"Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody's business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy."
God has not promised to take away our trials, but to help us to change our attitudes toward them. That is what holiness really is. In this life, happiness is rooted in our basic attitude toward reality.
"In many shamanic societies, if you came to a medicine person complaining of being disheartened, dispirited, or depressed, they would ask one of four questions. When did you stop dancing? When did you stop singing? When did you stop being enchanted by stories? When did you stop finding comfort in the sweet territory of silence?"These are excellent questions, I would suggest, to be used by spiritual directors today.
"Wherever we bury Jesus, he comes back to life. We can bury him in the Bible or in stained glass windows, in creeds and formulas and the heritage of our own tradition, in movies and plays and music, in our past. We can even bury him in bread and wine. And each time from each place he rises from the dead. He sheds the words and images and walks right on out into the world."
"The things that we love tell us what we are."
Anguish is not healed by crushing its victim under the weight of every truth you know. It is healed, or at least assuaged, by listening, by time and acceptance, and often by giving to the other the sense that you also have lived without answers.I commend the book to you if you are able to acquire it. (I think it's out of print.) I may share a little bit more from this work over the next few days.
“The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them.”
Pentecost often ends too soon. The first part of the story is thrilling. The sound of a mighty wind. The tongues of fire. People from all over the Roman Empire hearing their own languages spoken by ordinary Galileans. The promise of the Spirit poured out on young and old, including slaves, both women and men. Pentecost means all of that. As the story goes on, Peter stands up to preach, and he preaches such a powerful sermon that over 3,000 people are baptized. Pentecost means all of that too. But Pentecost ends too soon if it has nothing to do with possessions, with wealth and poverty, with what we call economics. Economics is from the Greek word oikos, which means household. How do we live together in God's household? Well, I know economics is a subject so complicated that our eyes glaze over at the mention of the word. But God is very interested in economics, about what we do with our possessions and portfolios.
* A Pentecost church will reach out to people of every language and tongue.
* A Pentecost church will call young and old, women and men to prophesy.
* A Pentecost church will preach and baptize, but the story always ends too soon if a Pentecost church isn't concerned about economics.
A few years ago I talked with a friend of mine who's a pastor in New England. "How's your building program going?" I asked. "Oh, we ran out of money before we got to the worship space," she said. I thought to myself, "What could be more important than the worship space?" But I kept my thoughts to myself. "We renovated the basement," she said. "You know, we have a shelter there for homeless men. We put in new showers and renovated the old kitchen. The basement was so drab, and the showers-well, there was only one shower and it was lousy. On the Sunday before the shelter opened, the worship service began as usual in the sanctuary. When it came time for communion, the people carried the bread and the cup downstairs to the basement. The whole congregation gathered around the empty beds. They passed the bread and the cup around the circle. The body of Christ given for you. That night the shelter beds were full, and the worship space still needed a lot of work." The church calendar still said it was the first Sunday of Advent. But people in that congregation knew that Pentecost wasn't over. Pentecost shaped their life together, and it had everything to do with economics.
AscensionIn his most striking commentary on the Ascension Calvin says: "Since (Christ) entered heaven in our flesh, as if in our name, it follows, as the apostle says, that in a sense we already sit with God in the heavenly places in him (Christ). At the Ascension, our humanity, our "flesh," has been "taken" (Acts 1:11) by God's Beloved One into the very heart of God. This is profound good news for us as Christians and for our whole world. It means that we are more deeply valued, loved and held by God than we may have known before.This, truly, is divine encouragement.
...
This ascension of Jesus Christ is good news for us as Christians, and through us, for our world. It means that God loves, values, holds, and will transform our fragile and broken humanity in Christ. It means that, at the Ascension, Jesus took all of human life, which he cared for so deeply, and brought it "into the heavenly places," into the very heart of God. This includes the suffering refugee, the abused child or spouse, the victim of war or terror, the lonely one in the nursing home, the one who struggles with depression or a lost sense of worth and value, those who are sick, all who are in difficult transitions in life.
"Receiving is much harder than giving. It can be emotionally risky; it requires opening up to a possibility or desire that may not be fulfilled. Giving is easy. Not only do you get to showcase your more saintly qualities, but also your ego enjoys the reward — the payoff of giving.... Have you experienced the pleasure of giving to a grateful recipient? Isn't it obvious in that moment that receiving and giving are flip sides of the same coin? ... All of the help, information and abundance in the universe cannot get through to you if you have a negative belief about receiving. Nothing can get through that distortion. That energy is strong! It is like an energy wave that pushes away the very thing that is trying to assist! Perhaps you know people who reject again and again offers of assistance, of love, of connection. Perhaps this is you."Yes, I do know people like this. And it can be very discouraging, even painful, when such a person rejects a gift.
Just these two words He spoke changed my life, "Enjoy Me."~~~~
What a burden I thought I was to carry - a crucifix, as did He.
Love once said to me, "I know a song, would you like to hear it?"
And laughter came from every brick in the street and from every pore in the sky.
After a night of prayer, He changed my life when He sang, "Enjoy Me."
Today I will conjure love from the empty air. I will call it out from thin places where people walk without breathing, from dark places where they stumble without seeing. I will find love in those I do not like and let love appear in the faces I avoid. I will make room for love in my life even if I feel overcrowded with worry. I will offer love without restraint even if I have not received love in return. I will dance with love in innocent pleasure. I will sing love as though my voice were a new discovery. Today I will be the love God made me be when God called me from the empty air.It is by Bishop Steven Charleston who, these days, lives right here in Oklahoma.
"Only a renewed consciousness of the worth of each and every one of us can provide the beginning of a new politics and of community that could bring us together. To create such a new consciousness will be a formidable spiritual and political task."
— Jim Wallis in The Soul of Politics
To Practice This Thought: See the image of God in every person you encounter today.Election year in the United States can be a very stressful time for anyone and it can be difficult for some of us to maintain the kind of spiritual outlook we truly want to have. The recommendation above can help, I would suggest.
Artist: Francisque Millet Two thousand years of failure have not taught some reformers that you can't stop sin by declaring it illegal. Two thousand years have not taught them that you can't save a man's soul by force -- you can only lose your own in the attempt. Drunkenness and gambling and secularism and lechery -- various hopeful churchmen have earnestly tried to outlaw them all; and what is the result? A drunken nation, a gambling nation, a secularist nation, an adulterous nation. And, often, a ruined Church.
In case you don't recognize the name Joy Davidman, she wrote a number of books including Smoke on the Mountain (from which the above passage is taken) and was also married to C.S. Lewis.-- Joy Davidman
.jpg){kind=link}
