grace
grace.
June 27, 2020‘I lack the peace of simple things. I am never wholly in place. I find no peace or grace. We sell the world to buy fire, our way lighted by burning men, and that has bent my mind and made me think of darkness and wish for the dumb life of roots.’
-Wendell Berry
[Sun Valley, Idaho]
Good Friday
April 10, 2020
In Jerusalem yesterday, a priest peers from the door of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where Christians believe Jesus was buried. Photo: Ariel Schalit/AP
Father Richard Rohr, Center for Action & Contemplation:
‘It is true that you are going to die, and yet “I am certain of this, neither death nor life, nothing that exists, nothing still to come, not any power, not any height nor depth, nor any created thing can ever come between us and the love of God” (Romans 8:38-39).
On Good Friday, we lament Jesus’ death while living in hope that death does not have the last word on our destiny. We are born with a longing, desire, and deep hope that this thing called life could somehow last forever. It is a premonition from something eternal that is already within us. Some would call it the soul. Christians would call it the indwelling presence of God. It is God within us that makes us desire and seek God.
Yes, we are going to die, but we have already been given a kind of inner guarantee and promise right now that death is not final—and it takes the form of love. Deep in the heart and psyche, love, both human and divine, connotes something eternal and gratuitous, and it does so in a deeply mysterious and compelling way. We are seeing this now in simple acts of love in this time of crisis, such as people volunteering to make masks and deliver food, or people cheering hospital workers arriving for their shift. Isn’t it amazing how a small act of love or gratitude can imprint a deeper knowing on our soul?
The crucifixion of Jesus is the preeminent example of God’s love reaching out to us. It is at the same moment the worst and best thing in human history. The Franciscans, led by John Duns Scotus (1266-1308), even claimed that instead of a “necessary sacrifice,” the cross was a freely chosen revelation of Total Love on God’s part.
In so doing, they reversed the engines of almost all world religion up to that point, which assumed that we had to spill blood to get to a distant and demanding God.
On the cross, the Franciscans believed, God was “spilling blood” to reach out to us! This is a sea change in consciousness. The cross, instead of being a transaction, was seen as a dramatic demonstration of God’s outpouring love, meant to utterly shock the heart and turn it back toward trust and love of the Creator.
I believe that the cross is an image for our own time, and every time: we are invited to gaze upon the image of the crucified Jesus to soften our hearts toward all suffering.
Amidst the devastating spread of COVID-19, the cross beckons us to what we would call “grief work,” holding the mystery of pain, looking right at it, and learning from it. With softened hearts, God leads us to an uncanny and newfound compassion and understanding.’
David Brooks:
December 8, 2019Modern individualism releases each person from social obligation, but “being guided only by the lantern of his own understanding, the individual loses all assurance of a place, an order, a definition. He may have gained freedom, but he has lost security.”
-Pascal Bruckner
Pascal Bruckner is a French writer, one of the “New Philosophers” who came to prominence in the 1970s and 1980s. Much of his work has been devoted to critiques of French society and culture.
“Happiness is a moment of grace.”
Flourish
May 28, 2019
“We must listen to what is supporting us. We must listen to what is encouraging us. We must listen to what is urging us. We must listen to what is alive in us.”
I personally was so trained not to trust those voices that I often did not hear the voice of God speaking to me, or what Abraham Lincoln called the “better angels of our nature.”
Yes, a narcissistic person can misuse such advice, but someone genuinely living in love will flourish inside such a dialogue.
We must learn how to recognize the positive flow and to distinguish it from the negative resistance within ourselves.
We must learn how to recognize the positive flow and to distinguish it from the negative resistance within ourselves. It takes years of practice.
Center for Action and Contemplation
❧
Come sail away.
September 19, 2018
The winds of God’s grace are always blowing; it is for us to raise our sails.
-Ramakrishna
We must raise our sails to catch the winds of God’s grace.
