NOT BY REASON, BUT BY GRACE

My still-in-bed blinding flash of the obvious: God is our presence, not a Being out there for us to pray to, but consciousness...a part of us, alive within us, and already active as us whether we know it or not.

Then I read God Calling today, "Search until you meet Me face to face...." 

There's assurance that the BFO was a meeting with God face-to-face. Ah, but our living it will tell the rest of the story. 

It is the acting on it that is the will-o'-the-wisp. Acting on it is to sit and wait on the Lord to make known to us by our actions His will, His way. That's the holy paradox...to sit and wait on the Lord is the spiritually required action. 

Uh-oh...to spiritually sit and wait on the Lord is not to sit on our keister and wait to be gifted with rainbows and roses. This is when, where and how we prove Fr Richard's we don't get to God by doing it right, we get to God by doing it wrong. 

We need to walk through the muck and the mire of doing it wrong, i.e., our own mistakes, to realize them as God's gold...all our uglies are blessed by God even as we live them.

Just as nothing turns us to God faster than fear, the muck and the mire are for our benefit...to experience God's will, God's way. Or, not by reason, but by grace.

Thank you.

VULNERABILITY -- GOD'S WILL, GOD'S WAY

His fear was seemingly transmuted into what we call 'beginner’s mind,' which is what grace always does—it turns our vices into another way to love and serve God’s reality....This ever-rediscovered beginner’s mind, which is a deathlike vulnerability before reality, keeps each of us forever growing and forever young. -- Fr Richard's Daily Meditation, March 21, 2023 (slightly altered) 

I have come to love the descriptive "beginner's mind"...it is clearly before we know...and there's the common sense glitch to spiritual growth. 

We seek, we study, we ponder, we think, we meditate...which for a long time is just a fancy word for think. All the while our need is the vulnerability of the beginner's mind...open, needing to be filled not by learned words but by inspiration and intuitive grace. 

Seeking to become wholly vulnerable is on no one's To-Do list...at best, it's a Should, and, face it, "should" is the skunk in the closet. Who's kidding whom? Vulnerability takes us by surprise, feels less than wonderful...usually embarrassing...and exposes our secret secrets, those even unbeknownst to us. 

Yet it is by way of our studying, our meditating, that we are opened to the vulnerability of God's will, God's way. There...vulnerability is God's will, God's way, the beginner's mind, utterly unavailable to self-will as it does what grace always does—it turns our vices into another way to love and serve God’s reality.

Thank you.

THE BLESSED DISGUISE OF DOWNSIDE BEING UP

[E]verything shows itself...to be 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 trapdoor into salvation. -- from Fr Richard Rohr's "Daily Meditation" of December 14, 2013

I do not recall when first I heard this life-in-reverse word, but it confirmed my then-new way of thinking, feeling, doing, being. I do remember the healing I felt when I read the above paragraph for I knew it for my truth. It described what I'd been calling "mirror image."

"Mirror image" is how I believe God sees the material world...what to our egoic mind is "No!" is often his "Yes!" 

 

Looking back, I am happily amazed at how often I have relied on "mirror image" when the less-than-wonderful events of my life were attacking my mind. Likewise, I am not overly shocked to experience the difficulty in remembering that first thing when the need arises.

Time takes time as does a raising consciousness. I am grateful today to remember that, too. I am currently walking through a virtual briar patch, and whether it be of the material mind or spiritual mind has yet to be determined. 

I am accepting the root of my briar patch as spiritual growth that's been overrun by nearly three years of pandemic isolation. My need to be resocialized is my work cut out for me while allowing my spiritual nature to lead the way (accepting my goofs with love and laughter). Whoa...a new venture for me, and easy it is not. Ah, and it is not supposed to be. 

To (gr)ease the way, here comes gratitude all aglow and whispering, He goes before me to make the crooked places straight.

Thank you. 

FINDING GOD IN ALL-NEW PLACES

We need to begin to recognize God in places where we would never, perhaps, have suspected [God’s] presence before, and not only in the big city or in the places of our enemies, but also in the many seemingly banal and bizarre circumstances of our lives. * * * * * But to learn this lesson, really to learn it, we need to undergo the grace and mystery of bewilderment. --Dominican priest and poet Paul Murray, in Fr Richard's Daily Meditation, today

What a gift that priest-poet's quote is to me. His topic is Jonah in the whale, and he goes on to say how Jonah’s journey of transformation is one that all of us must undergo.

