LOVE! (OR AT LEAST DON'T TAKE OFFENSE)

I awoke recently, with a heavy heart and on-guard thoughts, feeling personally attacked by friends, unfriends and passing acquaintances. As I lie there, feeling swamped with hurt, and plotting how to just drop them all out of my life, I was gifted with a blinding flash of the obvious: Theirs is not yours...touch it not.

I realized that the lesson to learn is not in personalizing the incoming negativity I felt; the lesson is in whatever personal negativity there be is not mine, has naught to do with me unless I pick it up by reacting to it...even by my flight from it. 

My forward action, then, is to mentally name my attackers as I hug him and kiss her and let them go. From my mind. With love. And remember Rohr's forgiveness is just a religious word for letting go.

Interestingly, the hardest I'm imagining is to "let them go from my mind with love"...mainly, my problem is with the word "love." Because what I want to do is "vent," meaning to talk about it (them) with venom disguised as "seeking to understand." 

I am still (forever?) learning how to love spiritually...with no kickback. Which may be the problem. Face it, predetermining "how to love spiritually should feel" is a self-determined objective, plain and simple. Let go and let God is not just a slogan.

What I know from my toenails up is that I need to show up to my mental gunfight...there is no gunfight if we don't start shooting...by gun or by mouth or by negative thoughts. One is as lethal as the other, and none is of God. 

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer doesn't have a spiritual ring to it which doesn't mean it isn't good advice. Actually, that may be just another way of saying love your enemy as yourself...only the first way seems more doable.

Learning to live...live and breathe...by spiritual principles is not easy, but it's never boring either...the unboring part is the effort it takes to not take offense. Whoa. I hope that's not just me.

Thank you.

WE ARE THE THANK YOU WE GIVE

Blinding flash of the obvious: Whenever we feel fear (anger, sorrow, inner pain), lean into it...do not move away, move forward toward it.

As I ponder that, I see fear as a feeling...just another feeling. Whenever we feel fear manifesting as anger, sorrow, pain or any negative, we can immediately shoot a thank you prayer...sit with that...let thank you be our guide to grace, the place of gratitude. 

It is grace then, never our mental efforts, that quiets us, opening us to our inner good, i.e., God with us, within us. God calling us to lean into the fear...to not move away but mentally to move forward, toward our fear. 

Our ever-present block is our desire for the immediate...the ego's quick, fast and in a hurry solution. God's will takes as long as it takes...ours is to let it.

I once had the BFO, "God is a drag-foot," which seemed so disrespectful of God that I kept mum about it. Since I never forgot it, I figure God must not be offended so I pull it up as needed, and hey, it works. It slows down my race/race, run/run mind, I am quieted...to listen. 

Ah, I recall: Fear is God in camouflage calling us to Him. 

Thank you.

RANDOM THOUGHTS, REDUX

[This is a slightly reworked reprint of my post of November 24, 2013.]

Here's an I-wish-it-weren't-but-I'm grateful-it-is quote: "The grace of God sometimes comes in the form of sorrow."

Then there's a making-it-mine thought: "We need to make wise choices every moment just to keep from being swept away." The brain-buster is the fact the speaker was referring to food. In fact, our aim must ever be toward making wise choices especially as to whether to take anything personally or not. Not is the wise answer, but the doing, the choosing, is where the spiritual work begins...just begins.

Then there's: [Like the fragrance from a flower] "love from within us radiates towards everybody and manifests as spontaneous service." Spontaneous service. Every time I go back and reread that entire quote, I'm struck by those two words. For they are the perfect description of getting out of our own way, letting go and letting God. 

Spontaneous means without forethought...or it does to me, and I'm not looking it up in the dictionary. Love as "spontaneous service" has no "me" attached...it's purely God flowing from his container, me, you, each and all of us. It begins when we connect with our core, God, infinity on the head of a pin, our center, love.

Thank you.

THE SEEKER TRANSFORMED

Blinding flash of the obvious on awakening: Our life is God walking us through the briars and the brambles, the good and the glory, to God.

I have ever believed that we all come from and return to God consciousness.  As gay contemplative writer Michael Bernard Kelly is quoted in Rohr's "Daily Meditation" this morning, We came from union and all of our longing is a movement back toward union.

In my simple world that stands with my belief of a common pool of God-consciousness from which all are born and all return...there to be born and reborn until we get it right.

It seems our exchanged mind teaches us that our travels through life are enhanced by the briars, for which we become grateful; our glories are to be appreciated in the moment, then loosed and let go...for which we need to get grateful.

We make those travels difficult by our natural inclination to avoid the briars and the brambles...but whoever learned a new lesson from the glory they received from doing it right in the first place? 

From our eyebrows up, we wish, desire, want to keep doing it right, only our self-determination clings to that which we have, effectually staying new growth, God's perfect objective. 

Our self-determined objective may seem right, good and true...we want to be loved, lose weight, Be Somebody. Except that there is no God there.

