NOW LIVE THE GIFTS OF GRACE AND GRATITUDE

 On awakening, I almost immediately went to my attack mind to continue the egoic dance with my nemesis du jour...namely, how s/he is wrong, and I am right. 

Then I read my Rohr Daily Meditation, and I knew the following paragraph could've been dedicated to me: 

The first foundation of any true religious seeing is, quite simply, learning how to see and love what is [e.g., our nemesis du jour]. Contemplation is meeting reality in its most simple and direct form unjudged, unexplained, and uncontrolled!...If we don’t know how to love what’s right in front of us, then we don’t know how to see what is.

For each seeming nemesis, that which ticks us off regularly or rarely, we need to learn how to see through our Inner Power's eyes and to love what we see. 

Almost assuredly we will need to make a deeper dive into the meaning of love...to us personally. Like the word spirituality, which I had to grapple with to get a true meaning for me, the meaning of love changes...it deepens at a higher level, and we need to do likewise.

I'm guessing this is a rest-of-life proposition which is an altogether good thing. Face it, it keeps us turned to God the majority of the time...some days a lot, some days barely 51% but that's the majority of the time. 

Praise God for the gifts of grace and gratitude...now to live them. 

Thank you.

ON TRUSTING OUR INNER POWER

A deeper level of understanding higher comes in the reading of Mechthild of Magdeburg...how at the end of her sacred and sanctified life she lost all material and spiritual connections. Blind, helpless to even dress herself, cared for my nuns, she said, If this is what God wants for me, this is what I want for me. 

There it is.

Seeing...trusting...God's will, God's way through our will, our way eyes/perception is the answer, The Way.

Ah, but to go for "less than," to even think we know God's "less than" plan, is to stay in our self-determined objective mind...there is no God there.

We get what comes to us not by self-might, but by our inner light... unknowing with trust is faith in our Inner Power. 

Thank you.

A NEW LESSON IN REJOICE AND BE GLAD

Mechthild of Magdeburg reached a point of fragility when she became blind and wasn’t able to dress or feed herself...and God took away all traces of the felt sense of God’s love. She comes to the end of her life in a state of powerlessness....She becomes utterly ordinary, falling away from the ability to gain footing by her own power to do anything at all. She says that if God wishes her to live this way, then she wishes it too. -- Fr Richard's Daily Meditation, October 27, 2023

Earlier this morning, before I read of Mechthild's experience, my thinking hovered around my old age bringing me into this state. I felt no fear, no trepidation, I simply allowed it as a possibility.

Later when I read Fr Richard's Daily Meditation, I got validation, acceptance, of this not as a future fact for me but as a future possibility...that such, too, would be on God's watch, so to speak, so therefore right for me.

Most importantly, I was reminded that in death as in life God's will, God's way seldom is in concert with our personal wants. There...another rejoice and be glad. 

Thank you.

GOD IS IN THE UNEXPLAINABLE

Morning blinding flash of the obvious: The unexplainable is love, too. 

Only recently I realized that I had not paid my respects to my beloved friend when he was dying from throat cancer. By that I mean, the entire two years from diagnosis to death, I did not so much as say "Sorry to hear that" or send him a card, a text, an e-mail, a handwritten note...I'm talking nada.

I am in earnest when I say I only recently fully realized my nonactions. 

This is a man who was a casual friend with whom most everybody (to my knowledge) felt a happy rapport. He was not an intimate friend, he was a spiritual friend, and whenever I saw him, I felt a jolt of joy. 

I do know that I never took seriously his diagnosis of cancer...meaning, I never gave it a home in my head or my heart. It was to me nonexistent. And I consciously did not attend his funeral. I made it to his visitation, gave my condolences to his wife and his mother, stayed the accepted half hour and left. 

Just this past week I have been thinking of him...and my nonacceptance started floating through my mind. I felt neither shame nor guilt...my two favorite places when I'm unsure of myself...possibly because my behavior was so alien to me. I simply know and do better than that...whether I want to or not, and for him I would want to.

I have been unable to justify me to myself...maybe because I feel no shame, no guilt. My nonactions were not deliberate, they were unknowing. I do know that I purely loved the man.

