Kitty Crenshaw's Blog, page 13

What Would It Be Like?

Berthe Morisot. Dans Le Parc. Petit Palais, Paris

‘I am loved by God more than I can either conceive or understand.’ Let this fill all your soul…and never leave you. You will soon see that this is the way to find God. 

Henri de Tourville

What would it be like to live and move and have our being in the knowledge of God’s all-encompassing love for us?

Growing in this love relationship is the core of our spiritual life. Love is everything. Without love permeating everything we think and say and do, nothing of eternal significance is birthed. We must recognize and abandon every false way of obtaining love that has enslaved us for so long and trust unreservedly that we are loved. But how?

It is only through faith in the descending love of God that we will be set free. In all four Gospels, but most especially in the writings of John, the message is clear: God gives us the choice to journey through life as one who is valued and loved. It is this truth that dawned on those who met and spent time with Jesus, who watched Him as He encountered damaged and broken people, suffering and perplexed people, and told them simply, from the purist of all hearts, that they were loved. This is the astonishing mystery : the transcendent Creator of the galaxies, the oceans, and all created things knew it was impossible for us to grasp the immensity of His love for us, so He sent Jesus to be the incarnation of that Love.

“Long ago, even before He made the world, God chose us to be His very own through what Christ would do for us; He decided then to make us holy in His eyes, without a single fault—we who stand before Him covered with His love. His unchanging plan has always been to adopt us into His own family by sending Jesus Christ to die for us. And He did this because He wanted to.” Ephesians 1:4-5

It is well to remember that your worth, your preciousness, and your uniqueness are not given to you by those with whom you live and work in chronological time. They are given to you by God, the One Who has chosen you and calls you His Beloved child. Despite life’s unpredictable and often cruel circumstances, never doubt you are deeply loved by God.

“You are my Beloved” reveals the most intimate truth about you. It expresses the core truth of all created things. The eyes of Love see everything as precious, with infinite beauty, and of eternal value. God delights in you. In some mysterious way, you matter to God because nothing, no one in all of creation can reflect His love back to Him in exactly the same way you can.

It is in prayer that we first begin to recognize our unique worth, for it is in prayer that Jesus gives us His Spirit. It is the Spirit that opens our hearts to a new dimension of love and a greater capacity for loving. So persevere and endure when you are struggling in your circumstances, trusting that Love is always with you and growing in you. Remember Whose and Who you are. Come soak and nourish yourself in Love. Live continually in that Love, and let it fill your soul.

June 11

I have come to know through the decades that the essence of Christian spirituality does not lie in entertaining a concept of God, but rather lies in articulating a memory of moments illuminated by god’s love and His presence. ~Betty

God Is Not Far

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Photo gift from TimRobinsonCreative

God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us.    Acts 17:27

God is invisible, but God is not hiding—we just can’t see Him yet. Everything that is visible is a creation of God. The Transcendent Creator must then be invisible, but is always making Himself known to us in the magnificence of creation. Jesus is what we can see of God.

We are the baby in the darkness of the womb who cannot see its mother but lives within her protective warmth, touching the edges of her, hearing her voice, sensing her presence. We can only wait until, in the fullness of time, we are born into the world and are finally embraced by the one in whom we have lived and moved and had our being since the moment of our conception. 

Now, born at last, feet grounded firmly on the earth, we watch for numinous shadows of our Creator’s presence in everything around us. We grow into what Jesus referred to as “blessed eyes that see and ears that hear” 1 by tamping down our need to interrogate the mystery and coming again to sit at His knee as the little children did, simply reveling in the goodness of His presence with us. 

“The sound of beautiful music touches our soul and brings us together to a higher place just for a moment. Certain smells and sights connect us with our memories and reassure us of the continuity of time and the constancy of creation. The sweet smell of a tree is good. The feel of its bark is good. The sight of its sheltering strength is good. The sound of the wind ruffling its leaves is good. It is all good. God is total goodness, and these moments bring us in touch with Him and the oneness of all things. We all have a deep sense that there is much, much more to life than the way our ego is asking us to live it, but when we are given glimpses of the reality awaiting us, we tend to miss them because we are so busy. The More we pay attention, and the more we desire to move into this divine world, the more of these moments we will have, and finally the Light will break through.”

