Kitty Crenshaw's Blog, page 16

November 21

As we allow the little pool that is our hearts to be filled with the River of Living Water, our lives naturally begin to overflow in blessing to others. ~Betty

The Flow of Gratitude

Gratitude is the infinite giving and receiving of love between seekers and God. Gratefulness is prayerfulness. Prayerfulness is prayer without ceasing. Gratitude is all we can offer in return for our awakening to the great Mystery in which we live and move and have our being.

The Hidden Life Awakened page 203

In the Gospel accounts, Jesus never did miracles to prove himself or his power. Always, he was moved by tenderness and deep compassion for the sick and broken, the poor and outcast, because he knew their pain and was intimately acquainted with their sorrows. Usually, after he healed someone, he would tell them not to tell anyone about the miracle he had done for them. Once he healed ten lepers of the life-long scourge that had disfigured them and made them complete outcasts. “But the other nine, where are they?” Jesus sadly asked the only leper of the ten who returned to thank Him.1The rest had happily received their healing and gone excitedly on their way.

Not many of us return to enter into the flow of gratitude when a prayer is answered. We are excited, and we forget. But if we will consciously focus on remembering to return to thank God for even the smallest gift, our relationship can be a constant flow of perfect giving and perfect receiving. God is the giver. The gift is love. We are the receivers. We are the thanks givers. The gift is loving gratitude. God is the receiver.

A further word from Betty:

I see a picture in my heart all the time of the sweet, sweet relationship between the Father and the Son. The Father, so willing to pour Himself out for the Son and the Son so willing to receive it and give it all back in gratitude—no strings, no conditions, no counting the cost.

We, as His chosen, must endeavor to live our lives in this sharing flow of love. How do we get caught up in this endless spiral of love? By returning to God to say thank you. Our gesture of gratitude completes the exchange, accelerates the spiral in which the giver gets thanked and so becomes the receiver. The joy of giving and receiving rises higher and higher until our gratitude becomes the reflection of God’s mercy. 

It is important for us to remember that all that is is a divine gift. Every breath we draw is a gift of love. Every moment of our existence is grace. Thus, our sacrifice of thanksgiving implies not just a quick easy word of thanks, but rather our whole lives given over in grateful response and loving obedience.

The great mystery of gratitude is that what is accepted in thanksgiving multiplies in the sharing of it with others.2Five loaves and five fishes, when received as a gift in gratitude, were enough to feed a multitude. Would this in itself not be enough to call forth our hearts to prayer, to offer all that we have, all that we are, all that we could ever hope to be, back to Him in deepest gratitude?

Prayerfully, may you share this crumb of broken bread with others. ~Betty

With gratitude to Tim Robison Creative for the beautiful image

November 7

It is in the beauty of the incarnate Christ that we behold the perfection of God’s boldest plan. ~Betty

A Letter From Betty

Dear Ones,

As Christ’s disciples, we will sooner or later find echoing within our hearts the same question Jesus posed to the twelve in Mark 8:18: “Do you have ears and fail to hear?”  The kind of hearing that Jesus desires of all disciples is a listening that proceeds from a heart characterized by receptivity rather than selectivity, freedom rather than fear, a heart that has been broken and is becoming compassionate.

All of Jesus’ teaching can perhaps be summed up in His instruction to listen to and obey the voice of Love. Jesus’ life was a life of loving obedience.  He was always listening to the Father, always attentive to His voice, always alert for His directions. Jesus was “all ear.” That is true prayer: being all ear for God.

Listening is a choice we make to attend to and truly hear what is going on around us. It takes patience and practice. We learn to listen with three ears: one for the other person we are with, a second for God, and a third for ourself. This was no small challenge for me, but over the years it has become a single, integrated attending to all of life around me; a contemplative response that seeks to listen to Love. I have discovered that the sound of Love is all around me if I but listen. And that, as I listen to God in all of life, all of living becomes prayer.

