Miracles

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Brother Curtis Almquist, conversation, Jesus, meeting, reality, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, walking miracle

Just a word today as I prepare to spend the day with about 100 of my Sisters (always a joy) to pray and reflect on our lives together. We do this on a regular basis but today is preliminary to our “General Chapter,” a meeting of hearts and minds that usually happens now every six years to examine our reality and to set a direction for the future. Our conversation started yesterday afternoon and will continue through tomorrow. With no words of my own this morning that might approximate the meaning of this event for me, I offer a line from the daily message of the Society of St. John the Evangelist.

Brother Curtis Almquist suggests: It’s not just Jesus who is a walking miracle; you also are a walking miracle. (ssje.org)

What would our lives – and the world – be like if we all believed that saying and lived out of it?

God’s Handiwork

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being, blessing, doing, God's handiwork, lesson, love, psalm 100, reality, sing joyfully, Sisters of St. Joseph, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, work

People often ask me these days if I am retired. I’m no longer shocked at the question, especially since I am now 70 years old (an amazing statistic that still surprises me sometimes!). I have been blessed thus far with good health and am grateful for meaningful and creative work that continues to present itself.

This morning I was reminded in two of the lectionary readings of this blessing. In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul is talking about faith and says, “For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus for good works that God has prepared in advance, that we should live in them.” Psalm 100 follows this theme, opening with a call to “Sing joyfully to the Lord, all you lands; serve the Lord with gladness; come before God with joyful song!”

On Saturday, I spent the day with over a hundred Sisters of St. Joseph – a few younger and many older than myself. Many of these women are retired from active ministry but virtually all of them continue to understand the truth that we are God’s handiwork. This, then, becomes for all of us the most important “work,” calling us daily to love as God has loved us. It is about our being rather than about our doing. For some of us that is a difficult lesson but once learned, it makes all the difference. It is my hope to have totally accepted that reality when all I have left for others is love.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My Choice

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A Deep Breath of Life, abundance, Alan Cohen, create, happy, miserable, perspective, reality, seeing, The Sophia Center for Spirituality

I was jarred into wakefulness this morning by a paragraph in Alan Cohen’s book, A Deep Breath of Life, that reminded me of something I believe about perspective. I trust that I have the power to choose the way I look at life. Here’s how Cohen described it.

If I want to be happy, that’s my choice. If others want to be miserable, that’s up to them. I do not have to justify, explain, rationalize, apologize, or compromise my choice for joy. I create my own reality, just as you do. The universe is big enough to have all kinds of reality happening simultaneously, and none of us needs agreement from anyone to verify the world we choose to live in.

That doesn’t change the feelings of distress that I wrote about yesterday. It is, rather, a choice to see everything from the perspective of abundance and be thankful for what I have in life of good things – like people to love and ground under my feet (be it muddy or green)…I will need to spend the rest of today conjuring up all those good things that seem so distant when the difficulties of life show up to bring me down. As I wrote that, the song from the movie, The Unsinkable Molly Brown, arose. That’s a good place to start because, as she sings, “I ain’t down yet!”

 

 

 

 

 

Can You Hear It?

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Ancient Songs Sung Anew, divine energy, Divine Presence, evolution, instruction, listening, natural word, nature, reality, silence, still, Teilhard de Chardin, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, universe

In keeping with what I said yesterday about Chardin’s vision of evolution in the universe, today we have Psalm 19 in the lectionary readings. One commentator sees this psalm as containing “a grand cosmological vision of a vast universe, alive and full of the divine Presence.” In this psalm we hear the message that God’s word is heard through the natural world as well as in church sermons and our life experiences. I am always happy to read and hear others speak of the importance of the natural world as a conduit of God’s presence and teaching since I learn a lot from observing the depth and function of nature. Here is a suggestion for all of us, the busy people of the world, that might be something to try with the goal of opening us more fully to a deeper way of seeing.

Sometimes our difficulty is that we are not silent and still long enough to hear the subtleties of this quiet yet pervasive form of instruction. Allow yourself to become still and silent for a period of inner and outer listening. Listen with your whole being. Ask this divine energy and communication flowing through you to become a cleansing wind blowing the dust and debris away and opening you more fully to God’s inner Reality. (Ancient Songs Sung Anew, p.46)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Non-Denial

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consciousness, curious, denial, distress, engaged, facts, guidance, inertia, information, intelligent, isolation, Meg Wheatley, messages, Non-Denial, open, Peace, perseverance, reality, responsible engagement, signals, The Sophia Center for Spirituality

I was thinking yesterday how easy it is from here in our lovely, peace-filled location in rural Upstate New York to ignore all the turmoil in the world and in our country. If I don’t wish to allow the distress into my consciousness, I can just avoid watching or listening to or reading the news and go about my days in isolation. While I know that is not a valid choice for me, it is occasionally a temptation. I was reminded this morning of my need to be awake and aware by a page from Meg Wheatley’s book, Perseverance, that I will quote below in its entirety as a call to all of us to resist the pull of inertia in favor of responsible engagement in whatever way we are able to contribute to raising the level of light in the world. (This includes a willingness to discriminate between “fake news” and truth.) The page is entitled Non-Denial. It is not a message to be read quickly and dismissed. I would recommend reading it, as I plan to, several times, and seeking examples from our own life of applications for the message.

