Kitty Crenshaw's Blog, page 10

Follow Beauty

Beloved, if I am to hear Your voice reminding me that in You there is nothing but love and that I was created out of Your first love for me, I must deliberately move into a place of solitude, silence, and prayer. Beauty will lead me there. If I am to learn to access the beauty within me, I must first learn to access the beauty around me.

You are, above all, Creator and Artist. The ineffable beauty of Your creation and the glorious works of artists created in Your image take me outside myself in a mystical way. Poets try to give it words. Scientists give it authority. Simply gazing on beauty for twenty seconds physically restructures my brain and leads to gratitude which nourishes my body and heals my heart. Always, beauty calls me back hungry for more.

A deeply centered spiritual life keeps me aware that my true dwelling place is not in this world, but in my sacred center, that place of splendor where You reside. Only awareness of Your indwelling Spirit makes it possible for me to live in the world without belonging to it. It is to Your first love that I must keep returning. Beauty will lead me there.

The gates of heaven are everywhere. I will return again and again to taste the wonder and wake to the beauty of Your supernal love within and all around me.

Help me keep my thoughts continually fixed on all that is authentic and real, honorable and admirable, beautiful and respectful, pure and holy, merciful and kind. And fasten my thoughts on all of Your glorious work, praising You always.1  

From The Hidden Life Awakened p 184

“All of these storms and every little thing, whether it was the soft mist on the fern, the tiny rivers the cleansing rain made in the earth, or the warmth of the sun as it came through the trees to highlight just one little spot of earth—whatever it was—there was always a sense of Presence, a sense of God manifesting Himself to me through creation. I was very sensitive to all of it. I would follow a mountain stream to listen to what the rapids had to say, being very careful not to step on any of the wildflowers, and I would stop to feel the soft texture of the mosses. Even the stones were giving me many messages. And what were they saying? ‘Come rest a minute, and I’ll interpret God’s love to you as my warmth enfolds you. I love you, I love you, I love you.’ All beauty says that.”

a holy dimension, an infinite shimmer. Lifting the veil of the known, peace flowing through a pure heart.

The persistent yearning that sweeps us all is a yearning to be known as we are and to be loved. When the wave of this yearning swells in our hearts and its crest is infused by wondrous Light, all our barriers are pushed aside. Beauty awakens within us. A momentous reality of God trembles through our veins, opening a glimpse of the Eternal. God answers with Love our trembling awe. Then comes a quiet wondering—how could we have lived in the shimmerings, the whispers, the intimations of such a Great Beauty and missed it? How could we be so blind?                    

Betty Walthour Skinner. Face to Face with God

January 21

Clinging to our personal opinions keeps us from seeing who God really is. ~Betty

Deliver Me From Evil

Pablo Picasso. The Blue Room. The Phillips Collection.

Father, You who are in heaven and hallowed in my heart, lead me away from temptation, deliver me from wickedness and evil, and forgive me the sin I still carry in my heart.

Evil, wickedness, sin—words that have been largely suppressed. But the frightening onslaught of recent events has brought them roaring back to the surface. God of the raging waves, please help us. Our foundations are shaking, and we are drowning in a sea of fear and anxiety. Nevertheless, Your all-powerful and ever-loving light of hope continues to glow within me. Cleanse and clarify it, then give me the courage to let it shine out into the darkness of our world.

God, I invite Your searching gaze into my heart. Examine me through and through; find out everything that may be hidden within me. Put me to the test and sift through all my anxious cares. See if there is any path of pain I’m walking on, and lead me back to Your glorious, everlasting ways—the path that brings me back to You. 1

Love is still hard. Am I holding any back from others, because I might lose some of my power or become a doormat? Am I adding any condemnation or negativity to the atmosphere? Am I still clinging to my opinions and biases? Am I still laboring under the illusion that I can control anything or anyone? If I am to offer Your light into this deepening darkness, I need awareness of my sins and radical trust in Your empowering mercy.