Listening in love begins with vulnerability. Vulnerability means we peel away our own mask and begin leading from our weakness. Having embraced our own pain, we then become the “wounded healer” for the other. 

The second quality of a good listener is deep acceptance. Acceptance comes very close to agape-love. Agape is the kind of love that does not try to shape the other person into its own mold. It accepts the other just as that person is. It meets people where they are. 

The third quality of a good listener is expectancy.  Expectancy has to do with hopefulness. It is the capacity to awaken in other people their own potential to receive the Light, to be healed. Above everything, it confirms what is deepest in the other person, arousing hope within them. 

A good listener has the ability to “stay with” another. This takes infinite patience. We must listen intensely without interrupting with “Oh, you mean…” We really don’t know what someone means. We want to feel where their words come from.

Communication has many levels, and we want to reach the deepest of them. Within every exchange there is more than the speaker and the hearer. There is also the Eternal Listener. God is there. When we really listen, we become aware of His Presence with us. And in deep communion with Him, we begin listening others into the Eternal Listener’s Presence. 

Perhaps this is the single greatest desire of the human heart: to listen attentively to the voice of God speaking through the joys and sorrows of the seasons of each soul.~Betty

                                                             

October 24

Jesus never defended Himself. He kept silent, and His silence enabled a far greater good. ~Betty

Beauty in the Dying

Winslow Homer. Autumn. National Gallery of Art

Autumn creates space for dying.
What is left untended in the heat of summer
Needs mending in the Fall.
For earth and flesh must keep their seasons
And their liturgy.
 
The leaves fall, fall, dried and withered things
As if from some far and distant land.
Through their barren pathways up and down I wander,
Unmasking hidden gardens of my past.
O, how long my road has been.
 
Down, down, into the emptiness
That solitude has cast.
Where memories’ wavering echo
Relives the residue of suffering,
And the gray fog of sorrow drifts.
Where what is near seems far away,
A painless vastness among the stars.
 
Up, up, I slowly climb to heights
Where long lamenting shadows
Lay lonesome across the mountain stone.
And in the quiet stillness a melancholy roams.
Where way beyond the distant ridge I see a city white.
There the radiant face of Christ appears.
And it was wet with tears.
 
Autumn creates space for dying
And a broken heart for crying.
BWS

The Hidden Life Awakened (pg 176)
 

Listen as Betty reads a portion of her beautiful poem, Autumn , accompanied by pianist, Dana Cunningham.

The green has turned to golden. Some branches bare, their leaves have fallen.  And I, His chosen, come again to ponder, within the changing pattern of creation the beauty in the dying, the forgiving face of God.

Again and again and again I came, for nothing stirred my soul at such a deep and maturing level as autumn in the mountains.  It continues to affirm me in my belief that there is divine order in all things.  It gives me a living sense of the holiness of time. Amid such beauty, I see God as an artist painting a picture; a picture that speaks of creation as always in process—a lamenting, longing, suffering love that redeems. God is the Artist painting on the canvas of time the mysterious grandeur of creation. In the silence, in the patient waiting, this sacred picture begins to speak. The beauty in the dying is God unraveling the mystery of the supreme, inexpressible, unrepeatable act of redemption: Christ pinned to Golgotha’s tree.

October 10

We have a choice, and our choice is critical because it is either life giving or life draining. ~Betty

Matter, the Bearer of Spirit

Ours is a world in which matter is the bearer of spirit. The Incarnation was the ultimate example of this. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” Jesus. If you will begin to change the way you see your body and its integral and holy relationship to all of creation, everything will begin to change for you. By doing the work of honoring, balancing, and integrating your inner life and your outer life, you will be able to more purely love God by offering your whole self to the work of love. The deepest mystery about you is that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit and the bearer of Christ to the world. Your body, no matter how broken, was wondrously created in God’s image and given a genome: a set of genes and chromosomes largely inherited from your parents. That genome is then radically affected by your experiences in life and by its nutritional status. You, of course, can’t choose your genome, and you can’t always choose the life experiences that impact it, but you can choose to change how you respond to what you have been given. You can choose to give your genome every physical advantage with healthy foods and energizing exercise, and every mental and spiritual advantage with positive reactions, loving attention, and inspiring self-talk. This is so honoring to the Artist from whose heart you emerged.

