Kitty Crenshaw's Blog, page 12

A Letter From Betty

Dear Ones,

Here in the silence of my tiny room at the nursing home, I sit lonely. The diminishments and pain of aging continue unremitting. I cannot hear, my eyesight is failing rapidly, and now, my joy and comfort in the companionship of my children and dear friends has been taken away by this pandemic. I am locked in. As we all endure this new sorrow and uncertainty; as we seek common ground in a world shattered by disease, hostility, and violence; as we stumble under the weight of loss and grief, how can we know and believe that God is with us?

Oh, Good Jesus,
  Hear me, hold me, love me
    in this, the season of
      my spirit’s loss and grieving,
    in the anguish of my waiting,
    in the silence of familiar voices gone,
    in the pain of all the change,
    in the twilight of my years
      before Perfection dawns
        and I am gone.
 
 
Oh, Good Jesus,
  I try the letting go,
    to understand my weakness,
    to trust You in my darkness,
    to make room for Your grace to heal.
  Yet there is no return,
    only the echo of my own crying.
  It seems I, too, with You,
    am caught between the nails.

My dear Friend, Jesus, eases the intensity of the pain and helps me stay focused on love, enabling me to go forward and release everything to him, knowing that no matter how circumstances unfold, all shall be well. Jesus was always talking about love—nothing else mattered to him. Everything he did was about setting the example of love. He fed the poor and healed the desperate sick—never to show off his power or gain a greater following, but because he was moved to tears by their suffering. He refused to bend to the hypocrisy of the religious without love. When an angry mob of churchmen threw a woman caught in adultery at his feet, he rose powerfully to her defense in a very volatile situation, daring the one without sin to throw the first stone. After they slunk away, he helped her to her feet and, totally without judgement, called her to a higher way. The way of love.

On the quiet Thursday evening before Passover, Jesus, knowing it would be their last time together on earth, called his little band of friends together for supper. When they came in, he bent down and tenderly washed their dusty feet to demonstrate for them once more, the great humility of love. After supper, he did another strange thing—he lifted a loaf of bread and told them it was his body which would be sacrificed for them. Then he raised his glass of wine and told them it was his blood which would soon be poured out for them. The very last thing he said to them before he went to crucifixion and death for them was, “ My dear friends, I only have a brief time left to be with you. So, I give you a new commandment: Love each other just as much as I have loved you.”1

Love. The great imperative is to love. Loving others is the only thing that lasts and the only thing that changes anything. Such a simple thing, yet we miss it. As God’s children, chosen and beloved, we are asked to watch carefully and learn from Jesus how to receive the love, and then go out offer it to the hungry hearts of others. We are asked to stand together in the midst of a broken world, redemptively available, open and vulnerable to all its sorrow, suffering and pain. Our goal is to be true to Him, to carry out His plan, to be captives in the procession of His triumphs.

Oh, Good Jesus,
in this holy place of crucifixion,
broaden the boundaries of my heart.
Soften the hard places that
defend, define, deny.
Teach my heart to love.
Make it a refuge for others who, too,
are caught between the nails.

BWS

August 20

Will you trust that in the experience of your change and loss, you are being prepared for a deeper love? ~Betty

The Descending Way

André Grioux. Forest Interior with a Waterfall. National Gallery of Art.

Humility is the way of Love. The descending way of humility is the movement toward the true self’s realization. It is the highest virtue and the root of every other virtue. Humility is that lowliness of heart which seeks nothing for itself and is entirely dependent on God. Humility is an unself-conscious way of being and loving. This desire for lowliness has been too little regarded by the church and the culture, because it has been too little understood. Surprisingly, when we come to this sense of our entire nothingness, we come to everything.

Seeking the lowest place is in constant conflict with our pride. Pride is the false self’s illusions and conclusions which promote in us an inordinate and blinding self-consciousness. The descending way of humility is a movement towards unself-consciousness. It is the exposing of the false in us in order to perceive the true. If we will continually choose the way of humility, we will finally find our way onto the wide plateau of freedom and holy poverty.

We have to intensely desire such a holy gift, asking God for it always, but we must know that the path of humility goes through humiliation. The endurance of insults and humiliation, inflicted on us by our pride, have one indispensable condition: our consent to suffer the pain silently and alone for the sake of Love’s way. Gently yet painfully, this consent brings us to the lowest place, that empty place within where the Holy One and the human one meet in tenderest love and forgiveness.

When we feel humiliated by something or someone, we don’t react, we stay silent and listen to what the Holy Spirit is saying to us about ourselves. Then, rather than staying trapped in guilt and self-flagellation, we allow the situation to bring us to new self knowledge and a deeper place of love. In the full embrace of the reality of who we are and who others are, all illusion and deception is left behind. We come to know ourselves in our truth and others in their truth, in their brokenness and pain, and in the beauty of our common humanity.

