SOLIDARITY...ON HELPING GOD HELP US

Blinding flash of the obvious: To help us, God needs our help.

Well, now. The quandary is how?  To help us, God needs our help...how? 

Is this, then, when we learn how to sit and wait on the Lord?...with a purpose in mind? The purpose of helping by following not leading....by following the commands we receive from within in our quiet time? Not fooling ourself by following whatever "good" idea comes to mind, as in, thinking of ourself as first, i.e., by leading, or as last, by following, or as in-between, trying for One.

This may be the time that we kiss self-determined objectives on the lips and let them go...which, standing alone, cannot be done for that becomes a self-determined objective. 

Blinding flash of the obvious: To give God our help is to seek God's will.

Ah, then to seek God's will is to accept when wrong, not if wrong, as God's will...to be wrong is proof of God's will...to be right is the inner peace that allows us to continue to seek God's will and that is all.  

SIDEBAR: The world, and all the sects and sections of the world, seem to be in crisis today...the Fellowship of my Soul being my deep concern. I am calmed and comforted by the words of Pope Francis re emerging from a world crisis. His words hold true for the world, for a country, for a Fellowship: ...one does not emerge from a crisis the same as before....We emerge from a crisis either better or worse than before. It is up to us to choose. And solidarity is, indeed, a way of coming out of the crisis better....

Solidarity...our forever and not new answer.

Whenever anything upsets me, no matter what the cause, there is something wrong with me; ergo, we have ceased fighting everything and everybody. 

Thank you.

GO TO GOD FOR GOD...AND THAT IS ALL

God expects but one thing of you, and that is that you should come out of yourself insofar as you are a created being and let God be God in you. -- Meister Eckhart 

I got that quote from today's Eknath Easwaran's "Words to Live By," which book I have read daily since it was gifted me in 1996. And, who's kidding whom, that has ever gone over my head like a hairnet. 

Interestingly, in reading Merton's "Events and Pseudo Events" today, I got a glimpse of all, all, that we see, hear, think, feel in the material world is simulacra...which word I had to Google: simulacra - something that replaces reality with its representation. 

My interpretation of that is the material world, our reasoning mind's home, is an illusion...used by us to replace God, the reality of God, the only reality.

What came to me from Merton's quote is the aborning realization that we must take each sight we see, or memory, good/bad, and turn it over to God...higher consciousness. There without thought to be stripped of all its bells and whistles to find naught but God there.

This is, of course, an intellectual exercise right now...but what spiritual growth isn't at start up? 

I'll no doubt need to make my see-it-now, along with every less-than memory, acceptable to my reasoning mind in order to let it go entirely. I'll pray my thank you, and in the unlikely chance God strips me clean in a holy minute, I'll be grateful. But I know me better than I know God, and I'm glad I've given me permission to do what I do to get where I'm going...to God.

Just to mention, I relate to Eckhart better than to Merton. I mean, Eckhart never uses words like "simulacra." In fact, so far, I've never had to Google Eckhart, yet I've just started with Merton and already...enough said.

Love and laugh...and go for It.

Thank you.

NOT BY WILL BUT BY WISDOM

Blinding flash of the obvious:  Not by will but by wisdom.

I can only judge me by my own limited knowing. That hopeful thought floated by me this morning just as I was sitting down to read Merton...about "The Technological Imperative."  I knew by that title this was  going to be way over my head, but I waded in. It was way over my head. 

He wrote, "...when technology  merely takes over all being for its own purposes, merely exploits and uses up all things in the pursuit of its own own ends, and makes everything, including man himself, subservient to its processes, then it degrades man, despoils the world, ravages life, and leads to ruin."

Even as I read that, it translated itself to me as, "Trying to detach from a character defect by reading about it, analyzing it, going to therapy for it...or just obsessively thinking on it...is going down that wrong road again. Find God there. Thank you." 

My hopeful thought about self-judgment gave me permission to accept my no-frills spiritual breakthroughs as being as valid to me as technological breakthroughs are to scientists. Indeed.

I reread Merton at the point where he wrote, "Technology can elevate and improve man's life only on one condition: ...that it remembers that the origin and goal of all being is in God."  Indeed, indeed.

Don't tell me God doesn't know...and fulfill...our needs. Our realization takes a tish longer to come by...proving that we get there not by will but by wisdom.

