PRAY TO UNTHINK, TO UNLEARN...FOR FAITH

I am beginning to suspect...realize?...that all my learning is leading me to unthink. The reasoning mind is essential to us daily...but gets in our way a lot when our spiritual mind is aborning.

I do not doubt that a great mental burden will be lifted when we begin to unlearn and rely on our inner self. Face it, our main security blanket is just words, pretty words and true, words of gold even...but He will not remove the gold from the crucible until all the dross has gone... [God Calling, p. 5].

We may speak pretty but until we are living upright and righteous and without forethought, we are missing the Source...we are speaking by rote and expecting riches.

Maybe unlearning and unthinking are the roots of faith...and I say without blushing, no wonder faith is so hard to grow into...it asks us to go against our natural self. From the eyebrows up, that makes sense...moving it down to heart and soul is for God to do His thing.

Then we shall no longer complain. / Then everything that God has done with us / Will suit us just fine, / If you will now only stand fast / And keep hold of sweet hope. —Mechthild of Magdeburg from Fr Richard's Daily Meditation, October 28, 2023

Thank you.

ON LIVING BY SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLES

Blinding flash of the obvious: It is not what is said that hurts my feelings, it is how I choose to hear it that hurts my feelings.  

Our need is to upgrade our hearing, meaning lift it from the egoic plane up to the spiritual plane. That process requires "Sermonizing," or, living by spiritual principles.

First, we pray thank you which turns us to our Inner Power for acceptance of what we have heard and from whom we heard it. Second, same as first unto infinity which is now our life. 

Acceptance is not questioning the mystery of divine/human union...clean acceptance is based on that mystery. "It" keeps coming back egoically until we get it right spiritually...meaning all sides come out the winner. 

All sides come out the winner is the rub, of course. Short and to the point, we gotta get over our own self. 

As in every religion, there are times, places, and people who 'get it'—the mystery of divine/human union. There are different stages and states of consciousness, and all are part of the journey. -- Fr Richard's Daily Meditation today.

Thank you.

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.