Your genome is not static; its cells are constantly changing, growing, and evolving, reacting to whatever it is fed and exposed to. Food isn’t just energy, it is information, and it has a direct effect on your body’s functions. Everything you eat and drink, every thought and feeling, all of your movement, rest, and sleep, as well as all of your relational interactions, impact you on a cellular level every single moment. All of this growth and change requires energy. Think about it: What fuel can you give your body’s cells if not good food and plenty of oxygen? If you truly believe that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, you will want to honor and care for the cells that make it up. In every moment, you are choosing the trajectory of your health and happiness, moving it in one direction or the other by the choices you make. Will you claim that power and honor the gift?

The wonderful news is that you don’t have to return to the old struggle with willpower to overcome your poor habits; your resistance will focus your subconscious too strongly on the battle, weakening your brain’s effort to rebuild positive structure. You can much more easily overcome poor habits by adding in good habits. There are fun new habits and good-tasting foods that will help your genome. By adding more delicious, healthy foods into your diet, more time in quiet reflection, more positive relationships, and more fun activities into your life, you will divert your brain’s energies to building positive habits, crowding out the poor ones.

Watch as Betty unwraps more of how to heal the whole person. You can also watch it on our Videos page.

God wants you to be healthy and happy as much as you want that. So take care of yourself by taking care of your cells. What one good thing will you give your genome today? Will you go outside and walk a little? Will you feed your cells a meal of delicious, mainly plant-based foods? Will you think of things you can be grateful for, trusting that your brain is turbocharged to re-create itself when you are in a state of gratitude? If you will do these things, you will one day wake to find yourself in new and joyful places you may have given up hope of ever accessing again.

From The Hidden Life Awakened (page 93)

September 26

Stretched out on the cross, Jesus turned toward the universe with utter forgiveness. ~Betty

The Return of the Prodigal Son

Of all of Henri Nouwen’s many beloved books on the spiritual life, this deeply personal meditation on Jesus’ parable and Rembrandt’s 17th century painting of the same name, is his most inspired and self-revelatory. He wrote his masterpiece in 1992, just four years before his death of a heart attack at 64. It remains a perennial bestseller.

Rembrandt too, finished his masterpiece shortly before his death. At the end of a controversial, debauched, and pain-filled life of loss, he had finally come in touch with the immense compassion, mercy, and tenderness of God as Father whose heart burns with love and desire only for his children to return, and as Mother who longs to enfold them again in the safety of her womb.

Transformed
by an encounter with a detail of the father’s hands gently embracing his broken
son, Nouwen spent years pondering Rembrandt’s painting before he wrote his book,
sharing his own raw pain and brokenness.

I came to see it somehow as my personal painting, the painting that contained not only the heart of the story that God wants to tell me, but the heart of the story that I want to tell to God and God’s people. All of the Gospel is there. All of my life is there. All of the lives of my friends is there. The painting has become a mysterious window through which I can step into the kingdom of God…Seldom, if ever has God’s immense compassionate love been expressed in such a poignant way. Every detail of the father’s figure—his facial expression, his posture, the colors of his dress, and , most of all, the still gesture of his hands—speaks of the divine love for humanity that existed from the beginning and ever will be.

A word from Betty:

In my opinion, The Return of the Prodigal Son is Nouwen’s finest work. Read it slowly and meditatively, giving his words time to lead you to a deeper place. They come with the gift of sacred simplicity; massaging your heart and stimulating your intellect.

With special love and hope always that the words you offer to others might be words of love, a love that calls others home to an inner awakening and abiding peace. ~Betty