A Boring Life???

Guilt, anger, and resentment are really heavy burdens for us to haul around.  Just think of all the energy it takes to control, deny, stifle these so, so human, emotions  within ourselves.  On the other hand, how free we feel, how energized we feel, when we give ourselves the freedom to feel, experience, express and let go (give to God) of these feelings.  Think about how energized you feel when you blow you stack and let go of what has been bottled up.  Our energy is drained when we journey  burdened under the weight of guilt, anger and resentment.   We will find our lives being very dull, uninteresting, tedious and above all, very boring.  (The "B" in garbage.)

Jesus tells us He has come, "That we may have life, and have it to the, fullest.”He wished His joy-full love upon each one of us, so  that our joy might be complete. So what has happened to this "joy of life?"  What has happened that has caused us to lose our zest for life?  What has caused us to see life and our relationships through the eyes of indifference and boredom?  Why do we go about with feelings of boredom, masking anger?  John O'Donohue,  "Anam Cara" has these challenging thoughts.  When we become bored with life, in all of its forms, I hope the following will enable you to come to a deeper understanding of who you are and the mystery, The Paschal Mystery, unfolding in each and every moment of your daily living. "  (Lord, grant that I might see. ) The awakening of the human spirit is a homecoming.  Yet, ironically our sense of familiarity often militates against our homecoming.  When we are familiar with something, we lose the energy, edge and excitement of it."   

Friendships and relationships suffer immense numbing through the mechanism of familiarization.   We reduce the wildness and mystery of person and landscape to the external, familiar image.  Familiarity enables us to tame, control and ultimately forget the mystery.  We make our peace with the surface as image and we stay away from the Otherness and fecund turbulence of the unknown that it masks.  Familiarity is one of the most subtle and pervasive forms of human alienation. 

People have difficulty awakening to their inner world especially when their lives have become overly familiar to them.  They find it hard to discover something, new, unique or adventurous in their numbed lives.  Yet, everything we need for our journey has already been given to us.  Consequently, there is great strangeness in the shadowed light of our soul world.  We should become more conversant with our reserved soul-light.  The first step in awakening to your inner life and to the depth and promise of your solitude would be to consider yourself for a little while as a stranger to your own deepest depths.  To decide to view yourself as a complete stranger, someone who has just stepped ashore in your life, is a liberating exercise.  This meditation helps to break the numbering stranglehold of complacency and familiarity.  Gradually you begin to sense the mystery and magic of yourself."

We are encouraged to look at the familiar  until it becomes a stranger to us. 

The following quote is from Henri M. Nouwen's book, "Here and Now - Living the Spirit."  "Joy is essential to spiritual life.  Whatever we may think of say about God, when we are not joyful, our thoughts and words cannot bear fruit.  Jesus reveals to us God's love so that His joy may become ours and that our joy may become complete.   Joy is the experience of knowing that you are unconditionally love and that nothing - sickness, failure, emotional distress, oppression, war, or even death can take that love away.  Joy is not the same as happiness.   We can be unhappy about many things, but joy can still be there because it comes from the knowledge of God's love for us."

It is essential for us to accept the fact  at every moment of our lives we have an opportunity to choose joy. There is joy when we grow in the acceptance that we are witnesses to the dynamics of The Paschal Mystery to each and person God chooses to place in our lives. What great faith our God has placed in us.  We are the contemporary manifestation of The suffering Jesus, Who became The Risen Christ, AFTER three days being in the tomb.  Whatever was happening in the darkness of the tomb happens to us in the darkness of our tomb time. Life then is always the lived experience of having to deal with opposites. We are asked challenged to accept joy and sorrow, success and failure, love and hate, war and peace, this dynamic  is endless.  We do not live in the either/or, but in the growing acceptance of the, both/and.  This acceptance is an essential exercise in the birthing process. From what I have seen in movies, and on TV birthing is not a boring exercise. It demands supreme physical and emotional effort. You actually have to be trained to face this encounter, with emerging life. This is the Lenten season. Year after year we go back to the school of spirituality, to be formed anew for the new experience of the emergence of The Risen Christ.  A boring life??????

Individual Thorn part 2

Rousseau said, "Man was born free and everywhere I look I see him chained."  Resentment is a destroyer of individual lives and family ties.  We are told what hurts a relationship is not what is on the table, it is under the table.  Resentment not dealt with grows and festers over the years.  It infects, affects and ultimately destroys so, many relationships.  Rightly, does O'Donohue call it a canker.  That is why the "R" of Garbage is resentment.  It could also be rebellious, but that is a whole different blog.  