That "except" is terribly difficult to recognize much less accept since all the while we are mentally on our knees praying for to get love, get thin, get glory. "To get" is the nature of a self-determined objective. 

The perfect objective which is of God is to give. How else could the paradox you've got to give it away to keep it be true?

This is the heart of our yearning: to become that which we taste and hunger for, not briefly, but fully, totally, permanently, being utterly transformed into that which we desire so deeply....the seeker transformed into that which she seeks. --  Kelly in Rohr's "Daily Meditation" today (and I say "Amen")

Thank you.

ANOTHER OF-GOD PARADOX

 We cannot become humble by mere intellect or willpower....All we can really do is become more aware of our pride or vanity by noticing how we respond to even minor slights or humiliations. -- Fr Richard Rohr, "Daily Meditation," December 15, 2020

Oh my, how we respond to even minor slights or humiliations surely sings my song. By our response we give weight...either to our egoic self or to our spiritual center. 

Our egoic self responds in kind...personally, i.e., negatively...maintaining our self-bondage; our spiritual center is our Oned Self which recognizes no slight or humiliation, ergo no response. 

As I write this, I am embarrassingly aware that I know this from my eyebrows up...my head and half my heart are nattering right this minute about the various people who are not  "doing it right" in my life. According to me. 

Oh wait, that's not all...how I am going to rise above it...show them how it's done. 

Ah, but I know I am heading in the right direction by the siren song of my beloved character defect...I am taking myself too seriously. 

I can read, study, ponder the Sermon, Rohr, et al., till my face falls off...all of which are good and necessary...but until, in my own head all by myself alone, I am breathing those words that I'm agreeing with, I am wandering aimlessly in that great wasteland of mental mire, a.k.a., secret self-admiration. 

Quick...my sliver of gold: I know I am heading in the right direction, detours and all. I am a student,  sometimes a slow-learner, sometimes a quick-study, but a student who has found her rightful teacher, her place, her home: All Alone hunkered down with my peeps...just another of-God paradox.

Thank you.

CARRIED FORWARD BY LOVE

Not to get too high-flown about it, but I am wrestling with the words "Divine Love." Meaning, I have been unable to find another name for it...to downgrade it, actually. Whenever the words slip out, I feel like I'm putting on airs so I try to quash them. I know the words "Divine Love," and that is all I gut-bucket know about it...which, to my mind, pretty much translates into putting on airs. 

Hope is dawning, though, that this may be the difference between my rational mind at work and spiritual intervention...it's not like as if I'm choosing the words for I am not, I am resisting using the words. (And still they persist...just as with the woman speaking her truth to power. She was right, and so is Divine Love.)

That's my backstory, but the point I want to make is: Until we lose the in-our-head knowledge of love, from Mother love to romantic love to just-feel-good-all-over so it must be love...all of which we try to replicate and call Divine Love...we will never experience the love we seek. The indescribable love that we chase our self trying to describe which leads us to another brick wall. 

The indescribable love of God can only be experienced and then only in the moment. The memory of that exalted feeling is what we carry forward...or, in truth, is what carries us forward. 

It is not attainable, it is just there...it is not earned, awarded or rewarded...maybe gifted but that's just the reasoning mind's bow-tied wrap.

I ascribe to the definition of Fr Richard Rohr who wrote, "We know God by loving God. And I think that it is actually more important to know that we love God than to know that God loves us...." (Rohr's "Daily Meditation," November 10, 2020)

We know, of course, that to ascribe and to do are two entirely different things. Ah, but to ascribe is the starting point, and the starting point is more important than the ending. We can end anywhere by just stopping...quitting in a word...but there's only one true starting point. We know it when we continue deeper to a higher place.

We realize it in the moment we feel righted...and wonderingly wonder, Is this then Divine Love?

Thank you.

ON BEING IN THE PROCESS

Again I wonder if all resistance isn't resistance to love...fear of divine love if we get right down to it. Divine love, as in, I will fight no more forever, and realizing Chief Joseph was right, that we need heed just that.

Uh-oh...it is "just that" that births the fear of love we've personalized...by naming some hapless other as the current cause of our woes...and offers no sittin' in judgment fun at all.

It is those egoic thoughts that drown out the spiritual facts; namely, that God has us in the palm of his hand...God has our back...God can and will intervene in our life in our behalf. There it is...the art and the bane of dual thinking.

The sliver of gold...it is our dual thinking that causes pain enough for us to recognize we are going down that wrong road again. Detour! Turn around...loose it and let it go. 

Apparently, I am in the process of having these truths moved down from my head to my gut to my heart, and finally to meld with my Soul...a circuitous journey with God in charge and on God's timetable...me trundling behind, nattering, "Are we there yet?" And that's when I'm doing it right.

This I believe, and maybe only from my eyebrows up but that's a start: All that we see as fearful is of God. We can welcome it with our thank you prayer and be set free...in God's good time.

It is I: be not afraid. - John 6:20

Thank you.