Friday Reflections, August 24, 2012

Today's reflection is a brief excerpt from Richard Rohr about silence, and it is moving me deeply.

Silence is the language of God, and the only language deep enough to absorb all the contradictions and failures that we are holding against ourselves. God loves us silently, because God has no case to make against us. Silent communion absorbs our self-hatred, as every lover knows.
(Richard Rohr -Adapted from Simplicity, p. 97)

Friday Reflections, June 1, 2012

Today's reflection comes from Richard Rohr, and arrived in my inbox this past Sunday, Pentecost.  I so appreciated the reminder that Pentecost is for every day, not just a semi-ignored festival of once a year, and wanted to share this reflection with you today.


THE SPIRIT
Sunday, May 27, 2012 
Pentecost Sunday


On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together, with the doors locked for fear of the Jewish leaders, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” After He said this, He showed them His hands and side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord. And He said to them again, “Peace be with you!”
~ John 20:19-21


We still wait behind closed doors; fifty days (“Pente-cost”), fifty years, five hundred years, we are always waiting and hoping, but not really expecting. It is the day we are always waiting for but never prepared for, the day of the great outpouring of fire-laden love, the day that ties all other days together. Pentecost is actually every day, if we expect it; but, not surprisingly, this is the greatest forgotten major festival of the entire church year.  Most come to church expecting no new outpouring, or maybe not even remembering an old one.


Yet it is Pentecost, the day of the great gathering in and the great sending out. The Holy Spirit must get tired of waiting for us, always hiding behind our closed doors.


Prayer:
Break through my closed door, O God.


Adapted from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, day 205, p. 192

Friday Reflections, March 30, 2012

Today's reflection struck me deeply earlier in the week.  It was written by Richard Rohr, and deals with suffering.


SUFFERING


When I was young, I wanted to suffer for God. I pictured myself being the great and glorious martyr somewhere. There's something so romantic about laying down your life for something great. I guess many young people might see themselves that way, but now I know it was mostly ego, but sort of good ego at that stage.


There is nothing glorious about any actual moment of suffering—when you're in the midst of it. You swear it's meaningless. You swear it has nothing to do with goodness or holiness or God—or you.


The very essence of any experience of trial is that you want to get out of it. A lack of purpose, of meaning—is the precise suffering of suffering! When you find a pattern in your suffering, a direction, you can accept it and go with it. The great suffering, the suffering of Jesus, is when that pattern is not immediately given. The soul can live without success, but it cannot live without meaning.


Adapted from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, p. 86, day 94

Friday Reflections, March 23, 2012

Today's reflection comes from Richard Rohr:


YOUR IMAGE OF GOD CREATES YOU

Your image of God, your de facto, operative image of God, lives in a symbiotic relationship with your soul and creates what you become. Loving people, forgiving people have always encountered a loving and forgiving God. Cynical people are cynical about the very possibility of a coherent loving center to the universe. So why wouldn’t they become cynical themselves? Of course they do.


When you encounter a truly sacred text, the first questions are not: Did this literally happen just as it says? How can I be saved? What is the right thing for me to do? What is the dogmatic pronouncement here? Does my church agree with this? Who is right and who is wrong here? These are largely ego questions, I am afraid. They are questions that try to secure your position, not questions that make you go on a spiritual path of faith and trust. They constrict you, whereas the purpose of the Sacred is to expand you. I know they are the first ones that come to our mind because that is where we live, inside of our ego, and these are the questions we were also trained to ask (unfortunately!).


I would, however, offer you and invite you to ponder another question. Simply having read the text, ask: What is God doing here? Then ask yourself: What does this say about who God is? Then, what does it say about how I can also meet this same God?


From A Teaching on Wondrous Encounters (webcast)

Friday Reflections, February 17, 2012

Today's Friday Reflection comes from a daily email written by Richard Rohr.  His words on prayer challenged me earlier this week, and I wanted to share them with you today:


DISCOVERING YOUR TRUE SELF THROUGH PRAYER

“Everything exposed to the light itself becomes light,” says Ephesians 5:13. In prayer, we merely keep returning the divine gaze and we become its reflection, almost in spite of ourselves (2 Corinthians 3:18). The word “prayer” has often been trivialized by making it into a way of getting what we want. But I use “prayer” as the umbrella word for any interior journeys or practices that allow you to experience faith, hope, and love within yourself. It is not a technique for getting things, a pious exercise that somehow makes God happy, or a requirement for entry into heaven. It is much more like practicing heaven now.


