Awake and Alive

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beautiful, conscious breathing, everyday activities, Fully Awake and Truly Alive, prayer, rest, Rev. Jane E. Vennard, simple, spiritual practices, summer read, The Sophia Center for Spirituality

We’re starting our summer book study next week at The Sophia Center with a book called Fully Awake and Truly Alive. Each time I try to tell someone the title of the book I have to find either the book itself or the flyer announcing the topic. It’s not that complicated but I’m always concerned about remembering it correctly. “Is it Truly Awake and Fully Alive or does Fully come before Truly,” I ask myself. And then there’s Awake and Alive to deal with. Is it possible to be awake before you’re alive or is it all a question of those demanding modifiers?

Regardless of whether I ever get it right, the book is a great summer read. It offers a new look at prayer and spiritual practices in a way that gives credence to the value of everyday activities like gardening, hiking and rest. Who thinks of resting as a spiritual practice? And yet the concept of Sabbath is foundational to much of religious tradition. Pair rest with conscious breathing and silence and the foundation grows even stronger. In other words, simple is beautiful. For those of us who are driven by work and the necessity of achievement, these are good reminders. Actually, even for those less inclined to feverish activity, the reminder to stop for a moment to breathe in the day may be an inestimable gift.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Where Is He Going?

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Apostle, disciples, I am the way, Jesus, John, simple, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, the way, Thomas, troubled

This morning’s gospel (JN 14:1-6) has Jesus giving a sort of pep talk to his disciples. What we know that they didn’t is that Jesus will be leaving soon and he’s trying to prepare them to continue on without his physical presence. “Do not let your hearts be troubled,” he says. “In my father’s house there are many rooms.” I often wonder if they had, by that time, caught on to his manner of speaking in metaphor. Even now we have trouble understanding and accepting that diversity does not necessarily mean division in religious belief and practice.

Later in this very deep and meaningful text Jesus gets even more difficult to comprehend to people who are expecting him to stay around now that he has come back from the dead. Telling them he’s going to prepare a place for them was confusing enough but when he said, “Where I’m going you know the way,” they lost him totally. Thomas, the “show me” apostle, speaks up. “We don’t even know where you’re going! How can we know the way?”

The answer to that question still confounds us. We know it by heart but still fail to recognize how simple yet profound “the way” is. Maybe we find it too simple to be correct. It is a simple answer, but not easy nevertheless. “I AM the way,” Jesus says, “and the truth and the life.” All we are called to do is to “put on the mind of Christ,” walking in the absolute integrity that is consonant with the example and words of Christ, living the life that becomes transformed because of the unconditional love that fuels it. We think too much, perhaps, about achievement – doing good works that will get us to heaven. If we focus on the attitude that underlies our good works – the unconditional acceptance and welcome of others into our hearts, (the love that Jesus modeled) – our actions will follow in kind.

As I said, simple but not easy. One step at a time…

 

 

 

 

 

 

Plain speaking

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eating, heart, heartbeat, Jesus, listen, Mark, simple, The Sophia Center for Spirituality

Jesus was quite emphatic and plain speaking in the gospel passage for this morning. (Mk 7) Clearly, he wanted people to “get the message”  since he started with: Hear me, all of you, and understand. His point was that those who were complaining about people eating certain foods were living by a set of rules that could not save if there was no deeper meaning. When even his disciples didn’t get what he was trying to convey, he got “down & dirty” saying: Are even you likewise without understanding? Do you not realize that everything that goes into a person from outside cannot defile, since it enters not the heart but the stomach and passes out into the latrine? (Definitely too much information for some…)

Certainly rules are necessary for good order in a culture. Even in spiritual practice, following some procedural steps can help to deepen the practice, but rules will never get us to the depths for which we long; for that we need a heart willing to be cleansed of all impurities like jealousy, criticism, gossip…We know our own.

Jesus sounded frustrated today, seemingly because the principle to be grasped is so simple (living from the heart) although the practice is far from easy. We seem to have an advantage here with the life of Jesus as a model. He was an observant Jew whose heart led him deeper than the rules when it seemed that the rules were not sensible and his heart called him to a higher law. Can we step out in the same way? Only, I submit, if we have listened deeply within and are listening not only to ourselves but also to the heartbeat of God.