WE GET TO GOD BY DOING IT WRONG

When we are at peace, when we are not fighting it, when we are not fixing and controlling this world, when we are not filled with anger, all we can do is start loving and forgiving. —Richard Rohr, 9/7/24

That is resist not evil (Matthew 5:39) plain and simple.

 Resist not must be the law of the Lord, according to me...anything else is mental gymnastics. 

Nonresistance is the secret of peace of mind, body, Soul and Spirit. 

Nonresistance, I'm guessing, cannot be achieved by the material mind. We must go to God to recognize, realize, live nonresistance. 

In the human condition, we are born on two levels...mental and spiritual. We spend the majority of our time on earth on the material level. Those of us who know a need for a higher consciousness must go to God, consciously and constantly. The hard lesson to learn is that we must go to God for God and that is all, everything...for that is all, everything.

There are the rare and precious few who know God from within early and forever...the Buddha and Jesus, of course, but I refer to walking-around people like Lincoln, Gandhi, Mother Teresa. Yet, they all had to crash and burn to come to their higher level of consciousness. 

From our eyebrows up, we say welcome while resistance dogs our path...that's if we're doing it right. Which makes welcome Fr Richard's we don't get to God by doing it right, we get to God by doing it wrong.

Thank you. 

TRANSMUTATION...EGO FEARS, GOD APPEARS

I have just begun to realize how very unthoughtful I am. I decided this morning to seek self-discipline from within...to seek not only to act thoughtful but to be thoughtful.

I had to grin...face it, Franny, another impossible decision to fulfill...another subterfuge of ego, trying to use God as its cloak. 

Yes, but! There is transmutation...when ego fears, God appears. 

When (not if) this change in me comes, it will come from within me, from the higher Power within me, carrying me through my own what-to-do, what-to-do bafflement. 

As long as we seek a self-determined objective, it is ego operating for its benefit even when it benefits not just us but others. God's love benefits ego, too, sought or not.

If a Power greater than myself, i.e., the Power within me, is not doing my thinking for me, my ego, wrapped in apprehension, seeks safe harbor out there. 

Ego is not evil, but it is not built to readily accept that there is a power greater than itself. There it is...human beings' divine choice.

Thank you.

MAKE A LEAP OF LOVE...INTO LIFE

Perhaps the old phrase (thanks, Kierkegaard!) “leap of faith” … would be better rendered a leap of love. —Brian McLaren, Fr Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation, September 5, 2024 

Here's me today...nearing the end of my life and looking back at the choices I have made that are welcoming now. 

My first thought was that they were shaming me, my old (yesterday's?) thinking, but it is not shame I feel...it is peace. I do welcome that which I see as me just as I am today...alone, but never all alone. There, my life-long deepest fear of being left all alone is no longer waiting inside me ready to pounce but affirming that God is ever present with me, within me. 

I know, feel, understand, realize...I am not alone, I have never been alone, I can never be alone. I am... we are...companioned with the Father within. I am peaced. 

The recent obit of a childhood acquaintance is tickling my brain this morning. The obit named her five life-long friends...none of whom ever left our hometown, all had married, had children...each had a life well lived no matter the slips and slides, the glories and gollies...friends together. 

I had to wonder: Do I envy, or do I pity? 

Admittedly, it'd be pity in my yesterday's consciousness, but not envy now...maybe admire is the best description today. And why not? A friendship circle that lives...thrives!,,,for a lifetime is rare and to be admired. Oh, that feels so right...we just made a leap of love.

 

Lord, hear my prayer, thank you.

Thank you.

COUNTERINTUITIVE PARADOX, OR IS IT JUST ME?

Unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath. -- The Gospel According to Saint Matthew

There are real and vast changes taking place within each of us right now. This is about my recent ongoing experiences with unconscious changes. Interestingly, I say vast but I mean wee...too tiny to notice until they are too significant to miss. Kinda like the Gospel According to Saint Matthew.

I'm understanding getting and giving at a much higher plane...I was gobsmacked to realize that my life-pattern has been to receive hugs but to seldom as a matter of course to originate hugs. 

What brought this to the forefront happened at a meeting of friends recently...most everybody gave a hug to the friend I was standing with...all spoke, smiled, and chatted with me, none hugged me. 

Another friend who is just back from a month's vacation was there...we usually walk out together.  With no conscious thought, I did not welcome him back, nor did I wait for him to walk me out as he has done. I simply split...walked out alone and drove away. Again, with no conscious thought at all. 

My blinding flash: This is a gift of my 80s for my benefit...to learn, no matter how late the lesson, to learn to be aware...aware that each meeting with another, friend or foe, is an opportunity to give love...to give love in all its forms, not to wait for love to come to me. 

Ah, our mindset...the birthplace of God's will, God's way.  

Again, God is on the field in that we get to learn the difference between a self-determined objective and the perfect objective which is of God.

Self-determined, I would start hugging everybody in sight, even those who clearly did not want it...of God's perfect objective, I know naught. 

I have no idea how God is going to cause this change to come forth, but I trust God. He can and will reach out and give all the hugs that are stored within me that I have received from so many for so long...when he knows that I am ready. 

We make the decision; God makes it happen.

Thank you.

REASON...JUST ONE MORE OF GOD'S TOOLS, III

[The following is a reprint of a previous post of mine.]

We cannot solve the problems of the mind with the mind. -- The Buddha

Whenever I come across that quote, I know it for true...then I spend the next ten minutes pondering how it is true, why it is true....

Our reasoning mind will retire neither quickly nor quietly. It is interestingly pathetic, or pathetically interesting, how long we will cling to the belief that reason is our safety net...that "victory can be ours for the thinking." All the while we have had it proved to us...even proved by our own self...that it is detachment from reliance on our reasoning mind that sets us on the path to real freedom, the freedom from self.

Reason is essential to us as we walk the the rough and rutted road toward still more spiritual growth. It is our thinking that opens us to recognize reason as another tool of God's but not our safety net and not our security.

Reason, if used properly, clears the channel for God's thoughts to pour through. Reason is God's Roto-Rooter, if you will.

Our mistake is putting our trust in the Roto-Rooter instead of in God.

Thank you.

ACCEPTANCE: SURRENDER EARNING ITS WINGS

 Acceptance. Such a peaceful word. It even sounds comforting. 

Little known fact: Acceptance is another, albeit prettier, word for surrender. 

EEK! 

Face it, surrender is not, repeat not, pretty much less sought-for.

In the material world, or to our reasoning mind, surrender means loser; more explicitly, if I surrender, I am a loser, something to be avoided...no more questions, end of story.

Here lives the difference between what we think and what our living experience proves: We think surrender is to be avoided, yet we live surrender as we walk the rugged and awe-inspiring road to a Power greater than our thinking...to peace of mind...to love and laughter...to God.

Acceptance gives God the courtesy of letting him go first. 

Thank you.

'TURN THE OTHER CHEEK' IS LOVE ACTIVATED

But I tell you not to resist the evil person. Instead, whoever shall strike you on your right cheek, turn to him the other also. -- Mattthew 5:39

Blinding flash of the obvious: Turn the other cheek is not let me be walked on. 

Turn the other cheek is how we come to know and to show God's hand is in it. We become walking around proof that God's hand is in it for all...be their number 2 or 200+. 

The reasoning mind, home of the material world, cannot get us there unaided. It is our faith in God that ensures his love flows through us to and from any and all others.

Turn the other cheek is to trust the Higher Power, God, that both sides can and will come out the winner...which is impossible for the reasoning mind to pull off. 

Trust God with all our heart, our soul, our body and our brains; pray thank you, and love will shower our world.

Thank you.