Clearly, this BFO was a God gift, and I am grateful: The unexplainable is love, too. 

Thank you.  

WE REMEMBER NOT TO QUOTE BUT TO DO

Ir is not what happens to you but how you respond to it that matters.-- Epictetus, a Greek Stoic philosopher 

The things we learn. Here's me thinking that quote was said by a friend of mine in a meeting some 40 years ago. No doubt he did say it, but he didn't give Epictetus credit...like me, he probably didn't know that. 

And what does it matter? Other than to enlighten us to the well-quoted fact there is nothing new under the sun. 

What matters is not how well we remember that to quote it, but how well we remember it to live it. 

I came across a note of mine written in 2012: I am learning how not to take slights, snubs and other miscommunications personally…they are not. They only become personal if and when I personally attach myself to them…respond to them…resist them.

Recently a friend and I planned to go to a two-tiered event. I said up front I was willing to go the first half hour but not the second hour of the event. She seemed a tish hesitant but agreed. 

Came the day, I got there, she wasn't there, she did not show. She called the next day wondering what happened that I wasn't at the hour-long event, and she began her explanation.

I knew, whether my suspicions were right or wrong, it's over, no permanent injury, so I  said we just had a miscommunication. If gobsmacked has a sound, she had it along with very grateful, and that was it, we went to lunch.

Being reminded of that feels good because I then recalled a few other instances where I'd held my peace. It really feels quite nice. 

From that good memory, I'm thinking we need to keep our inner "wins" active...as in ponder them....appreciate them within our self. They, too, need love...and the encouragement to do it again.

Thank you.

WE ARE A PEOPLE SPIRITUAL IN NATURE

[The following is a slightly reworked reprint of my post of October 29, 2021.]

In one of my daily readings this morning, I came across these words: ...then they are part of the grand movement of love in the world, which is the movement of God in the world.

Blinding flash of the obvious: the grand movement of love in the world is what we are living in right this moment. Resist it not for it is our path to freedom from our own self, that which led us here in the first place.

I ponder that, and my thoughts go to my beginnings, and I recognize where we are right now is where I was back then. My own need led me to crash and burn and so to a Power greater than self, God, and thus to love and laughter.

Today, we are at a place embodied by a self-fed leader, his acolytes and like thinkers. We need recognize and accept that this place, these thinkers, this leader, were given us by our own need. To become that which God created...love and love alone...we, you and I, need to crash and burn with our resistance to all of that.

I firmly believe our country, born of spiritual (not religious) principles, sturdy in its democratic laws, can and will withstand the battering from within. But what if it is you and I that stand at the door with love and love alone as the protectors of our country? We must rid our own self of our like thinking and offer love and love alone...oh! and laughter, which is love out loud.

This is a country, we are a people, spiritual in nature. We may seem lost right now, but we pray our thank you knowing we are not lost, we are in the process of finding our rightful place. Let it be.

Thank you.

TO CHANGE OUR MIND...FEELS RIGHT RISKY

The big and hidden secret is this: an infinite God seeks and desires intimacy with the human soul.  -- Fr Richard Rohr, Daily Meditation, October 22, 2023

Apparently, "the big and hidden secret" has shaken me from my toes to my nose. I keep pondering that paragraph in its entirety (see my 10/22/23 post), and here's me writing about it...yet again.

The big tell, I am getting a thorough cleansing. My nose is running like a faucet...I've been up for two hours, have gone through one full box of Kleenex and am starting on my third "nickel" pack. That is cleansing according to me.

As we have learned, and Rohr reminds us often,  it's God in you that loves God. You, on your own, don't really know how to love God.

I don't resist that truth, but the in-depth description of God's love for us has been daunting, as in: mystery, tenderness, singularity, specialness, changing the rules 'for me,' nakedness, risk, ecstasy, incessant longing. 

Face it, that reads like a trashy romance...of which I am a prime reader but not for my spiritual growth!

And further: [The big and hidden secret is this: an infinite God seeks and desires intimacy with the human soul.] Once we experience such intimacy, only the intimate language of lovers describes the experience for us....

I hear the echo of a favorite BFO: The hardest thing life will ever ask of us is that we change our mind. 

Indeed.

Thank you.