Resentment can and does destroy our own lives, our relationships, our marriages and our ability to "have life and have it to the fullest."  Let us then begin to look at our lives through the eyes of a health love which is patient and kind, takes no offense and is not resentful.  Let us look at ourselves and our lives through the eye of God's love which frees us to be ourselves, free, authentic, human beings.  This is a perpetual, personal process demanding we treat ourselves with love, respect and forgiveness.  The change which results from this will allow us to have healthy boundaries.  The downside of this which really is a gift to yourself is you will be giving resentments, not getting resentments.  How much resentment builds up when we do not treat ourselves with love, respect and forgiveness?  You will find opposition to your new way of thinking and your new way of living.  

Resentments are burdens we don’t need to carry; we don’t have to carry.  Let us again remind ourselves of what St. Paul writes in his epistle to the Corinthians, "love is patient, love is kind.  Love takes no offense and is not resentful." Let us journey inside of ourselves and see what events and areas of our lives in which we feel resentful.   In what things have we not forgiveness ourselves?  What is the area that we are still growing in reconciliation?  Because we are human beings in the process of becoming fully human with all of the subtleties of what it means to be human.  

"Resentment is the poison of the spiritual life.  The word means, literally "feeling again," in the sense of "feeling backward."   The emphasis is on the a clinging to the past, a harping on it that becomes mired in it. Resentment goes over and over an old injury.   Revisiting the hurt, the powerlessness, the rage, the fear, the feeling of being wronged.  Scraping the scab off the wound, resentment relishes anew its pain.  It is the particular kind of memory that reinforces the vision of self-as-victim.  Resentment is the refusal, out of fear, to cross the bridge of sadness and let ourselves back into the impermanent world of relationship.  Anger as resentment refuses relationships, slashing at everything and everyone that comes close.  But our pain can be healed only by some kind of closeness, some kind of connection with others.  Sadness opens us to the need for unity and community.  (The Spirituality of Imperfection by Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham).

"Without forgiveness life is governed by an endless cycle of resentment and retaliation."  Someone, else wrote, "Those who are free of resentful thoughts surely find peace."  So then continue the Feeling work.  Do your writing and burning.  May you come to peace and acceptance this Lenten season.

Individual Thorn

An excerpt from an upcoming new book "Garbage to Treasure through Grace."

St. Paul is conflicted. He is not a happy camper. He  has been chosen by The Lord for a great mission. Looking inside he sees something he is not happy with. He does not want it to be in his life. He wants it removed. That was his plan. The Lord had other plans, and God was not very shy about letting Paul know. WE do not know what habit of sin, what thorn in the flesh, Paul had to deal with, all we know is he wanted it gone. Fat chance says the Lord. I got other plans for "this thorn." Plans Paul is not going to like, and will upset his ego. Even though he asks three times to have this thorn removed.  The Lord is not moved. He says to Paul, "Get over yourself. All this is not about you, and your weakness, it is all about My mercy-full, transforming, compassionate love that is  being channeled into you through, this weakness, you resent." Paul got an introduction into what the spirituality of imperfection is all about. Paul got the message but remember not right away. Consoling is it not!!! Now it gets better. It slowly dawns on him, all this is not about him. It is all about the workings of mysterious grace. Mysterious action of grace, which transforms weakness into strength. Not our strength, but the strengthening love of The Lord God, that is revealed to us through our individual "thorn." We all have one. To resent it is to drive us away from the inner journey. We as regular human beings are not well equipped to deal with the shadow, the unacceptable, the inferior, the part of us that has not yet been transformed. Paul uses the word "flesh" for that. It is translated "sarx," a challenging reality we not only have to embrace but actually love. Paul by his acceptance of the thorn gives us these encouraging words, "It is ONLY when I am weak, it is then that I am strong." As it was for Paul, so it is for us.  Read and reflect on Romans chapter 7.  While you are at it, go to Corinthians chapter two, and read more about St. Paul's struggle with the humanity he is immersed in.

