, is where I am right now...in the midst of another mental brouhaha. All I want to do is kvetch, carp and complain, not to mention blame and shame the real source of my woe, i.e., not me.

Clearly, my problem is I'm following my reasoning mind even while knowing that's my ego Lucy doing the dictating. All good but useless information until I move out of knowing into giving over to the fact that I do not know what to do. 

I know what I want to do...win and be done with it. But what I need to do...ah, of course I even "know" that: Give over, give up, give in. Yes, but.... What about shake the dust off your feet and move on? What to do when the dust travels, too?

The paradox of the reasoning mind: It is essential to have a fit and fairly well-honed reasoning mind if we're going to live successfully in this world. However, it is going beyond that mind...that mind that we've worked so hard to get "fit and fairly well-honed"...that requires us to hold our nose and take a leap of faith.

I very well  know the answer to stilling the ego's nattering what to do?, how to do it?  Trust my original decision to throw in with God, then sit and wait on his Word. Now to do it.

And do not gossip and call it venting. Sheesh.

Thank you.

TRY TO REMEMBER

Growth, be it spiritual, mental or physical, comes in layers. According to Fr Richard Rohr, we have to “unknow” a bit every time we want to know in a new way.

My goal, to live the St Francis prayer, i.e., grant that I may seek to give comfort, understanding, love rather than seek to get them, must be tempered. There will ever be those who cannot or who purely do not wish to hear us.

Here's our new growth...learning, being willing to learn, how to let them resist us without resisting.  Without resisting by projecting false superiority or without currying false favor. Both of which are self-protection on parade.

How to let them resist without resisting could not be simpler...which probably is why it takes so long to accept: Let them and move on. Let them resist the not-present us.

Our how-to is set out in Matthew 10:14, When you come to a town where the people cannot hear your words, shake the dust off your feet and move on.

My simplified version of that: When someone disagreeably disagrees with me, lean on my golden rule to try not to be as nasty as I want to be; say, with a smile, You may be right; move on.

The trick is remembering my golden rule...the rest then follows fairly easily.

Thank you.

LOVE IS INNER PEACE...TO BE GIVEN

Consider these words inspired by John of the Cross: “Love what God sees in you.”

As I read that, the thought crossed my mind: What if what God sees in me includes that part of me which my enemy sees as me...and rejects? Love that, too...especially the enemy.

Same purpose deeper is to love what God sees in us as God loves what he sees. Our deeper purpose or our cross to bear depending on how seriously we're taking ourself in the moment.

It is a tall order to love what God sees in us, and I found that in order for me to understand love, I had to first redefine love. My concept of love had gotten stuck back in the boy-girl love days.

Love tends to be hard to realize until we know what it means spiritually, according to me. My understanding of love...of life itself...began to expand when I was lifted into a deeper knowing through spiritual growth.

We stumble again over the conflict between our wants and our needs. We want love...the feeling of love...to equate with warm, wonderful and 100 percent secure. Then we can share it.

We need it to be an inner knowing of peace that cannot be held but only given...the more we give of our peace, with no expectation of return, the more at peace we are. Loved in a word.

That begins when we love what God sees in us.

Thank you.

REASON...OUR BLACK HOLE AND SAVING GRACE

Spiritual growth offers us an entirely different way of knowing: an intimate relationship, a dark journey, a path where we must discover for ourselves that grace, love, mercy, and forgiveness are absolutely necessary for survival in an uncertain world. (From Fr Richard Rohr's "Daily Meditation" of December 1, 2019, slightly reworked.)

According to me, our "old" way of knowing grace, love, mercy, and forgiveness is useless to us now...to hold to that way is to hold to our feeling guilt, shame and blame even as we know not why. The why is our ego at a loss because ego is lost in a spiritually woke soul...reasoning mind on the run, so to speak.

Learning to live fully present to this moment, to live without certitude, seems to our reasoning mind a way to live uncertain and unsure...nervous at best. But detaching from the want to know (self-described as a need) is the door upon which our Father knocks opening to our inner security, faith.

Ah, and when those few bright and fleeting moments come, we know and we know we know and we know not what for certain sure we know...but we feel our inner elfin spirit running through the proverbial field of flowers with butterflies and rainbows abounding.

As Rohr has written, You only need enough clarity to know how! Yes, we really are saved by faith.

Or, my favorite from "The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment" by Thaddeus Golas: We must go beyond reason to love.

Thank you.

OUR HIDDEN NEED: SIT AND WAIT ON THE LORD

We pray to have our difficulties "taken away."  They never are as we prove to ourself again and again...when they return again and again, albeit and always in a different guise. Trying so hard to rid ourself of our difficulties is akin to unlearning so we can relearn...which is staying in the problem for sure.

Our lesson to learn is the art of acceptance...what else? Our defects are transmuted by our attitude of gratitude...we find ourself laughing at our egoic response and loving anyway. Talk about freedom!

Mayhap our deepest lesson...our ongoing, neverending, lesson is learning to listen with ears of compassion...not to judge but to accept, i.e., to love.

We must learn to listen to hear the speaker whose hidden message is their need...their secret need. To do that we must stop running our own hidden agenda of listening to gather facts against the words being said...then hating the speaker for the words.

The message is never the words but the need hidden behind the words. The need is ever God's to fulfill, and we are God's eyes and ears to use in fulfilling them. With our decision to live a turned-over-to-the-care-of=God life, we are free to be of use to others...any others sent to us.

We do not go trolling, proselytizing or recruiting...no. Our work is much harder than that...we get to sit and wait on the Lord. With an attitude of gratitude. Which is love and laughter, plain and simple.

Thank you.