THE PRICE OF BEING A HUMAN

Beware of running from yourself and your own legitimate suffering, which is the price of being a human being in a limited world.

I hope I will always remember those words, the meaning of those words. "The gift of legitimate suffering" is how the sentence translated itself to my mind because, in fact, everything is a gift to my mind. Legitimate suffering or not, it is a gift if we so choose to believe.

Non-legitimate suffering is ego on parade. As in, ego takes our legitimate suffering, kneads it into the victim's poor, pitiful, put-upon me...unloved, unwanted, unneeded, unappreciated...then finds someone else to take the fall for it...not to mention fix it and/or us.

Non-legitimate suffering, the ego trip, in fact, may be the deeper gift for going there will turn us back to God...bedraggled, humbled but in the end better for it.

If that sounds like it comes from experience, BINGO...it does. Which is precisely why I hope I will always remember the meaning of Beware of running from yourself and your own legitimate suffering, which is the price of being a human being in a limited world.

Thank you.

GOD IS THERE WITHIN...FOR US TO EXPERIENCE

God looks through my eyes, I don't look through his eyes.

As I reread that note that I had written in my "God Calling" so long ago, I remembered how often, before I got that blinding flash of the obvious, I used to shoot pleading prayers. I was forever begging God to let me see my current ugly through his eyes, to recognize it as the gold I had been assured it really was.

The morning when I flashed on that, I knew, and I knew I knew: God, the source, the force, the unseeable, unknowable, untouchable is within me/without me. Present always and all ways to all...me, you, they, them, us, friends, foes, animals...wild and tame, furry and feathered and scaled...flowers and trees, weeds and foods growing in the fields. There. God is there. Here. God is here.

To me, that is the blessing and the curse of the reasoning mind...that which sets humans apart from all other things and beings. The blessing is that it is our reasoning mind that guides us up to those blinding flashes of the obvious, then opens up, allowing us to believe what we are told, that God is revealed through great love and/or great suffering.

The curse is it is our own reasoning mind that tells us suffering is bad and should not...must not...be tolerated. It is that reasoning mind that cannot differentiate between the suffering of love and the suffering of the flu or the fear of fear. "I hurt therefore I'll tell God to fix me...then I'll find something to take for it."

It is we who refuse to accept for fact the miracle of God within us, without us. Not all, of course, but too many of us believe from our eyebrows up, but refuse to use the daily self-discipline required to seek, to seek, to seek deeper within for our healing. It's faster to look outward. Ever searching for the perfect "something" to upgrade our reality or improve our feelings...when all the while that "something" is there within...for us to experience.  

Thank you.

ON EXCHANGING OUR MIND

Just as we have learned that the eye-witness account is the least reliable of all testimony, we are beginning to learn that the literal mindset is one of the least fruitful levels of meaning, according to Fr. Richard Rohr. Which reminds me of the point made by an unknown 14th century monk, in The Cloud of Unknowing, to "be wary of the overly scrupulous."

It's like Thaddeus Golas taught in his Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment: We must go beyond reason to love. We must go beyond our literal sense of right and wrong, of black and white really, to find God, love...to be made whole, One.

This is a whole 'nother state of mind. It has a name, and its name is the fourth dimension. It is real, and it exists within us. As Eknath Easwaran puts it, "[W]e have discovered another dimension to life, another realm -- changeless, eternal, beyond cause and effect -- on which the entire physical universe rests."

It is that fourth dimension that allows us to accept the difficulties of life, the errors of our own making, and, more importantly, those that are visited upon us as if gifts of gold when they appear to be dross. We get to exchange our mind.

Those who are stuck in the literal world, the secure world of the reasoning mind, will never experience the peace of being wrongly accused...without any need to respond in kind, to justify, excuse or defend our self in any way. Then, too, they will not think that's a bad thing.

That's why we can't explain it...it does not make reasoning-mind sense. But then neither does God.

Thank you.

Father, thank you for blessing Pope Francis today, for helping him to know your will for him and for giving him the power to carry that out. Amen.