Like all of us he has to deal with this reality. He is doing the things he does not want to do, and not doing the things he is supposed to do. Sounds familiar??? You bet it does. It is our moment to moment struggle ,that morphs into hours, days, years, and even for some, decades. We are so very slowly immersed into the mercy-full, transforming, passionate  love of our Prodigal God. A God we will never understand, or comprehend, but gradually grow in acceptance of.  This mystery, like all mysteries is slowly revealed to us through our weaknesses, and brokenness.  Carl Stuhmiller writes, "It is ONLY (mine) through our weaknesses, and our brokenness can  we have an audience with a God of faithfulness and compassion." The Prodigal loving God Jesus The Christ Came to reveal. So then resentment is toxic to our spiritual wholeness.

The love of God has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us, so, the Scriptures tell us.    

Part 2 tomorrow...

Spiritual Mysteries are Never Solved part 2

As we study the gradual evolution of humankind, we see there was an acceptance of a spiritual reality greater than themselves.  They entered into a relationship with that Power, and that was the beginning of religion. That goes back 70,000 years back into the mists of antiquity. We are so indebted to the sciences, and to the scientific scholars, for the challenging insights into the evolution of humans, and their religious development. O’Murchu singles out paleo-anthropologists in particular.  It was a slow development.  Evolution is a slow, slow process but every now and then scientists have discovered quantum leaps.  "Evolution is about horizons, not established boundaries." Diarmuid has describes this reality as an “interactive evolutionary process within which we are called to be co-creators.  As we are chosen, so also we are blessed, consecrated to meet the great challenge of helping to bring into reality, God’s vision for His creation. Since we are not God, we mess up, make mistakes.  This is what it means to be human.  The sad thing is we are not given much encouragement to embrace our human errors.  It is only through the acceptance of our limited humanity, can we ever grow into who we really are in God’s love.  Not in the sight of other limited human beings but in the all embracing, loving eyes of our gracious God.  I love to paraphrase Robbie Burns, he wrote:  "Would that God the gift to give me to see myself as others see me," no way.  Others see me as they are.  We are seen through their clouded lenses.  I much prefer to pray:  "Would that God the gift to give me to see myself, as God sees me." Now we are able live a life of freedom, not a life constricted by fear.  Rosseau wrote "Man was born free, yet everywhere I look I see him chained."

A healthy spirituality, which is a healthy way of seeing The Wild Creative Spirit working to bring all humankind, and all creation into a oneness, a wholeness.  Our individual decisions are not just about me and my life, it is all about the health of an evolving reality.  A reality so much greater than I, yet so dependent on my healthy decisions, and actions.  Quoting The Second Vatican, "we are co-creators, and co-perfectors of the universe". One of the cancers we have to face on our journey with our God, to our God is resentment. This really throws a spanner in the works.  We Irish are the masters of resentment. There is the joke, "What happens when you have Irish Alzheimer's? You forget everything but the grudges." Funny but very sick.

Spiritual Mysteries are Never Solved

An excerpt from an upcoming new book "Garbage to Treasure through Grace."

Long, long ago, (this not going to be a fairy tale) I was hit by the fact that our gracious, mercy-full Father-God has an awe-full dream for us.  As the scriptures tell us that the love of our Gracious God has been poured into our hearts through the workings of The Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit, may I suggest, is God’s love in action.  It is, to use the words of Hildegard of Bingen, God’s hugging us. Individually, with a specific love, geared to the needs, challenges of the present moment.  We are ever and always in the hug, the embrace of a gentle Power, greater than ourselves. Coming to the realization , and the gradual acceptance of this reality is our life, long goal. How awe-full is it for us to accept and believe we are each and every one of us, the beloved daughter/son of a Loving Power.   

"We are encircled by the arms of the mystery of God."  Spiritual mysteries are NEVER solved.  All we can do, as spiritual beings immersed in the human condition, is allow ourselves to be drawn into the mystery.  After each encounter with mystery, we find we are enlivened and enlightened.  We are blessed with a new energy to face the challenge of being authentic human beings in a real messy world. We become authentically human, when we accept this ego defeating reality, we are dependent on a Higher Power. St Paul tells  that "of ourselves we can do nothing, but we can do all thing in Him Who strengthens us.  So then “with God all things are possible." That is the Power greater than ourselves.  A power Whose essence is love, "Unconditioned, Unlimited, and Unrestricted." A prodigal love we cannot “earn, deserve or qualify for." Fr. Rohr has posted this in his daily message:  "Deep within the recesses of our being, we are held….known…treasured..not out there somewhere, but in the very Wonder of Love…in the very seat of the heart….in the very core of the soul."