Tags
heart, love, love God, love your neighbor as yourself, Mark, mind, Moses, neighbor, soul, strength, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, truth
From the mouth of Moses to the gospel of Mark the Scriptures repeat the same message about how we are to live. We hear it today, not in a long diatribe but rather a brief directive about love. When asked what is the first and greatest commandment, we can all likely reply – at least with the short form of “Love God and love your neighbor as yourself.” The deep impact of what that effort calls out from us, however, is in the almost staccato list of capacities that follows. We are to love God with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind and with all our strength. In other words: Give it all you’ve got!
What occurred to me as I typed those last two sentences was that if we are to give ourselves so completely in loving God, what can be left for our neighbor whom we are supposed to love as ourselves? But that, it seems, is the mystery, the wonderful truth of this life of loving. In the love of God, everything gets transformed so that there is always enough love to go around – for ourselves and the neighbors everywhere who have become our other selves. Love begets love wherever it is found. That’s just the way it is. And it’s up to us to prove it.
How fitting for those gathered in this tiny town in Maine that we should be celebrating today the Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus. As we endeavor to move in prayer and practice from a stance of oneness, we are frequently reminded to “put the mind in the heart” and act from there. No judgment, no self-identification, just the love that flows out of a consciousness that we are all one. While not an easy goal, it is the simplest of practices – just breathing into the sense that the heart is central to our living and its steady beating is our lifeline to love.
I was reminded again this week of how easy it is for me to walk through my days on automatic pilot and how quickly I fall out of consciousness while doing a task. Let me explain. On Tuesday my cursor disappeared from my computer screen. (I have a touchpad which I have been using for over three years.) No matter what we (I and my tech companion in the office who saves me all the time) tried, nothing would bring back that little arrow that makes things happen and allows me even the smallest success in communication. When I finally had time to visit the “Geek Squad” it took two experts to figure out that a mouse – a computer mouse, that is – might get me back up and running. Voila! It worked. Having breathed a large sigh of relief, I went back to my office and happily started to type again. Each time I needed to move the cursor for an edit or another function, I found my index finger circling around on the touchpad until I woke up to the fact that I needed the mouse to accomplish the move. My mind was on the text I was typing and the two tasks of hitting the keys and using the cursor were secondary and tertiary, just like so many other activities that I do automatically.
I heard an urgency in the voice of Macrina Wiederkehr this morning in a prayer she wrote to the God of All. Take it with you today as a plea for what we need to stay the course of courage in this fragile world.
My mind feels this morning like oil on a frying pan that has heated enough to be jumping around like the Mexican jumping beans of my childhood. The thoughts are going as fast as the ticker tape headlines across the bottom of a television screen and, because of their speed, are gone before I can latch onto their meaning at all! So I open Thomas Merton’s Book of Hours for Thursday and find this description of me:
Today is Monday, the traditional beginning of the work week for most people. For me it is always a time to “gear up” and make a list (or add to my already long one) of the things I hope to accomplish in the week ahead. Then there is the “long term list” of events that will be taking place in this season of spring into summer…As I began that litany in my mind, I realized again how cyclic life is for me and how much better I respond to it if I hold the schedule lightly so it flows like a dance rather than a race. Let me explain.
I found a startling juxtaposition this morning in the first lectionary text – the beginning of the first creation story in Genesis 1:1-19 – and a section of one of our readings under consideration today here at our contemplative “boot camp” experience. The first of this duo is the lyrical description of God’s splendid work of bringing into being the glorious creation that becomes our home. The second is, in part, a recounting of what scientists have discovered over the last quarter-century about the communication between sub-atomic particles which scientist David Bohm explains as “a deeper and more complex level of reality than we experience, an ‘implicate order or unbroken wholeness’ from which all our perceived reality derives…”