THE TOUGHEST TEST

[The following is a reprint of my blog of September 12, 2009]

Going against the reasoning mind. That is the toughest test...going against what my best thinking tells me...actually, going above my best thinking, deeper. I think it is the toughest because it feels like the riskiest...when, in fact, there is no risk (we find, after we’ve learned the how of it).

As Thaddeus Golas wrote, “We must go beyond reason to love.”

Pema Chodron says, “When things fall apart and we’re on the verge of we know not what, the test of each of us is to stay on that brink and not concretize.”

Fr. Richard Rohr calls it “holding the tension.”

It’s all about learning to trust the Spirit within. Holding the tension between thinking, which too often is simply worrying, and intuiting...waiting to hear, to know the still, small voice. The resistant mind will usually throw up any number of awful possibles so that waiting cannot possibly be an option.

But it is...and we learn it through practice, through disciplining the mind, through practicing the art of patience.

Thank you.

ON PASSING THE BATON TO GOD

Karma, rightly understood, creates responsible and self-actualized people instead of fear-based people. -- Fr. Richard Rohr's "Daily Meditations," September 20, 2015

I wonder if the breaking of karma isn't just recognizing our own bad behavior (our rues, regrets and remorses aborning) and owning it through love and laughter. We can own the worst part of ourselves as we believe it to be and live in peace with it if we can accept it through love and laughter.

Love and laughter are the great transmuters...it is that which transmutes the worst part of ourselves  into "responsible and self-actualized people." Which takes away any thought that acceptance through love and laughter is to ignore, justify or deny our own bad behavior. Responsible, self-actualized people do the next right thing...make our apologies, then our amends and begin anew to live a turned-over life.

Love and laughter replace fear with humility...the humility of knowing "I am powerless, and I am grateful." That's passing the baton to God.

Thank you.

ON BUILDING THE HOUSE WITHIN

We each must find our own voice. If we are just quoting the words of another...another person, book, bible...we are living by rote. That is not the path to happy, joyous and free; that is the path to self that paves the way to more self...that is the freeway of the ego. (And isn't "freeway" just another oxymoron?)

The paradox, of course, is that we must find our own mentor(s), author(s), speaker(s), mystic(s) to whom we give our self in trust...to lead us quite simply in changing our mind. From her experience, his strength, their hope we fashion our own and grow from ego-based to spiritually based.

Since we all know that truly there is nothing new under the sun, we must accept that unless and until we find our own, we will never realize our father within. We can quote him, we can preach him, we can teach others about him, but we will not gut-bucket know him. And peace in the midst of turmoil (my definition of serenity) will not be ours.

I found my peace when I realized that nothing I say is original to me...I just say it as I have experienced it, and it comes out my own. It is from our own experience that we...and our words...are made new. We have found the rock upon which to build the house of our father who lives within.

Thank you.

THE SPIRIT OF THE LORD WALKING

I am reminded again that the second commandment of Christ Jesus is to love your neighbor as yourself. For whatever reason, I keep thinking "love your enemy as yourself." Which is a fairly high standard, but who's kidding whom...so is loving your neighbor!

I ponder that a lot...love your neighbor as yourself, love your enemy as yourself. I'm taken to the Lord's Prayer in which we beseech God to forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us...isn't that love your enemy?

Then the Sermon on the Mount tells us to agree with our adversary quickly...isn't that love your enemy?

Then there's the real underneath-it-all hook...as yourself. Love your neighbor as you love yourself...my cynical self says my neighbor deserves better than that. But that's either dark humor or false humility, neither of which are keepers.

To really be a loving person is to be a giving person...without thought. Without expectations. As we breathe.

My standard is getting higher as I type...I suspect I'm using the Pope as my yardstick and falling waaay short. Now, there...I do believe Pope Francis is the spirit of the Lord walking. I just consider myself blessed to recognize it. And I am grateful.

Thank you.




But that is my dark humor, and I don't live there anymore