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awareness, blame, collective input, common ground, deep thought, dialogue, difference, headlines, Jan Phillips, No Ordinary Time, non-duality, polarization, salvation, separation, speak from the heart, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, wake up
Today is the fifth in our discussion series of No Ordinary Time, the inspiring book of Jan Phillips. We will be talking about the concept of and our desire for non-duality. We have come into and live in a world where things are defined by separation and difference: young or old, meek or bold, joy or pain, wealth or poverty…so many things. We are waking up to the fact that our salvation comes from the ability to go beyond those distinctions to find more than common ground. We must come to unity in our diversity if we are to survive and thrive.
Jan’s text is brilliant in setting out the territory we must traverse in order to find such a solution, all of which is worthy of quoting. I offer just a bit of what she says at sunrise for your consideration and wish you the impetus and stamina to make it a reality for your own life and for the world.
What’s happening in the world is a result of our collective input. The morning headlines are the news that we are making as a whole human family, by what we do and what we fail to do. Each one of us is a co-creator of the culture we are immersed in, and if we want to see change, we can make change by changing ourselves, our thinking and our destructive habits.
Blame is not useful. Polarization is not useful. Bitterness and negativity are not useful. What’s useful in these perilous times is deep thought and dialogue. What’s useful is a willingness to speak from our hearts, to say out loud what we hunger for, what we’re willing to live for, and what it is we can no longer abide. We are attendants at the wake of the old way, and each of us – through our actions, our thoughts, our work and relationships – is midwifing a new world into existence. This is our destiny, our meaning, our purpose, and when we come to our days with this awareness, when we sense the oak in the acorn of our beings, then we will have the energy to move mountains and shift the tides. (p. 126)
May it be so in our time!
Yesterday my co-facilitator, Cheryl, and I were speaking about today’s book-club meeting. We’ll be considering chapter 4 of the book No Ordinary Time, by Jan Phillips. Both of us commented on our hesitation when considering the chapter title: “The Mystery of Evil.” We admitted we’d rather skirt that one in favor of the uplifting discussions we’ve encountered thus far. No worries. Jan has a way of stirring up readers and motivating to action so that anything (like saving the world) seems possible. Here are some thoughts from the introduction to the chapter that will most likely form the basis for our conversation today.
This morning I have just spent my first hour preparing for session 2 of our 6-session study series on the book No Ordinary Time by Jan Phillips. The study grew out of response to Jan’s visit and our meaningful workshop with her in April. We have 19 women gathering to continue pondering the fact that our ordinary lives can truly be extraordinary if we allow them to be so. Our chapter heading for tomorrow is “Discipline” and it contains several possible spiritual practices. I thought it auspicious to choose one – a simple exercise that can be easily done – as a suggestion here. See what you think about the possibility of inserting this into your everyday routine.
In looking ahead to possibilities for the autumn “semester” at the Sophia Center, I began re-reading Finding the On-Ramp to Your Spiritual Life, a little book by Jan Phillips. The impetus came from two different conversations – one with Jan and another with a member of my Spiritual Practices Circle who is considering reading the book with a group in her Church. It’s a catchy title and the idea of using traffic signs as chapter titles was, it seems to me, quite an inspired idea. It’s part of Jan’s genius, I think, to see deep meaning in the connections that exist everywhere and use everyday experiences to mine deep truth. Think about all you could say about “STOP” or “DIVIDED HIGHWAY” or even “FALLING ROCKS AHEAD.” (Actually, that’s not a bad idea. What would you say about each of those things vis-à-vis your life?)
Today I’m meeting with Cheryl, my co-facilitator of our summer series on Jan Phillips book, No Ordinary Time. Jan’s workshop with us was so inspiring that Cheryl thought it a good idea to keep that awakening going and it seems that others – myself being the most enthusiastic – agree. (Check the “
Quotes from Pendle Hill: Today’s quote comes from Jan Phillips in her book Finding the On-Ramp on Your Spiritual Path.
Quotes from Pendle Hill: Today’s quote comes from Jan Phillips in her book, Finding the On-Ramp to Your Spiritual Path:
Yesterday I was speaking with someone who had participated in last weekend’s workshop at The Sophia Center for Spirituality about how simple, and yet how effective, the activities were. We concluded that it was a combination of the engaging manner of Jan Phillips, the presenter, that engendered trust by her honest sharing and the resultant willingness of the group members to act in like manner that carried the day. The focus of the sharing, a consistent energetic current that undergirded such success, was the life experiences of the participants and how those experiences had been transformative in some way. The genius of the process was that the transformation came from the simple exercise of speaking our truths aloud. Happy or sad, difficult or easy, long past or recent, we recounted our life events as we saw them and recognized ourselves in the eyes and hearts of the willing hearers in our midst. We found our creativity in the extraordinary poems that we wrote in 10 minutes, prompted by a series of necessarily included words like a color, a location, a body of water, a person…We moved our bodies in a simple circle dance and found it easier to do in the singing and connecting of hands and smiling eyes. In short, we realized our common humanity and celebrated our desire to reach out from that place to a world in need of our blessing and gifts.
I often speak about the beauty and my good fortune of living in the Northeast region of the United States. Over the past few years my appreciation for this gift has grown as has my compassion for those who live in increasingly dangerous weather climates. Whether it be tornado, mud slide, forest fire or other damaging condition, we have seemed untouched, except for two floods in the last 43 years that caused damage but no loss of life. Last evening we got a taste of what it feels like to experience the likely possibility of a tornado.
I did not post anything over the last two days. While it is true that the weekend was full in a wonderful way with our long-awaited concert and workshop with the extraordinary Jan Phillips, I had every intention of attending to this morning practice. Unfortunately the internet was not cooperating. Thus I missed my chance on her feast to speak about Catherine of Siena – one of my favorites in a long line of holy women who have proved worthy of sainthood. One could begin the litany of her life with the fact that she was the 25th child born to her family! My admiration comes, however, from the chronicle of her friendship with God that gave her the courage to speak truth to power and which led her to a central role in the end of the “Avignon Captivity” – a 70-year period in the 14th century of papal exile in France.