Such prayer, such seeing, takes away your anxiety for figuring it all out fully for yourself, or needing to be right about your formulations. At this point, God becomes more a verb than a noun, more a process than a conclusion, more an experience than a dogma, more a personal relationship than an idea. There is Someone dancing with you, and you are not afraid of making mistakes.


From The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See, pp. 22-23

Amidst Darkness

I so deeply appreciated this morning's advent devotional reading from Richard Rohr:

Our Christian wisdom is to name the darkness as darkness, and the Light as light, and to learn how to live and work in the Light so that the darkness does not overcome us.


If we have a pie-in-the-sky, everything-is-beautiful attitude, we are in fact going to be trapped by the darkness because we are not seeing clearly enough to separate the wheat from the chaff. Conversely, if we can only see the darkness and forget the more foundational Light, we will be destroyed by our own negativity and fanaticism, or we will naively think we are apart from the darkness.

Instead, we must wait and work with hope inside of the darkness—while never doubting the Light that God always is—and that we are too (Matthew 5:14). That is the narrow birth canal of God into the world—through the darkness and into an ever greater Light.

Adapted from Preparing for Christmas with Richard Rohr, pp. 23-24

Paradox

On Sunday morning, the daily devotional from Richard Rohr was simply titled "Paradox" and read as follows:

I don’t think the important thing is to be certain about answers nearly as much as being serious about the questions.

When we hold the questions, we meet and reckon with our contradictions, with our own dilemmas, and we invariably arrive at a turning point where we either evade God or meet God.

When we hang on the horns of the dilemma with Christ—between heaven and earth, between the divine and the human realms—it creates liminal space. All transformation takes place when we’re somehow in between, inside of liminal space. (Richard Rohr)

My question is this - are we willing to live in that space of questions long enough to allow transformation to come and take hold?

Richard Rohr on Silence

Yesterday's meditation from Richard Rohr struck me deeply, and I wanted to share it in its entirety here.

~~~


The most simple spiritual discipline is some degree of solitude and silence. But it's the hardest, because none of us want to be with someone we don't love. Besides that, we invariably feel bored with ourselves, and all our loneliness comes to the surface.

We won't have the courage to go into that terrifying place without Love to protect us and lead us, without the light and love of God overriding our own self doubt. Such silence is the most spacious and empowering technique in the world, yet it's not a technique at all. It's precisely the refusal of all technique.

~~~

Silence, I think, is hard.  and terrifying, and sometimes so necessary.  I usually avoid it until it is forced, and then I cringe as it comes, and am usually thankful for it as I emerge from it.  Odd how that works, isn't it?

Hope

"Until we walk with despair, and still have hope, we will not know that our hope was not just hope in ourselves, in our successes, in our power to make a difference, in our image of what perfection and wholeness should be. We need hope from a deeper Source.

Until we walk with despair, we will never uncover the Real Hope on the other side of despair. Until we allow the crash and crush of our images, we will never discover the Real Life beyond what only seems like death.

This very journey is probably the heart of what Jesus came to reveal."  (Richard Rohr)

I was digging through my backlog of thoughts, quotes and meditations I've wanted to share here at some point, and came across the above passage from Richard Rohr.

I've been thinking a lot about hope again in the last week or two.  Partly because I'm praying for some situations that seem, in the natural anyway, barring miracles, hopeless.  Partly because I've been working through some stuff from my past that came up again - stuff from a time that really did create a sense of despair.

Hope, if you know me well, is one of my favorite words.  And this week I'm thinking about it, scouring my life for it, and clinging to it with white-knuckled fingers just because it is what it is.

And it encouraged me to be reminded by this quote that hope shines brightest in despair.  That it is in despair that we discover how grounded our hope truly is.  And that Jesus is hope revealed, and worth clinging to.