-Rev. Katherine Saux
God is like a person who clears her throat while hiding and so gives herself away.
-Meister Eckhart
Our job is to find God by raising the sail.
-Rev. Katherine Saux
A gathering of angels appeared above my head
They sang to me this song of hope and this is what they said
They said come sail away.
-Dennis De Young
Spiritual Warriors
February 17, 2018
There is a beautiful Tibetan myth that helps us to accept our sadness as a threshold to all that is life-chaing and lasting. This myth affirs that all spiritual warriors have a broken heart—alas, must have a broken heart—because it is only through the break that the wonder and mysteries of life can enter us.
So what does it mean to be a spiritual warrior? It is far from being a soldier, but more the sincerity with which a soul faces itself in a daily way. It is this courage to be authentic that keeps us strong enough to withstand the heartbreak through which enlightenment can occur. And it is by honoring how life comes through us that we get the most out of living, not by keeping ourselves out of the way. The goal is to mix our hands in the earth, not stay to stay clean.
I keep breathing deeply through the breaking my heart. In daily ways, we are judged, discounted, and even pitied for glories that only we can affirm. In the end, life is too magnificent and difficult for us to give away our elemental place in the journey.
At some point in our lives, almost every one of us will have our heart broken. Imagine how different things would be if we paid more attention to this unique emotional pain. Psychologist Guy Winch reveals how recovering from heartbreak starts with a determination to fight our instincts to idealize and search for answers that aren’t there — and offers a toolkit on how to, eventually, move on. Our hearts might sometimes be broken, but we don’t have to break with them.
-Guy Winch, author “How to Fix a Broken Heart”
Grace under pressure.
Feb. 4, 1968
February 4, 2018“Everybody can be great, because everybody can serve. You don’t have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve. You don’t have to know Einstein’s ‘Theory of Relativity’ to serve. You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love.”
-MLK
Happy New Year
December 29, 2017
Ubuntu greeting, friends:
‘I am what I am because of who we all are’.
‘As night and day take turns on this massive Earth spinning nowhere, the song we share within takes turns with the catastrophes of living. When we go silent, the age goes dark.’
-Mark Nepo
“We all have traveled this same pathway of experience – – the journey of the soul to ‘the heights above’ – – and always there has been a deep inquiry in our minds: What is it all about? Does life make sense? What is the meaning of birth, human experience, and the final transition from this plane, which we call death?
With the Koran we must realize that the Divine is closer to us even than our physical being. Nothing can be nearer to us than which is the very essence of our own being.
Our external search after Reality culminates in the greatest of all possible discoveries – – Reality is at the center of our own being. Life is from within out.
We must no longer judge according to appearances, but rather, base our judgments on the assumption that the Gaia-Mind dwells within us proclaimed or reflects Itself through us into every act.
I shall speak this Reality into every experience I have.”
[Science of Mind]
Mind is Brahma; for from mind even are verily born these beings–by mind, when born, they live.
-The Upanishads
The Mind, then, is not separated off from God’s essentiality, but is united to it, as light to sun.
-Hermes
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our own mind.
-Emerson
✿´¯`*•.¸¸✿
Grace filled transitions to you, to us all. Ubuntu.
- Abba
- Yahweh
- Baba
- Spirit of Life
- Giver of Life
- Breath of LIfe
- Muhammad
- Buddha
- Jesus
- Abraham
- Gaia
- Wakan Tanka
- Tara & Lakshmi
- Whispers
Shirley goodness and mercy will follow us all the days of our lives…
-Psalm 23:6
jai.
Rilke & Nepo
November 4, 2017
Once for each thing. Just once; no more.
And we too, just once. And never again.
But to have been this once, completely,
even if only once: to have been
at one with the earth,
seems beyond undoing.
Rainer Maria Rilke
✿
I enter every meeting with another being saying to myself, “If I only have this time on Earth with this person, if I may never see them again, when is it I want or need to ask, to know? What is it I want to say?”