The self-emptying of the Incarnate God is the ultimate expression of humility and the most compelling invitation to empty ourselves of all that is false in us. The emptier we are before God, the more complete the inflow of the gift of Divine Glory can be. Now, with a pure and whole heart, we begin to see God. This is the gift of indwelling humility and the essence of the human and the Divine Life within us.

It is difficult for us to grasp the truth that Jesus came not to astonish us with the great power and high visibility of God, but rather to show us the way of hiddenness and humility. In contrast to our culture that applauds upward mobility, the inner life affirms that God’s path is the descending way. Humility is the way of Love. The descending way of humility is the movement toward the true self’s realization. It leads us to a deeper understanding that, in His eyes, the most significant is often the most hidden.

This contemplative life of humility flows from a pure heart that has persevered through much suffering and found its way to the Source. When we finally come to see that our desire for God is an echo of God’s far more encompassing and passionate desire for us, we can offer others a glimpse of light in the midst of their confusion, darkness, and pain. It is the love, hope, and encouragement of the One in Whom all is lost, yet all is found.

The Hidden Life Awakened p.xv

August 6

As we drop our illusions and move into love, things don’t affect us personally anymore, so we don’t have to defend ourselves, define other people, or deny reality anymore. Now we are free. ~Betty

Transform Your World From Within

Georgia O’Keefe. Lake George Reflection.

Love that transforms can only come from within. Our heart is at the center of our being human. There, our deepest thoughts, intuitions, and emotions find their source. It is also there that we are most alienated from ourselves and consequently, from others and from the world. We know little or nothing of our own hearts. We keep our distance as though we are afraid of what we might find there. If we ask ourselves why we think, feel, and act in a certain way, we often have no answer, thus proving to be strangers in our own house. We fail to know the beauty of who we truly are. That is the painful part of being human.

Jesus sends the Holy Spirit into our hearts to comfort and empower us, but finds there is little room for Him. Heavy walls and deep clutter has collected there from our endless attempts to fill and fortify them with anything we think might protect us from pain. If we choose not to wake up out of our self-imposed darkness, we will remain isolated and limited in our capacity to relate to others and the world in a compassionate way.

Awareness is the key to change, and attention is vital. Our path to hope and wholeness is first to become aware of our negative clutter and then to consciously begin to clear it out—little by little, one choice at a time. It is a long and arduous journey, and we fail over and over again, but growth is never a straight line and God will always forgive us, using everything for our good. Nothing is wasted. Slowly, we open a holy vacancy within us that Christ, our Redeemer, can begin to fill with Himself. “Christ in you, the hope of glory.”1

This work will require a lifetime of perseverance, discipline, and intense desire, but the magnificent mystery is that Jesus wants to meet us in the seclusion of our hearts, stilling our fears, and making God’s love and our truest and deepest self known to us. As our inner life expands, our outer life will expand in blessing to others. If we will commit deeply to this great work of love, holiness will come, and with holiness the gift of mercy for all people.

Our humble opening to the Highest Good will at last become a treasure in the hearts of others, inspiring them by the sacrificial beauty of our own poured out lives. We have become the still point in the midst of the chaos of our families, our work, and our relationships. We have become blessed peacemakers and reflectors of God’s Love—transforming our world from within.

A Further Word From Betty:

The transformation we all long for occurs in the intimate embrace of our Divine Lover, in the still, hidden places of our soul. It is here that we become real—the authentic self that God created. Becoming real is an unlearning, the process of emptying ourselves of all that we have clung to and been conditioned to by our culture. As we gradually do this painful work of emptying ourselves of our ego, illusions, perceptions, and aversions, we begin to see Reality, and in seeing Reality we become real. In the emptying, we are creating a holy vacancy in our souls allowing God to fill it with Himself. We are detaching from our mind’s control over our lives just long enough to open a tiny gap where Spirit can touch spirit, where we can begin to hear the voice of Love speaking to us. It is in this holy vacancy that we encounter Love, listen to the voice of Love, and celebrate the presence of Love. This Love is the center and source of our spiritual life and this Voice has a new and deeper message, one we must begin to trust. As we allow this holy vacancy—this little pool that is our hearts—to be filled up with the River of Living Water, our lives will naturally begin to overflow in blessing to others.               

The Hidden Life Awakened p.200

July 23

When we defend ourselves, define another person, or deny our own culpability, we cease to see things as they really are. ~Betty

Pray For Deeper Acceptance

Gaspare Diziani. Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane. Metropolitan Museum of Art

God lives only in reality—in what is. We then, who yearn to live in the presence of God, must also live in what is. We learn to do this by praying always for deeper acceptance. This acceptance is lived out by our willingness to humble ourselves and allow God to enter our life in any way God chooses, knowing that all shall be well even though we don’t yet see how. Until we make the choice to deeply trust God’s good will for us and let go of how we think our lives should look and how the people in our lives should behave, we will never know freedom. This doesn’t mean our choice won’t be painful, but deeper acceptance of however God enters our lives will soften us and enable us to move into a new place of healing in spite of the pain.