From Richard Rohr

Today's meditation from Richard Rohr was stunning, and I wanted to share it in it's entirety here:

Question of the Day:
What struggles have given me a deeper insight
into the workings of the Holy Spirit?

The best thing that I can possibly do as a teacher/preacher is to help people to recognize and trust their own deeper spiritual intuitions.  I am convinced this is what we would call the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit.  We are not alone; guidance is always being offered. 

My great disappointment in so much of institutional religion is that I don’t think it helps people to trust their deeper spiritual intuitions.  So often it appears to be doing a non-stop flight over all of that.  Often we give people answers to questions they have not yet struggled with or suffered for.  So the answers that they finally have are not deeply understood or deeply felt.  They are not their own answers, and are forgotten easily.

(Richard Rohr, "The Authority of Those Who Have Suffered")

~~~

It feels odd to post a critique of institutional religion. I'm probably the biggest proponent of the organized church that I know.  And I don't particularly care what form it takes, either.  I've met Jesus powerfully at mass, and in a crazy charismatic church, and in a home church, and sitting in the dark in a car with a friend.  I feel strongly that each one of those moments, and everything in between encompasses the body of Christ.

That said, Rohr's words hit me strongly.  Because I've had people offer me answers to questions I didn't know I had, and they weren't my answers.  I needed to go through a lot of painful experiences to have answers to those questions.  I wrote, in one way or another, about some of those experiences here, here, and here over the last week.  I'm grateful for those experiences, and for the answers that came in the midst of suffering.

They've changed the way I pray.  Though I prefer to be left alone at times to simply live out my own "mysteries of faith", my nature is to fix it.  Quick answers.  "Easy" solutions.  Box that problem up into manageable sizes.  I've learned to really value the friends who ask me to listen for my own spiritual intuition (as Rohr puts it).  And I'm learning to emulate them as I walk with others through hard parts of their journeys.

Between the Eyes

Clearly, choosing to love (whether I want to or not) is going to be the theme today.

I kind of knew that, based on the dreams I'd had, and the actions that seem likely and necessary stemming from them, before I ever opened my eyes this morning, but, just in case I needed some convincing, there were several things waiting for me in my email inbox.

Things like this quote from a daily email written by Richard Rohr:

"...love is not a feeling, but a decision, yet a decision that increases our inner freedom each time we do it.  You will know this only after you act on love. Jesus didn't say when you get healed, love; when you grow up, love; when you get it together and have dealt with all your wounds, then love. No, the commandment for all of us is quite simply, “Love!” Once we know it is not a feeling, but a grace empowered decision, we can all do it. And each time it is a growth in freedom—and flow."

And this quote from here that my friend Jenny posted on her blog this morning.  The first thing I read, after opening my eyes and noticing the email that she had a new post:

"You climb from winding sheets into the opening day. Gently, Love asks to occupy the throne of your heart—the very seat of motivation. The request is so familiar that you risk contempt, forgetting how your world grows rich when Love reigns supreme. As if on cue, Fear counters the offer. Spilling worry like filth from a foul pail, this usurper exchanges timidity for hope and urgency for peace. These bitter enemies meet daily to see whom you place upon your seat of motivation. For this seat fashions the essence of every thought and every action. You decide between Love and Fear when choosing who will rest upon your seat of motivation. Tomorrow will be decided early—as you climb from winding sheets."

And then I realized that my own words were bound to convict me, too.   I'd forgotten what post I'd scheduled to go live today.  Clearly God has a sense of humor.  I can just see Him giggling, knowing what would come within this week, as I wrote that post on Monday night.

I really do want to be well.  It's a sentence I say with an ever growing conviction.

It's also a sentence I'm saying this morning with the following add on.  I want to be well.  Even when it means loving by choice, when it's hard, when fear must be battled, knowing that it will likely hurt.

The theme is hitting me between the eyes today.

Love is a choice.  One with a cost.  And one so necessary to make today.

How am I Choosing Joy?

These thoughts from Richard Rohr appeared in my inbox the other day.  If you've hung around this blog long, you'll see why they made me laugh, and reel, and take a few days to absorb them.  Choosing joy has been sort of a theme for me.  A major theme and goal, really.  Someday I'll write about just how impacting it was to me to discover that there was something of a choice in that...

But for now, I thought I'd share Richard Rohr's thoughts with you, and invite you to join me in "collapsing into joy."

Question of the Day: How am I choosing joy? Joy is both a decision and a surrender.  Eventually we stop being preoccupied with creating a fault-free environment that will ensure our own happiness, and we discover that joy is much more like falling into an objective Presence, a Larger Body, Love itself, a unified field, that many of us would call God.  You do not create love, you “fall” into it. You do not attain God, you fall into Him or Her.  You do not manufacture joy, you collapse into it when you give up trying to make it happen. What freedom when we no longer have to wait for ourselves to be happy!  There is no waiting, only receiving. This feast of the Body of Christ is also a promise of joy, and quite daringly—in a quite physical encounter of union, table fellowship, and close intimacy.  “I am telling you this so that my own joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete” (John 15:11). Adapted from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, p. 9

Holy Tears

It seemed appropriate to share these thoughts (formulated a little for American Memorial Day today) from Richard Rohr that arrived in my inbox this morning.  Especially given my teary experience at church yesterday.