For whatever reason...rightly, God's will, God's way, or wrongly, self-determined objective...my life today seems to me to be going upside down and backward. 

Many of my friends are doubling their exercise time...walking five miles, ten miles, etc., daily. My bum knees get me to my car, and that's close enough to perfect for me. So I've decided to start exercising my mind...and this time of upside-down ankle-biters is my journey of transformation.

I speak true when I say it is hard. Very hard. Interestingly, detaching my thoughts is coming fairly easy, but the likes of getting my new electric blanket turned OFF? Could not do it...so I went back to bed and slept for an hour, and it's preset time shut the blanket off. 

Then, my preferred cable channel could not be reached...that channel is the sole reason I signed up with my new provider. I finally unplugged the TV set...it may or may not be working now. Peace. 

All of this is me "exercising my mind." Trying to think my way to the factory-approved right answers, and with neither temper nor tears, accepting those cut-and-paste results fills me with gratitude. When the end result is gratitude, I get an Atta Girl!

I start anew tomorrow...I'm reading a trashy romance this afternoon.

Thank you.

SEEKING OTHER GRATEFUL HEARTS, 2

[The following is a reprint of my post of October 31, 2013, slightly reworked.]

Gratitude must be lived. 

A living attitude of gratitude shows forth as a beacon, drawing others to It. It especially draws grateful people who are as yet unaware...seeking they know not what.

I have read that the measure of our gratitude is proportional to the amount of time and effort we give to others, to other seekers.

That for sure keeps our gratitude replenished. In that way, it's like a hug...we must needs give it to get it. What better reason to live in gratitude than knowing It will seek other grateful hearts.

Thank you.

OUR COMFORT IS THY ROD AND THY STAFF

In my yesterday's post, I wrote, It feels kinda like attempting to scale a sheer, towering cliff, this detaching from material mind, aiming for spiritual.  

In looking back...to just yesterday!...I realize my "feels like" was a projection of how I expect detaching from material mind upgrading to spiritual to feel. 

Coming from my material mind, this morning I journaled that I feel like a scared child, afraid to be, just to be...which feeling morphed into seeing me as an immature adult, unsocialized, with little to no conversational ability...to say "unappealing" is being very kind.

I sat in the silence and saw me as a child, unpolished, a raw being, moving upward by every immature, unsocialized regret of mine. There...each rue, every regret, all my remorses form my golden goose moving me back toward my raised consciousness. 

Mentally, when self alone is in charge, layers of lacquered self-will seem essential to our security...we live and breathe for our unimpaired self-determined objectives.

Spiritually, we loose them and let them go. We are now living thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. There is no greater security.

Thank you.

DESPAIR REAPS UNFORESEEABLE BLESSINGS

May each of us learn in moments when everything seems lost that our unknown tomorrows will bring yet more perils from which will arise yet more unforeseeable blessings. -- James Finley, teacher. 

Recently I journaled about the various happenings in my life lately that appeared to be less-thans...meaning, not for my ego's benefit...that are now blessings. 

The latest was this morning with my new electric blanket. Sunbeam has "improved" the set-up "for my benefit," according to Sunbeam.

I could feel despair beating on the bars of my brain...fretting over the wreckage of the future. Or despair in a word. I have to return this thing. I'll need to repackage it, send off for a return label, rebox and rewrap, then take it to the post office all the while I'll be without a blanket...or, declare myself aged and ask someone else to do it for me...uh-oh, that is the behavior I'm trying to upgrade.

I did not go there...I out loud said, "This is for the raising of my consciousness. Trust and try." 

It feels kinda like attempting to scale a sheer, towering cliff, this detaching from material mind, aiming for spiritual. We don't get to choose our show-and-tell, we go with what is in front of us. When wrong, make a U-bie and continue to trust and try.

It took me a little over 30 minutes, but  I  we did it! I have my new electric blanket on my bed, trial-tested, good to go when I hit the sack later. I don't count it as unbelieving if just a tish of doubt clings to those brain bars, at least until I am comfortably asleep tonight. 

More will be revealed...that's my spoken-word tranquilizer. I am comforted by that since that which will be revealed may come wrapped in toilet tissue but, like despair, it will hold another pearl beyond price for my benefit. 

Sit and wait on the Lord...and pray thank you.  

Thank you.