Waking up to this truth is a process that continues all of our lives. It calls for a constant letting go of our biases, grievances, regrets, preconceived ideas, and old patterns of thinking and acting. It calls for letting go of others and allowing them to have their own journey and experience their own struggles, trusting God to be as creative with them as He has been with us. It calls for accepting them where they are now and loving them right there. Without this, relationships break under the weight of the expectations we put on them. If we will stop fighting the reality we find ourselves in and accept in love and trust what is, we will find the weight begins to lift from us and from our relationships. We will at last be freed from the slavery of our expectations, regrets, and illusion of control.

When we finally come to this, our minds begin to awaken to our hearts and to our true self hidden beneath the clutter we have hoarded there to protect us from the pain of the world. Accepting all that God brings will awaken and fan the flame of the Holy Spirit within our hearts, enabling us to see and befriend our yearning, to live into our longing rather than struggling to resolve it, and to live in the spaciousness of our emptiness rather than constantly trying to fill it. We learn to wait in deep humility and patience for the veil of our illusions to lift, allowing us to see and accept our reality and, in seeing, to choose rightly.

The inner space that is cleared by this deep acceptance, is, at its root, a matter of trust in God’s goodness and timing. Making the choice to accept everything that comes with awareness and full responsibility sets us free, moves us towards wholeness, and makes us real. This is our work—to become whole people in the world of our reality.

The suffering way of Jesus is willingness, acceptance, and trust. As Jesus lived, so are we to live, trusting that new life flows out of the choices we make and all that we let go of. It takes a great willingness to choose to surrender all of our sorrows, all of our needs, all of our fears, and trust the intimate love of a very present God. But if we will choose this descending way of humility, we will find our way to freedom.

May the Source of Love fill, inspire, and bless you as you make the choice for life.

The Hidden Life Awakened p.92

July 9

Remember and be encouraged; darkness can never overwhelm the light. ~Betty

A Letter From Betty

Dear Ones,

God created us in love and longs to recreate us in mercy. He is calling us to wholeness. Wholeness comes when we choose to commit to doing our part to develop and integrate all three parts of our being: a healthy body, a serene mind, and a powerful spirit. Each must be nourished separately.

If you will look at your life honestly and gently without judgement to see in which of these three areas you are out of balance, you can begin your work of integration. Are you using too much of your time and energy trying to have a perfect body? Are you retreating from your reality into too much spirituality or church work? Are your intellectual and political opinions and career pursuits taking your focus away from your higher calling to love?

Being and becoming a whole person in the world of your reality will require a tremendous amount of trust, discernment, and self-discipline, but its gifts are freedom, courage, joy, and limitless love. All of this is freely given, but you have to desire it, reach for it, and stretch yourself toward it.

In my own life, I was totally out of balance in all three areas, because I was so out of touch with the Spirit of God who brings us into balance. I believed the critical voices in my head that told me I was worthless, so the areas I could control became a way to feel better about myself. As a result, I focused on the aspect of myself where I felt most competent, which was my identity as a good Christian, while completely neglecting the physical and mental aspects of my being. These things began to enslave me, until I finally broke.

From The Hidden Life Awakened:

Self-hatred, so insidiously embedded in my wounded heart was the greatest enemy of my spiritual life, because it constantly contradicted the voice within that was calling me beloved. I never felt worthy enough. The very nature of the ego is its insatiable desire for significance: it will always want more. So, we obsessively drive ourselves to exercise, starve, or overfeed our bodies, compulsively drive ourselves to more academic or financial success, or drown ourselves in good works; all in a frenetic attempt to satisfy that inner critic constantly telling us we are not good enough.

For me, the movement toward healing required a complete surrender. God is always saying to us, ‘If you will give Me everything, I will give you everything.’ It is a constant coming, a constant offering, and a constant struggle to let go in order to move to a deeper communion with God. I knew my life was out of control, and I needed to change because what I was doing wasn’t working.

So, my dear friends, I pray that all the component parts of your lives, what you are learning in your pain and in your joy, might flow together in union with God who is Love, with the Son who is Life, and with the Holy Spirit who is Truth. If I could, I would give you my own healing, but I cannot. All I can do is love and encourage you. This I can do.

In the warmth of His recreative Love, I remain your faithful friend,

Betty

Click here to watch a short video of Betty talking more about healing the whole person

June 25

Mystery is that place beyond our capacity to control; therefore, its acceptance feels like a fundamental assault on our way of protecting ourselves in the world. ~Betty