~~~

As a young novice I only complained to my novice master once. We had to read a different life of St. Francis every month. I could not understand why St. Francis was crying all the time. He even invited Clare to visit and they spent the entire time crying “holy tears.” As a young nineteen-year-old male, this made no sense to me. Back in 1961 my novice master said to me, “you won’t understand it now, Richard, but you’ll understand it later.”

And now I do understand it. Tears can be a gift of the Holy Spirit. At the point when you can’t achieve the game of perfection, all you can do is offer to God who you are today, warts and all. Your willingness to offer your imperfect gift, knowing it will be totally received, brings you to tears—“holy tears.” There are many gifts of tears, however; sometimes you just cry for the pain and suffering of others, even though you yourself are not suffering at all. I am sure most of you have experienced such holy tears, maybe even today when we remember the many who have died so young, so alone, and sometimes so needlessly.

(Richard Rohr)

The Practice of Awareness

I received the following in my email from Richard Rohr this morning, and really appreciated it:

All spiritual teachers tell us “DO NOT JUDGE.” For those of us raised in a religious setting, this is very difficult. In a strange way, religion gave us all a Ph.D. in judgmentalism. It trained us very early in life to categorize, label, and critique. It told us all about worthiness and unworthiness. This judgmental mind told us what is right and wrong, who is gay or straight, and who is good or bad. This sort of mind never creates great people, because everybody has to fit into our way of thinking. At an early age our grid was complete. We had decided who fit in and who did not fit in. We fashioned our own little world.


Christianity that divides the world in this manner and eliminates all troublesome people and all ideas different from our way of thinking cannot be mature religion. It cannot see the multiple gifts of each moment, nor the dark side that coexists with it. This mind does not lead us to awareness, and above all, this mind will find it impossible to contemplate. To practice awareness means you live in a spirit of communion; your world becomes alive and very spacious, and not divided by mere mental labels.
(Richard Rohr)

Somehow hope

It's Monday again, and I'm struggling.

I'm feeling lonely.  A bit isolated.

Wondering about the state of a relationship that is precious.  Telling myself that I'm just being neurotic.  And then going on with the neuroses, seemingly unable to halt them.

I'm missing my roommate.  I process best aloud, talking with someone who I know is safe, and she was great for just letting me talk, get the crazy events of my "i work in a soap opera" days off my chest, so that they could dissipate and I could breathe again.

These days I live with Grandma, where every thought needs to be filtered, because any information she garners, she can and will share with everyone you know.

Let's just say that verbal processing isn't so much an option right now.

At least not at home.

Home.

That's a whole other topic.

The room looks like it's mine now.  I've unpacked most of my things.  I put together the "altar" spaces yesterday, unwrapping all the little items from their boxes and arranging them across the surfaces.

But it doesn't feel like home, and I wonder if it ever will.

If it will ever be anything other than "Grandma's basement".

If it will feel safe.