When something is not right in my body, pain alerts me; when something is not right with my soul, my conscience does the same, but so often it is easier to rationalize it away, or distract myself and simply wait it out until it goes quiet again. My conscience goes back to sleep, because I want it to.

Lord, keep me ever vigilant to the stealthy approach of wrong-doing and wrong-being. Let me depend ever more deeply on your sweet mercy and all-loving desire to recreate me. Do this for Jesus’ sake, who knows the weight of my sins, because He paid a dear price for them. I will humbly take them to the cross where His compassionate gaze will heal me. And when I have left them there in the wounds of Your Son, I will offer pure love to my hurting world. For Yours is the kingdom, the power, and glory. Amen.

From The Hidden Life Awakened p36

We wound others out of our wounds, and we sin out of our innocence. Nevertheless, we labor under the shadowy burden of a guilt that we can’t seem to shake. Sin is a word that doesn’t sit well in our culture anymore, and the practice of confession and repentance has become outmoded. Society has given us permission to run from our imperfections and hide our transgressions even from ourselves, but by not seeing them we are kept in bondage to them. The world’s great traditions have always understood the primary importance of confession and repentance. These practices mysteriously and wondrously free one from the bondage of shame, negative thinking, and behavior, by bringing them into the light so they can be offered in repentance to a compassionate and forgiving God, bringing cleansing redemption and hope of change to the penitent and ultimately to the world.

January 7

Hope lingers in the shadows of our darkest times. Hope is precisely what we have when we have nothing.~Betty

Change and Growth are Synonymous

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Vassily Kandisky. Autumn in Murnau. Private collection.

Loving God, I realize now that I have to be open to everything if I want to change and grow more deeply into the love and knowledge of You who are everything and in everything. I can only move towards wholeness by recognizing and turning off the old head tapes that have programmed me for far too long, so that I can hear You speaking to me always in newness. Faith brought me to love and joy and wholeness, but fear has kept me clinging to my old ways and small opinions. I desperately want to see and let go of all of my emotional security blankets in order to move back to an open, childlike trust in You—however You chose to reveal Yourself to me.

You are God, and I am not. You are in the smallest details of life—how could You not be? You create and sustain all of life, yet my heart continues to interrogate You rather than contemplate You. “Why do you allow so much suffering and injustice in the world? Why are You allowing this evil in our country? Why did you let this happen to me? Why don’t You answer me?” I continue to seriously think I can break into Your great and powerful darkness with my oh, so finite understanding. I’m tired and I want to change—please help me. The suffering way of Jesus is total willingness, total acceptance, and total trust. I want to live like that; trusting that new life flows out of the choices and changes I make, and all I let go of.

Gracious Lord, open my eyes to my radical interconnection with You and to that mystical sense of belonging to all things in the deep intimacy of Your perfect love. Such a relationship lifts me to a plane of truth and trust that neither sorrow, nor loss, nor brutality, nor horror can disturb. Intensify my desire to see You pervading everything, holding it all together by the cords of Your creative love. Help me to live into this sacred understanding by embracing my pain and allowing time for the fire of love to melt and merge me into oneness with You and the suffering world. Giving such loving attention to You—the One—is at the same time giving loving and compassionate attention to the many. This sacrificial life can only flow out of a heart that has persevered through much suffering and has found its way to the Source.

I commit to an ever greater opening up to Your love that is at once the source, transforming power, and joy of all human existence; imminent, transcendent, and beyond. It will require giving words to my most intimate experiences, communicating as honestly as possible all of my suffering, sorrow, and pain, as well as my peace and my joy. It will require that I yield layer after layer of the mistrust, anger, and pain that has encased my heart for so long. Thus I will come at last to see that my desire for You is in fact an echo of Your far more encompassing and passionate desire for me. I will become a living witness to the awakening of Your divine life in me—to what I have seen with new eyes, heard with new ears, and loved with a new heart—offering others a glimpse of light in the midst of their confusion, darkness and pain. It is the love, hope, and encouragement of You in Whom all is lost yet all is found.