Looking reality in the eye is an interesting experience. Often, people are startled to realize how much information they have been avoiding, and how much information is out there, waiting to be useful.

“Facts are friendly,” a psychologist once said, but most of us don’t see it this way. We move away from all the information that’s available, we retreat into denial. It’s the way we keep our world intact and avoid being challenged or threatened. If we can just hold onto our opinions and views, the world will continue to work just fine, thank you very much.

We get led into the practice of non-denial by failure and defeat. When we have no choice, we seem to get curious. When our back is against the wall, finally we’re willing to look at all the messages we had avoided. This isn’t a graceful process. But when we’re ready to open to the signals, guidance, and information that have been swirling around us, ignored and unnoticed, it’s amazing what we learn.

And it’s remarkable what capacities we develop. Absorbing these messages, we suddenly see things differently. We discover solutions not available from our former position. We experience surprise, sometimes delight, sometimes despair that we didn’t notice things earlier. But the end result is that we become more open, more engaged, and more intelligent.

We learn where we are. From here much more is possible.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Let There Be Light

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autonomy, communion, connectedness, Constance Fitzgerald, contemplative, creation, David Bohm, Genesis, implicate order, mind, radical individualism, reality, spirit, sub-atomic particles, symbiotic selves, synergistic community, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, unbroken wholeness

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…”

One would hope that these amazing discoveries, the fruit of evolution from the beginning of which Genesis speaks this morning, (although only of the first three “days” of the creation), would be the result of a concomitant evolution of both human mind and spirit. “Not so,” writes Constance Fitzgerald, a well-known theologian. In strong critique of our inability or unwillingness to respond to the task of becoming in this glorious home that has been entrusted to us, Fitzgerald says the following,

Our ability to embody our communion with every human person on the earth and our unassailable connectedness with everything living is limited because we have not yet become these symbiotic “selves.” We continue to privilege our personal autonomy and are unable to make the transition from radical individualism to a genuine synergistic community, even though we know intellectually we are inseparable and physically connected to every living being in the universe. Yet the future of the entire earth community is riding on whether we can find a way beyond the limits of our present evolutionary trajectory.  (Constance Fitzgerald, From Impasse to Prophetic Hope, 37-38)

There is much work to be done and the time is now, it seems, if we are to pay attention to what we have seen as possible in the coherence of the natural world. Let us think on these things!

Transient Sensitivity

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darkness, God, immensity, light, reality, sensitivity, Son, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, Thomas Merton, Thoughts In Solitude, transient expression, transient sensitivity

The first time I came out of sleep this morning into a still-dark world where ice crystals were bouncing off my window panes I was reminded of my dentist appointment three days ago. When he greeted me and asked me how I was upon entering the room, I just answered “transient sensitivity.” The hygienist who had just cleaned my teeth (read: picked and prodded) looked quizzical but the doc nodded and said, “Ahh, your sinuses…”

When I moved 45 years ago to this lovely valley located in the Southern Tier of New York State, I was told that it is known for the propensity of sinus conditions and I was warned that it would take about five years for me to join the ranks of those so “blessed.” I came to understand the condition but have only experienced it as mild discomfort when inclement weather is the order of the day. Lately, however, I know when storms are coming because my teeth begin to ache. Thinking I had a cavity recently, or more likely an exposed nerve in one of my teeth, I had an interesting visit to the dentist where he did everything he could to locate the difficulty, finally concluding that it was the above-mentioned transient sensitivity. In other words, my aging sinuses were talking to the aging nerves close by and predicting stormy weather.

That’s the long introduction to my thoughts this morning about my state of being. While it is true that my teeth are reminding me of what I see and hear outside my window, I was comparing the term to how I was feeling inside when I turned to Thomas Merton and read the following paragraph.

O great God, Father of all things, Whose infinite light is darkness to me, Whose immensity to me is as the void, You have called me forth out of Yourself because You love me in Yourself, and I am a transient expression of Your inexhaustible and eternal reality. I could not know You, I would be lost in this darkness, I would fall away from You into this void, if You did not hold me to Yourself in the Heart of Your only begotten Son. (Thoughts In Solitude, 71).

Call it synchronicity, call it a meaningless musing from a foggy mind, but for me this word from Merton will take me through the day in gratitude.