My happiest moment of the weekend was just before coming fully to conciousness this morning, when, just for a moment, I lay there and thought I was in the bedroom in my last apartment.

I watch for that apartment each morning as I go past it on the bus.

That was a happy place for me.  A place of healing.  A home.

And now God has led me elsewhere, and I'm struggling to be at peace with that.

It's not a particularly unique struggle, but right now it is consuming my days, my thoughts.

I find myself longing for something else.  Feeling unsettled, and "inbetween."

If I think about it too long, the tears build behind my eyes and I wonder if I will survive this latest step.

This move from a place that was healing to this whole other painful, awkward place.

Ironic that it is taking place during Lent.

The first Lent in several years where I am struggling too, to find my footing.  Not fasting in any of the traditional ways.  Forgetting at least three times a week to pick up the Lenten reading books I'd committed to using, and then guiltily "catching up" the following day, usually while I lean against the counter in the  tiny basement bathroom, waiting for the toilet to stop running, in case it doesn't stop and I need to take the lid off the tank and mess with things to make it stop.

It's Monday morning, and mostly, I want to cry.  Because my heart hurts.

And then I want to whine a little, too.  Because while I trust that God is in these places, too, they make me antsy and uncomfortable.  They hurt, and I don't like them.

So I listen, over and over, on repeat to Anis Mojgani's Shake the Dust.  Because the human heart beats a hundred thousand times a day.  And somehow that is hopeful.

And I ponder over and over these lines from Richard Rohr "Memory creates a readiness for salvation, an emptiness to receive love and a fullness to enjoy it. Strangely enough, it seems so much easier to remember the hurts, the failures and the rejections. It is much more common to gather our life energy around a hurt than a joy, for some sad reason. Remember the good things even more strongly than the bad, but learn from both. And most of all, “remember that you are remembered by God.”

Because I am remembered by God.  And there is hope in that too.  Even in the moments when I don't like what He is doing, I am remembered by him.

And because, in the absence of someone with whom I can process aloud, I can show up here, and write out my thoughts, and talk myself into somehow hoping, just for a little bit longer.

Daily 5 - Day 207

Today's Daily 5:

1. This quote from Richard Rohr that I posted earlier.  Remember the good things even more strongly than the bad, but learn from both.  That's kind of the goal, really, of the daily 5 - to re-shape thought to remember the good more strongly than the bad, to celebrate it, and not let my life be only shape by the lessons learned in the bad times.
2. Shake the Dust.  I've been listening to it over and over today as I moved around my space, accomplishing things.  Somehow that same message - to live again.  It's one I'm clinging to right now.
3. Toaster waffles for breakfast.  With butter and pancake syrup.
4. Went for a walk by myself in the sun today.  Yes, it was down city streets, to pick up some lunch, but it was a walk, alone, in the sun.
5. It was a better day as far as coping with "life at Grandma's" goes
6. Banana cream pie
7. Freshly washed sheets and pajamas
8. Got a lot of unpacking done.  The room almost looks homey now.
9. Playing some random online games for a while
10. DVDs or online TV playing as I sorted and unpacked and cleaned.

Remember the Good Things More Strongly than the Bad

I received the following in a daily email mediation written by Richard Rohr this morning.  It seemed timely, given the struggles of the last few years, the push to choose joy, and the current struggle to adapt to this newest season of life:

Our remembrance that God remembers us will be the highway into the future, the straight path of the Lord promised by John the Baptizer (Luke 3:4). Memory is the basis of both pain and rejoicing: We cannot have one without the other.

Do not be too quick to heal all of those bad memories, unless it means also feeling them deeply, which means to learn what they have to teach you. God calls us to suffer (read “allow”) the whole of reality, to remember the good along with the bad. Perhaps that is the course of the journey toward new sight and new hope. Memory creates a readiness for salvation, an emptiness to receive love and a fullness to enjoy it.

Strangely enough, it seems so much easier to remember the hurts, the failures and the rejections. It is much more common to gather our life energy around a hurt than a joy, for some sad reason. Remember the good things even more strongly than the bad, but learn from both. And most of all, “remember that you are remembered by God.”