From The Hidden Life Awakened pp 91-92:

“There is within us all this strong desire for the freedom to live and be whole, but it takes enormous courage and discipline to make the choice to trust God and do the difficult work this requires. Taking those initial steps toward change can be so frightening and painful that we often quit before we have a chance to experience any healing. The old voices in our head tell us it won’t work, things will only get worse, and we’re wasting our time. The new voice in our heart tells us that if we don’t change, we won’t grow, so dare to let go, trust God, and make the choice to change, regardless of how hard it is.

Change and growth are synonymous. We have a choice, and our choice is critical because it is either life giving or life draining. Failure to dare to change keeps us trapped in old behavior patterns that obviously haven’t worked, so why not open and take a chance on trust? Old behavior patterns are so hard to break because they are deeply rooted in our childhood wounds. The more we develop new behavior patterns, though, the easier the work becomes, and we slowly begin to see our life bear fruit.”

Click here to watch Betty talk more about turning off the old head tapes.

December 24

Wait in your pain, and keep watch for the Light. ~Betty

A Christmas Letter From Betty

Dear Ones,

I sit here ever so quietly with my dear dear Lord pondering so great a revelation, so perfect a love gift from God, as the marvel of the Incarnation. I wonder how the joy of such a marvel seems to have vanished in the noise of the world and in the hearts of its people.

Joy is at the heart of the way of Jesus. He came into the world on a high note of joy, and He left the world bestowing the sublime gift of joy.

The angel said to them, “Don’t be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people.“1

Jesus said to them, “I have spoken these things to you so that My joy may be in you and your joy may be complete.”2

Joy is different from happiness. It is never disconnected from sorrow, but always hidden within it. It offers us the freedom to move with our suffering into a new and deeper kind of joy, because we are not alone in it now—God is with us.

Emmanuel, God with us, is the heart of Christ filled to overflowing with the desire to love us, aflame with the fire to warm us, to give us a home, a sense of belonging, and a refuge in which we feel deeply safe. Emmanuel invites us to a whole new way of being, of loving, and of joy-filled living in spite of the pain. Let us respond to this gentle invitation by preparing our hearts to receive more and more of the life, light, and love contained in this gift of the simple coming of the Child. Such a Divine gift cannot help but call forth celebration.

What is our part in the preparation to receive this joyous gift? Let us humble ourselves and open more and more to the possibility and purity of Christ’s recreative movement in us. Let us prepare a place for Him, longing and waiting and watching for His birth in us. Let us intensify our desire to wait quietly and expectantly for Him with Mary, to humbly seek Him with the shepherds in our long dark night, to offer our precious gifts to Him with the wise men, and to behold Him with gentle awe in the manger of our hearts.

Thus, the Christmas gift, the transformation of our human nature into the likeness of the One who is given may be fulfilled, empowering us to live our ordinary lives with extraordinary love and surpassing joy.

In His all-compelling love then, a simple message yet ever so profound, from His heart through my heart to your heart.

Merry Christmas,

Betty

Oh, Jesus, precious Shepherd
What will You say to me this Christmas?
What have You prepared for me at Your Nativity?
 
Will the noise of temporal things
  silence the Heavenly Host,
  the angelic song of praise,
  the Infant cry of glory that bids me come,
  that longs to claim me, to rename me
  Chosen, Blessed, Beloved?
 
Will the clutter, the glitter of the world, blind me? 
Will I fail to find You in lowliness in the crib? 
  You, Holy Child of God, 
  You, His Gift of unending birth,
  of everlasting joy, of peace on earth.
 
Oh, Jesus, precious Shepherd, this Christmas
  Help me to find You.
  Enable me to hear You. 
  Give me Your Gift.
  Be born anew each instant
  in the manger of my heart.
 
