More on the Dream

No matter the place we are at God's dream for you and I is ever and always operative.  Never look to anyone for permission to claim your belovedness.  It is yours without "condition, restriction or reservation."  No action can win or lose your chosen belovedness.  The small hardened, self-righteous, judgmental, yes, I can include here professional clergymen, have real difficulty with God's permanent commitment to us who can be so perfectly imperfect.  So prodigal in our actions but so in need of the love of our Prodigal Father.  We are lead into a new way of seeing.  We are provided, gratis, with new glasses whose lenses open up new horizons, which we will never reach.  This way of seeing and thinking leads to the embrace of The Spirituality of Imperfection!! This is not the road we would choose to travel, but for so many of us, thank God, we find our home on the broken trail which lead eventually to the acceptance of human imperfections. We are now beginning finally to live the dream, the wish that our Gracious has had for us since eternity.  It is only in eternity we will come to see clearly The Divine plan and The Divine wish for us and for all creation.

This wish is annunciated, made known through the mystery of The Incarnation of God's love in the human person we call the historical Jesus.  Then this Jesus of God became The Christ of God through His Paschal Mystery.  As we encounter the carpenter-prophet Jesus in the scriptures we are led to discover that His purpose in coming, and His total immersion in our human reality was that we "may have life and have it to the fullest."  Jesus is God's dream for us, incarnated.  Since God is spirit, and we are spiritual beings immersed in the human condition, God came to join us in our human journey so as to model for in His life and ministry how we can live, the dream. What a mysterious ineffable dream our Gracious Creator God has for us. It is so deep that it demands of us that we go ever and ever deeper.  This journey of ours is endless.  There is no point on the this journey into mystery we can say "I have arrived," or "This is it, I have no further steps to take." Yes, we may have resting stations but that is what they are, resting stations on the endless trail that leads to places unknown.

The Dream

On the website you will see "The Battlefield of The Soul."  It is always there. Why?  Because from my point of view, we need a constant reminder of the choices we have to make.  Choices that are made by us in each and every moment we are given to live.  We live moment to moment.  We make our decisions moment to moment.  As we live the present moment, so will the rest of our life be.  That is why we receive the grace necessary for the completion of our life's mission one moment at a time.  We call that moment,  "right now."  In all of life's  "right now moments necessary grace is showered upon us.  The flow of grace never stops.  It cannot stop, and never will stop. In our next life we will live in the fullness of that Love.  We prepare for that as we respond to the promptings of grace in the here and now.  "Now is an acceptable time, now is the time of salvation.  "Mercy-full love is always in the offering, because of our Gracious Lover's faith-full-ness.  It is not because of anything we can do, but because we have been chosen to be the beloved daughter/son from all eternity.  "God help me to believe the truth about myself no matter how beauty-full it is." The deepening of faith in our belovedness leads to transfiguring and transforming places we would never plan to enter into.  The spiritual journey is above all a journey into mystery.  Are you fed up reading this time and again?  Well time and again we forget, we lose focus and are led astray in living lives of illusion.  Living the life that the false self has created. A living that leads us to alienation from our true self and sets us up for so much pain and suffering.  Then Our Gracious lover, again through the mysterious workings of grace meets us in the place of alienation and lostness. Like the Good Shepherd of the Gospels we are ever so gently lifted up, placed on strong foundational-shoulders, ongoing recovery, and brought home to our real home found in our deepest reality.  Sometimes it takes us a long time to surrender to our powerlessness so we can allow ourselves to be brought back home!!!

The name of the blog is "Aisling on earth."  Aisling is the Irish for a dream.  Over the years, I have been brought to this realization, God has this wonder-full dream for both you and I.  If you are anything like me we do our best to mess it up.  We sabotage the original plan, plan "A," so then The Mercy-full One has no option but to go with plan "B."  I have a sneaky feeling I have run out of letters, yet grace still happens.  St. John reminds us "It is not our love of God but God's love for us" that allows this to happen.  Mercy-full love flowing upon mercy-full love in a cascade that never, and cannot cease.  Faith-full love is THE gift we need to constantly explore and meditate on.  For those who have been gifted with the gift of contemplation, use your gift to become more aware of the action you must take, and ask for the strength required to meet the challenge.  There can be no contemplation without action!!!

Hope springs from the depths, part 2

The gift of eternal hope which has been placed in the depths of our being  and can only be encountered by us entering those depths. What has helped and strengthened me over these many years is the constant repetition  of Psalm 130.  "Out of the depths I cry unto You oh Lord, Lord hear my prayer." This is great because one can adjust this prayer to wherever one is at." Out of the depths of my fear, anxiety, hopelessness, guilt, shame, insecurity, powerlessness, or wherever you find yourself,  Lord this is where I need your strengthening and transforming grace," this can be one's choice as well. When we are enjoying the fruits of the Paschal Mystery, and we are experiencing, peace, joy, and love, we can also use these same opening words, "Out of the depths of peace, joy, love, serenity, my feelings of belovedness and acceptance Lord, hear my prayer."  Nowadays I survive on my stash of spiritual bromides I have been collecting over these many, many years.  If you do not have a bromide arsenal at hand, well start one and make sure you are not caught without a defense when "the itty bitty messy committee" attacks. That insidious committee lurks and waits for those moments when we are  weak, seemingly defenseless  and so vulnerable. Today a word has entered our everyday vocabulary, HANGRY, that breaks down to hungry and angry as dangerous places to be in existentially.  In those places, we make unhealthy decisions.  Decisions that results in damaging, or destructive actions. Those on 12 Step journeys will add lonely and tired.

Hope springs from the depths

 So now, as the result of all my travels in these my latter years I have chosen to become an out and out "Hope Punker."  My new avocation challenges me to look back, and share with you all those seemingly endless days of darkness as the place where the star of hope broke through.  A star, as far as we can see from this earth is the source of so very little light.  The light of a star was sufficient, however, to guide those ancient seekers to The Source of Light. (The Light of life entered life in a darkened cave.) As it was with those searchers, so it is with us who are seekers and searchers in a world where there appears to be so little light.  If we are to believe today’s prophets of doom it is getting darker, and darker.  So to counteract their saddening message of doom we have to pray for a different set of lenses, that will constantly be tweaked by grace to see that is only in  darkness that light has its birthing place.  Is it not also true that darkness has it’s origin in light? There is no dawn without darkness.  These two paradoxes will be confronting us our whole life long. My ongoing encounters with paradoxes have resulted in the reluctant letting go of the comfort of the familiar to be guided into the unknown and The Unknowable.