[…]
The truth is that each living spirit we encounter is a depth to gently swim in, a miracle that can quench our thirst. Honoring others in this way has opened me to wisdoms that would otherwise run silent beneath my time on Earth.
Mark Nepo
Borders & Walls
November 2, 2017
‘When closing makes us insular, we tighten and miss the depth of everything. We start to become wall-builders. When fearful, we harden and impose our fear on everything we meet. We start to hammer our amor into place. This is the cost of closing without opening.
But when we can open info what feels real and true, especially after great fear or pain, our heart widens like an inlet and we ready ourselves for grace.
For the most part, walls are useless. It’s meeting the sensations of being alive that cleanses us and shapes us, the way fast current scour the bottom of a river, making the river stronger.
-Mark Nepo
Whispers. ✿
September 2, 2017And [Gaia] is able to make all grace abound toward you.
-II Corinthians 9:8
Presence of grace…and stardust.
July 18, 2017
Love, friendship, creativity, pain, and loss are agents of grace, as are surprise, beauty, grief, and wonder.
When the soul expresses itself, we experience enlivened arcs of grace in which we feel the force of life that runs through everything. Anything that moves us to carry our soul out into the world is a catalyst of grace. In this way, love, friendship, creativity, pain, and loss are agents of grace. And while experience wears us down to what’s essential so the soul can stop being encased, it also takes daily effort to let our soul out and an open heart to the let the world in, so we can spark ourselves alive and finally be of use.
Like it or not, we’re opened by the hard, sweet journey of being human, until we’re sparked and work into a gateway for life-force.
The One Life We’re Given, by Mark Nepo
Anahata.
April 13, 2017
‘…humility is accepting that your head belongs beneath your heart, with your thinking subordinate to your feeling, with your will subordinate to the higher order. This acceptance is key to receiving grace.’
-Mark Nepo
Center of love.
January 3, 2017
‘Each person is born with an unencumbered spot – – free of expectation and regret, free of ambition and embarrassment, free of fear and worry – – an umbilical spot of grace were we were each first touched by God. It is this spot of grace that issues peace. Psychologists call this spot the Psyche, theologians call it the Soul, Jung calls it the Seat of the Unconscious, Hindu masters call it Atman, Buddhists call it Dharma, Rilke calls in Inwardness, Sufis call it Qalb, and Jesus calls it the Center of our Love.
[…]
This is a hard lifelong task, for the nature of becoming is a constant filming over of where we begin, while the nature of being is a constant erosion of what is not essential. Each of us lives in the midst of this ongoing tension, growing tarnished or covered over, only to be worn back to that incorruptible spot of grace at our core.
[…]
We call the filming over a deadening of heart, and the process of return, whether brought about through suffering or love, is how we unlearn our way back to God.’
-Mark Nepo
Beautifully brilliant.
September 23, 2015Frances McDormand speaking to NPR last year before the launch of HBO’s Olive Kitteridge (she won an Emmy for the role Sunday night).
~
‘One of the reasons that I am doing press again after 10 years’ absence is because I feel like I need to represent publicly what I’ve chosen to represent privately — which is a woman who is proud and more powerful than I was when I was younger. And I think that I carry that pride and power on my face and in my body. And I want to be a role model for not only younger men and women — and not just in my profession, I’m not talking about my profession. I think that cosmetic enhancements in my profession are just an occupational hazard. But I think, more culturally, I’m interested in starting the conversation about aging gracefully and how, instead of making it a cultural problem, we make it individuals’ problems. I think that ageism is a cultural illness; it’s not a personal illness. Getting older and adjusting to all the things that biologically happen to you is not easy to do, and is a constant struggle and adjustment {…} I want to be revered. I want to be an elder; I want to be an elderess. I have some things to talk about and say and help. And, if I can’t, then — not unlike Olive — I don’t feel necessary.’
NPR-All Things Considered
