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Advent, authenticity, charity, courage, faith, forgiveness, honesty, humility, Joyce Rupp, kindness, Lent, loyalty, mercy, patience, Prayer Seeds, qualities, reflection, respect, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, understanding
As travelers begin homeward journeys after celebrating Thanksgiving and those of us who enjoyed blessed companionship at home find ways to re-prepare turkey and “fixins,” Joyce Rupp offers a prayer. It is only one paragraph but holds a wealth of reflection should we accept the invitation of the 13 qualities that could take us far down a road of spiritual growth. Practicing one a week for 13 weeks would take us to the cusp of Lent. One a month, if the starting line was December 2, would span 2019 in fine style as a response to the holiday we have just observed. Why not write each one on a post-it note or index card and display it on the refrigerator or the inside of the exit door to your home and watch for how it affects things during its turn as your practice? What can we lose? What will we most certainly gain?
Sower of Seeds, you have placed in our hearts the potential for many gifts of your love to grow and ripen. Charity, authenticity, mercy, honesty, humility, forgiveness, loyalty, patience, understanding, courage, kindness, faith, respect, and other qualities reflective of your goodness dwell in our interior fields and garden…(Prayer Seeds, p. 181)
Jealousy is a very dangerous trait in a person. It seems to me a bit more serious than envy although it appears in the dictionary as envy’s synonym. I might be envious of someone’s good looks or good luck but, if I have a positive attitude about my own life, I don’t spend a lot of time comparing my lot with those of others. If jealousy takes hold of my life, however, it can lead to wishing harm to others – sometimes instigating events that will cause very bad things to happen.
Sometimes it seems too difficult to tell “the whole truth and nothing but the truth” when such speaking will reveal a fault or failing about ourselves. It seems much easier to obfuscate – a great word that means to obscure, blur or overcomplicate things so we don’t look so bad in the eyes of other people. The difficulty with this practice is that it doesn’t make us feel better because we have hidden our true self; rather we feel worse. The irony is that many times the failure we’re trying to cover up is so minor that we are the only ones who would judge it harshly if it were known. Everyone else would easily forgive the imperfection.
Last evening we welcomed 14 people to a Wisdom School here in Windsor. As an ice breaker, we made two concentric circles, facing each other, with the inner circle moving one person to the right each time a chime rang – once every 15 seconds. The task was simply to look the person in front of us in the eyes and hold that gaze until it was time to move.
Thinking about the situation of those in the path today of Hurricane Maria, people who will be blasted for the second time in two weeks by devastation, I picked up Meg Wheatley’s book, Perseverance, since there is nothing I can say of any relevance on my own. What I found was a quote from a 14th century Japanese Samurai Warrior. It was not what I was looking for but did make me think. What if it seemed I had lost everything? I mused. What would be left that would make me refuse to lie down and die? The answer focused on inner strength and so I repeat it here as a hope for those whose lives seem empty at this moment and a way to consider hope when all outer hope is gone.
One of the “tricky” faculties of the human mind is our ability to judge. We need to be “razor-sharp” in using the quality of discrimination – knowing first the two sides of that “coin” – while refraining from making judgments based on insufficient information, hearsay or our own narrow perspective. To clarify what might sound rather complicated in that sentence, I have two examples.