                                   BWS

December 10

The fight is not against yourself or your circumstances, but against your negative thinking. ~Betty

The Mercying Love of God

Ivan Rabuzin. Primeval Flower

Forgiveness is such a difficult thing, Lord. Forgiveness of self, forgiveness of family members, forgiveness of political, cultural, and institutional evil, and yes, forgiveness of You for not giving us the life we expected. But, I also hear many miraculous stories of rape victims and concentration camp survivors who have somehow been able to forgive their tormentors of the most horrendous evil. You did that from the cross. Why then is it so difficult for us whose lives are rooted in and totally dependent on Your mercy to forgive those we are most closely tied to—our family and closest friends? Can we just talk about that?

How often You must have to listen to these utterly predictable complaints. “I am still so hurt by what my parents did to me all those years ago. My sister is horrible and will never change. My friend treated me so badly. It’s not right. I don’t need any of them; I have made a wonderful life without them.” And yet, there are the ubiquitous entreaties for forgiveness at the bedsides of death and the dark regrets for never having asked.

That darkness is in me too—it is called unforgiveness. You have made it clear that if I choose to hold on to my resentment and anger, You cannot set me free from the knots of my painful and twisted relationships. Will I confront that darkness and allow my heart to expand, or will I let it continue to shrivel from demanding love rather than offering it? It is well to remember that forgiveness was never a choice. It is an imperative, a command.

“Jesus, how many times do I have to forgive them when they keep offending me? Seven times?

Jesus answered, ‘Not seven times, but seventy times seven times!’ “1

Forgiveness from the heart is very, very difficult. In fact, without You it is impossible. Unforgiveness is unforgiveable. Without forgiveness, there can be no genuine love and no reconciliation leading to healed relationships. Throughout Scripture You call me to live in a constant state of forgiveness. Jesus lived in forgiveness and Jesus died in forgiveness. Jesus is the embodiment of love. How can I, in my broken humanity, ever become free enough within myself to choose to love and forgive those who have wounded me so deeply?

I am beginning to catch a glimpse of this great mystery of forgiveness by listening intently for Your gentle, soft inner voice calling me home to Your heart which is mercy. Your mercying love has existed from the beginning of time, long before human love ever touched any of us. Forgiveness is made possible by knowing that only Your love can offer me what human love is incapable of offering. The great tragedy of human love is that it always wounds, because human love is imperfect and tainted by needs and unfulfilled desires.

My life is rooted in Your love, and without it I know I cannot live. You alone can teach me unconditional forgiveness as I choose to turn my heart towards You in prayer. Such profound and healing forgiveness comes from a heart that does not look for or demand anything for itself-a heart that is free both to forgive and to be forgiven. It is this Divine forgiveness that I, as Your chosen, am called to practice again and again in the ordinary, difficult, everyday circumstances You have put me.

So, I sit in the deep quiet with You and ponder my own inner space. Do I hang on to humiliations, rehearsing the scenarios, and so keep myself paralyzed by them? Do I give space to voices that continually demean and judge those who have hurt me? Injustice is hard, but prayer creates space for grace. Again and again, day after day, month after month, I come to ask for Your help to find and hold myself in Your mercy. As I continue to come and continue to choose to let go of my resentment and desire for retribution—however fair such punishment may seem—my focus slowly begins to shift to Your mercy, and I find myself much more tolerant of the failings of others. The actual wound is never completely forgotten, but the power to hold me trapped in a continual replay of the event is broken. My heart slowly begins to open to a new way of seeing and loving. As my focus changes, my heart attitude begins to change from one of resentment to one of gratitude. I find myself breathing fresher air and moving in greater freedom. Then one day the resentment is just gone. I can love them anyway. I begin to live in compassion embraced by You, whose name is Mercy. I am free.

Unconditional forgiveness is the only authentic ground of any human relationship. You place no limits on Your forgiving love, so to forgive is to participate in the mystery of Your divine life. You take the mud and silt of our common humanity, transform it by grace, resting all on the foundation stone of forgiveness. Might I open my heart ever wider to receive Your love, rebuilding my life on this foundation stone of forgiveness and mercy.     

Watch Betty share more about God’s mercying Love

November 26

Faith carries us along on a tide of God’s promises beyond the mire and desolation of our despair.~Betty