“God is not a Christian, God is not a Jew, or a Muslim, or a Hindu, or a Buddhist. All of those are human systems which human beings have created to try to help us walk into the mystery of God. I honor my tradition, I walk through my tradition, but I don’t think my tradition defines God, I think it only points me to God.”
Author: Brian Legate
Resting in Love – By Doc Childress and Howard Martin
How do we come to know love so that we can live from its depths? Love cannot be understood by the mind. And if God is love, God will never be subject to the mind as we know it. God and love can only be experienced. This simple practice is an invitation to encounter love in its very physical, connective reality.
Place the palm of one of your hands on your heart. Feel your heart beating, letting its rhythm bring you into the present moment and into the awareness of God’s blessing on your life, beat after beat after beat.
Bring to your conscious mind a loved one, a favorite place or animal, or anything that makes you smile with undeniable, spontaneous, unconditional love and joy.
Bring that particular beloved being or thing down from your mind and place it right under your palm into your heart space. Relax your mind and let your heart relax at the same time, feeling the sensation of blood vessels, muscles, and chest cavity opening in warmth and love for that particular loved thing. Smile.
Now humbly place a challenging person, issue, or problem directly under your palm, within your heart space that is wide open. Silently continue to smile and hold this challenging thing in the warmth of your heart.
With closed eyes, look at the thing that causes you pain, visualizing the detail that bothers you the most, all the while smiling. Consider that there may be reasons why this thing brings hurt. Smile at the fragility, suffering, or misunderstanding that makes it this way.
Finally, give the person or problem to your heart and ask that your heart’s wisdom and love take over. Rest in the Love that loves you and the other and wants to transform all into its loving image.
Adapted from The Heart Math Solution: The Institute of Heart Math’s Revolutionary Program for Engaging the Power of the Heart Intelligence
Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations
Francis of Assisi knew that if you can accept that the finite manifests the infinite, and that the physical is the doorway to the spiritual (which is the foundational principle we call “incarnation”), then all you need is right here and right now—in this world. This is the way to that! Heaven includes earth. Time opens you up to the timeless, space opens you up to spacelessness, if you only recognize them as the clear doorways that they are.
There are not sacred and profane things, places, and moments. There are only sacred and desecrated things, places, and moments—and it is we alone who desecrate them by our blindness and lack of reverence. It is one sacred universe, and we are all a part of it.
The Christ Mystery refuses to be vague or abstract, and it is always concrete and specific. When we stay with these daily apparitions, we see that everything is a revelation of the divine—from rocks to rocket ships. Our only blindness is our own lack of fascination, humility, curiosity, awe. The only thing needed is a willingness to surrender to the naked now which God always inhabits, where the incarnation is always taking place and always mysterious, where God in every moment is perfectly hidden and at the same time perfectly revealed. Hold that paradox together. Those who have eyes to see can allow both to be true.
Adapted from Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi,
pp. 5-6;
and How Do We Get Everything to Belong?, disc 3
(CD, MP3 download)
Gateway to Silence:
The kingdom of heaven is at hand (Matthew 3:2).
If God is always mystery…
If God is always mystery, then God is always on some level the unfamiliar, beyond what we’re used to, beyond our comfort zone, beyond what we can explain or understand. In the fourth century, St. Augustine said, “If you comprehend it, it’s not God.” Would you respect a God you could comprehend? And yet very often that’s what we want—a God who reflects our culture, our biases, our economic, political, and military systems.
Read the full blog post on Richard Rohr’s Daily Reflections
Let The Mystery Be – Iris DeMint
Discovered this song via a Christian Century tweet and now I can’t get it out of my head. Sometimes the simple messages last the longest. Thank you Iris! Just going to let the mystery be.
I am what I am,…
I am what I am, good and bad put together into one self; and God’s mercy is so great and God’s love is so total that God uses even my sin in my favor! God is using all of me to bring me to God. That is the Good News! – Fr. Richard Rohr
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
from Dream Work by Mary Oliver
published by Atlantic Monthly Press
© Mary Oliver
Salvation from …
Salvation from the False Self – Fr. Richard Rohr
“The saint is precisely one who has no “I” to protect or project. His or her “I” is in conscious union with the “I AM” of God, and that is more than enough. Divine union overrides any need for self-hatred or self-promotion. Such people do not need to be perfectly right, and they know they cannot be anyway, so they just try to be in right relationship. In other words, they try above all else to be loving.
Love holds you tightly and safely and always. It gives you the freedom to meet the enemy and know the major enemy is “me,” as the old comic character Pogo said. But you do not hate “me” either; you just see through and beyond “me.” Shadow work literally saves you from yourself (your False Self, that is), which is the foundational meaning of salvation. For then “You too (your True Self) will be revealed in all your glory with him” (Colossians 3:3-4).”
Welcome to Tradition – great works from Rob Bell
God belongs to all free beings. He is the life of all, the salvation of all —faithful and unfaithful, just and unjust, pious and impious, passionate and dispassionate, monks and laymen, wise and simple, healthy and sick, young and old —just as the effusion of light, the sight of the sun, and the changes of the seasons are for all alike; ‘for there is no respect of persons with God.’
from The Ladder of Divine Ascent, Step 1, Passage by St. John Climacus
From a Rob Bell Tumblr blog post – read more here.
What is the Bible? Part 54: Predestination, Election, and that Burning Feeling in the Pit of Your Soul
A favorite excerpt from Rob Bell’s Tumblr blog series entitled – What is the Bible? Spoiler alert the passage below is at the end of his post – so if you would like to start first at the top click here.
Always ask yourself when you come across something that religious people have been debating and discussing for years what would happen if you actually had concrete answers to the questions.
When I have been asked whether some are chosen or not, I always ask How would you ever know such a thing? and more importantly How would that ever make your life better?
Some things that religious people make a big deal of are rather pointless. Avoid the insanity.
How often do you ask What would it feel like to swallow a hair dryer while it was turned on?
No, you don’t, because it’s not interesting. And if you could answer the question, what would you have gained?
Here then is my word to you: Don’t participate in discussions that are pointless. You can say yes to God’s love and grace today, you can be grateful for each and every breath, you can trust that there is meaningful work for you to do today in the world. You can heal, you can be free, you can become more and more courageous and full of joy. All of this can be more and more the dominant reality of your life as you become more and more the person Jesus insists you can be. Why would you spend time on topics and discussions that have nothing to do with the very real invitation every single one of us have right now to live life to the fullest?
The Blessed Fool 