The Hidden Life Awakened pp 184-185

In the fullness of our time, we will be born again into ultimate supernal and eternal beauty, awakening in the loving arms of our trancendent Mother/Father. We will at last see face to face. 

Until then, we wait in faith and hope, and we pay attention to the myriad signs of God’s presence with us. 

May 28

The contemplative life of humility flows from a pure heart that has persevered through much suffering and found its way to the Source. ~Betty

Stillness

Francisco de Zurbarán. Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose. Norton Simon Museum.

Nothing is so one with the nature of God as stillness. To live a spiritual life is to live in the presence of God—to be still and know. Stillness is a deliberate act of the will, our response to Jesus’ love call to come and listen, learn, and abide. If we will discipline our minds to still our anxious thoughts and quietly keep watch with Him, the journey will begin to unravel its magnificent mystery.

All of life flows in an intimate proximity to the sacred. It is this proximity that endows everything that exists with ultimate significance, with supernal beauty and mystery.1 We live amidst the shimmerings and the whispers of such a Great Beauty, but the fog of inattention, fear, and anxiety descends over the eyes of our heart and obscures our view of Reality.

It is the fog that is the illusion.

Stillness allows the Holy Spirit space to awaken us and lead us out of the impenetrable mist up onto the high plateau of freedom and love. So, we make the choice to enter into refreshing stillness, quieting the negative voices, opening attentively, allowing the Light to pour into us and slowly dispel the fog that has crept in. Beauty awakens within us, and we become aware of the movement of God in the depths of our being—we remember Whose and who we are.

We become completely transparent to Love like a windowpane, so clean the Light can flow through unhindered. Empty now of our own thoughts, emotions, will and illusions, we are in a passive state before God, completely submissive, surrendered, and receptive—we have abandoned ourselves into the hands of God. At last, the messenger has become the message. “I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.” We finally see that everything in our lives—all of the pain and all of the beauty—has been woven together into the huge tapestry of divine love. The will is disciplined, the old voices are quieted, the heart is surrendered, and we hear only the voice of the Beloved saying, ‘I love you, I love you; I have loved you since the beginning of time. I will not abandon you.’

The Hidden Life Awakened page 215

Such an intimate awakening is conversion, and it happens over and over and over, until at last we grasp that the meaning of life is held in the wondrous mystery of God’s love. Now we can move with Jesus from the cloistered seclusion of stillness and prayer back into the mundane chaos that waits to engulf us—but it isn’t frightening anymore—it becomes an opportunity to offer presence and compassion in the midst of it.

May 14

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. ~Betty

A Letter From Betty

Dear Ones,

Our quest is simply to know God. This encounter with the living God is what we are hungry for. We have been created by God to need God and have been given an infinite capacity for Him. Our soul is the holy temple within us where Christ lives and where we meet the Divine. As we draw near to God in the hiddenness of prayer, He begins to reveal Himself to us. God is our destiny. We are His prayer, His thoughts. He is hopelessly lost in His love and longing for us. When the spark of our own longing is set aglow by a glimpse of such unspeakable longing, we are drawn toward His presence. As our longing intensifies, the Light brightens within us, thinning the veil. Our longing becomes our belonging—one with the longing of God.

Prayer is simply an offering of our hearts to God, for we truly have nothing more to give. Prayer is where it all begins, and I’m sure it is where it all ends. When we pray we descend into the depths of our being to be with Him in the silence and stillness—listening, waiting, and resting. Silence is the heart’s certainty of the captivating Presence of the Divine. It is a breathless quiet in which the Ineffable within us communes with the Ineffable beyond us. Prayer is an encounter with the living God. We engage with Him in friendship, in conversation, in thought, getting lost in mystery, wonder, love, and praise. In prayer, we are submitting and allowing this encounter with Love to change us.