Thank you.

ON WELCOMING SUFFERING...YES!

For me for today, subject to change by God and by grace:

Me: I have one bone-deep fear...for self, as I am perceived; I have one bone-deep spiritual desire...to live the Sermon as I understand it. 

My suffering: It seems the more I live the Sermon by denying my wants, the more others perceive me through my deepest fear.

Fr Richard Rohr: It seems there is an inherent negative energy or resistance from all of us when we are suffering, and it is in those moments that we are invited to a more generous response. It is actually the necessary dying that the soul must walk through to go higher, farther, deeper, or longer.

My interpretation: There is an inherent resistance from us to suffering (our fear realized), and it is in those moments when our fear is realized that we are invited to welcome it with our thank you. 

Fr Richard: That is the seemingly negative way of the cross...not from resistance, denial, or a sense of injustice or wrongness about our pain, but by walking through it in welcome.

Old, still gold, reliable: Hug it...kiss it on the lips...let it go. 

Thank you.

TO LIVE BY GUTS, GOD AND GRACE

Our life is all about what we thought...because that's what we got. With the majority of us spending our lives trying to place the blame for what we got. Always looking out there...parents, teachers, friends, lovers, God. God being the final culprit.

Some of us are called to organized religion, some to spirituality, some are atheists, comfortable with no God at all. Then a lot of us just rely on a mix-and-match of the various named religions. (Google names the major religions of the world as Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Confucianism, Christianity, Taoism, and Judaism.)

Underneath it all, I wonder if we all don't rely on the God of our own understanding...disguised however we need It to be. We just never had the nerve...or our own permission...to own it. 

That is no wonder for it is a heavy responsibility. To own it is to live it.

Living it is the beginnings of our understanding the invisible, unseen and unseeable, God of our own understanding...and grace. The grace of ego-deflation in depth. Ah, need face-to-face.

 

Now, we look no further than our Self for help in times of need, for relief in times of stress. That's how we learn that nothing turns us to our God faster than fear, a.k.a., personal need, personal stress, personal ego-trials. 

Without need we would never turn to prayer, to meditation, to a Source deeper that our ego, higher than our self-determined objectives. 

To own it is to live it...to live it births need. Need is of God...get grateful, get grace. 

Thank you.

LET IT BE WITH LOVE AND LAUGHTER

The term 'perennial philosophy' . . . refers to a fourfold realization: (1) there is only one Reality (call it, among other names, God, Mother, Tao, Allah, Brahman, or Great Spirit) that is the source and substance of all creation; (2) that while each of us is a manifestation of this Reality, most of us identify with something much smaller, that is, our culturally conditioned individual ego; (3) that this identification with the smaller self gives rise to needless anxiety, unnecessary suffering, and cross-cultural competition and violence; and (4) that peace, compassion, and justice naturally replace anxiety, needless suffering, competition, and violence when we realize our true nature as a manifestation of this singular Reality. The great sages and mystics of every civilization throughout human history have taught these truths in the language of their time and culture. -- Rami Shapiro, commonly called "Rabbi Rami", is an author, teacher, and speaker on religion and spirituality.

Well, there it is. Everything that I believe in one paragraph. And proof that what I believe and how I live what I believe are two different...ah, but converging...matters.

Amazing as it is to me, to my realization right this very second, "converging" is an apt description of  how I live what I believe and is close enough for the honest love and laughter of my spiritual self and my egoic self.  

I wonder if the point of convergence isn't what Merton writes about...when the spiritual enwraps the ego and the ego disappears. Waaay over my head and several lifetimes away for me now but close enough to ponder.

Let it be.

Thank you.

DESIRE NOT TO DESIRE, II

[The following is a slightly reworked reprint from my post of April 1, 2012, and I am grateful it still fits me.]

I desire not to desire, for my will is without value, since I am ignorant in any case. Therefore choose Thou for me what Thou knowest to be best and do not put my perdition in what my autonomy and free choice prefer. -- Bayazid Al-Bistami

This sounds so good...so right.

I've never heard of the person I quote so I don't know if s/he got there. I do know, though I never expect to perfectly get there, that I have a good feeling within that I can desire not to desire. 

Feeling good within is what I call getting a hug from God...that I know is good and right.

Thank you.