As we look on Love, we are reshaped by Love into the likeness of Christ. He gazes His purity into us. Our part is to stop, turn; open ourselves to receive His loving gaze. The quest to become like Him can happen only when we are with Him. How could it happen any other way? It is the discipline of returning in quiet and stillness to simply be with Him in the deep silence, allowing His Light to pour into us, listening in silence to the whisperings of the Spirit that opens the possibility of our transformation. Gradually, our will is disciplined, our mind is stilled, our heart is surrendered, Spirit touches spirit, and thus we experience His Presence. These are the moments when we come face-to-face with God.

May our heart’s desire for God be intensified as we respond to the Love waiting within us, continually coming to Him in prayer. ~Betty

Excerpted from The Hidden Life Awakened pages 186-187

April 30

Fear keeps us disconnected from the Source from which true love and freedom flows. ~Betty

Be Not Afraid.

Julian of Norwich by David Holgate by the West Door of the Anglican Cathedral, Norwich, England

Jesus’ admonition, “Be not afraid.”, does not mean that we cannot have fear. We all have fear, but we do not have to lead from a place of fear. Fear forecloses our potential to realize the fullness of all God longs to give us. If we will simply make our fears known to God and then do the inner work of naming, claiming and taming them, even our fears will be used for good and bring us to God. Betty learned this from her spiritual friend and mentor, Julian of Norwich.

Dame Julian of Norwich was a fourteenth-century Christian mystic who lived through history’s most fearsome and catastrophic pandemic—The Black Plague. Fifty million people died in Europe; half of the population. In the midst of that horror, she was given a series of sixteen revelations by God and then spent the rest of her life writing them down in the enduring classic, Revelations of Divine Love. It is the earliest surviving book in the English language written by a woman and marked by the depth of its theology, the breadth of its compassion, and the unrivaled beauty of its language. Julian’s humble vision continues to inspire and encourage us today, a promise that in the midst of our own sorrow and suffering, God’s compassion and great love is always flowing over towards us, and that “All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.”

Summer after summer, day after day, I read everything I could about Julian. I was deeply impressed by her simplicity and her tender and intimate relationship with the Beloved. With sweet humility, she would always preface the things she wrote about God with ‘As I understand it,’ and she would refer to Him as ‘our courteous Lord.’ While pondering a tiny hazelnut in her hand, Julian experienced a profound yet simple awareness: God created this, God loved this, and God will care for it. From Julian, I learned that every circumstance in my life would work together for good whether it felt good or not.

Betty Skinner in The Hidden Life Awakened pg 194

Julian writes of four kinds of fear that lead us into God, Who is Love. That fear and love belong together may be difficult for us to grasp, but Julian assures us that it must be this way. “Love and fear are siblings rooted in us by the goodness of our Maker. Reverent fear pertains to the lordship and fatherhood of God as love pertains to the goodness of God.”

The first kind of fear she describes is simple fright. The second is fear of pain; the lingering fear of someone or something with the power to hurt us that streams from deep wounds we received growing up and that strongly influences the way we perceive God. Until we shed this fear of a vindictive God, we will have difficulty seeing Him as Divine Lover Whose love heals and casts out fear. The third kind of fear is what Julian calls doubtful fear. It comes when we begin to see God’s goodness and our own darkness and wonder how we can ever measure up. If left unchecked, it can lead to despair. But, says Julian, “God wants to have it turned into love through true knowledge of Love.” When we begin to receive God’s loving response to our fright, pain and despair, we can begin to grow into Julian’s fourth kind of fear: reverent fear. Reverent fear draws us into the sacred Presence of God Who softens all other fear through the sweetness of His Love.

It is well to remember that we all have places of fear inside of us, but we have other places, too, of faith, trust, and love that we must learn to listen to. Everything is the voice of Love, even unspeakable pain. Prayerfully, might we approach our lives with reverent fear, trusting that this will bring us to the sweetness of God’s love, fearful only of one thing: that we might miss His unspeakable goodness.

Be Not Afraid.

To hear Betty talk more about Julian, click on this video page link.

April 16

Painful circumstances that seem so defeating are most often sacred gifts holding the seeds of our healing. ~Betty