Kitty Crenshaw's Blog, page 18
July 3, 2019
July 4
Every time we make a choice for hope, we are turning the part of us that chooses into something different than it was before. ~Betty
Click to order The Hidden Life Awakened
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June 26, 2019
A Letter From Betty
Dear Ones,
When I met hope, in my fifty-fifth year, on the southward side of a high mountain in North Carolina, it was unmistakable. Hope, for many years of my spiritual journey, was overshadowed by faith and love. Love’s relentless wooing had won me with its unspeakable beauty, mystery, and grace. Faith became the ‘yes’ within me on which I slowly began to stake my whole life, while hope remained invisible and elusive. Faith and love built my self-confidence until I broke inside, then faith began to fade and love dimmed. It was in my despair that I met hope. It had been resting in the shadows between faith and love. It was in the suffering, wounded, and broken places of my life that hope began to come out of the shadows and bring me to wholeness. It was in the emptiness and stillness between faith and love, in the hollow of a heart carved out by despair, that hope took hold.
What I realized on that unforgettable day was that hope had always lingered in the shadows of my darkest times. What awakened within me was that precisely when faith crumbles and love dims, hope begins. Hope is not the same thing as optimism. Rather, hope, in its purist form, is perfect freedom perfected as we choose to accept in Love whatever God brings as good. For those who deliberately choose to act only for the glory of God and the good of others, to eliminate all selfish motives from their lives and their work, hope becomes the golden cord in the landscape of their quest. It is the certainty that something makes sense, is worth the cost, regardless of how it might turn out. Hope is a sense of what might yet be. Hope is precisely what I had when I had nothing. It strains ahead, seeking a way behind, through, and beyond every obstacle. Hope does not try to determine how God’s way will be shown but remains open to new and astonishing manifestations of God’s presence at work in the circumstances of life. The more difficult the circumstances, the deeper the hope. This is the delight in despair. The Hidden Life Awakened (180)
I pray that the Holy Spirit will speak to your heart as you read these words. They come in obedience with the longing always that you might begin to taste the hope, the freedom, and the peace of Jesus.
In the warmth of His recreative Love, I remain your faithful friend. ~Betty
Beautiful photo by Sally Chester
The post A Letter From Betty appeared first on The Hidden Life Awakened.
June 19, 2019
June 20
When our hearts finally awaken to Love, the Spirit begins to move in us, completely changing our life and focus. ~Betty
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June 12, 2019
Beloved
With gratitude to Jenny Miller for the gorgeous photo @the_ardent_alchemist
But you are the ones chosen by God, chosen for the high calling of priestly work, chosen to be a holy people, God’s instruments to do His work and speak out for Him, to tell others of the night-and-day difference He made for you–from nothing to something, from rejected to accepted.
1 Peter 2:9 (The Message)
In all four Gospels, but 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. Despite what we are, despite life’s unpredictable and often times cruel and difficult circumstances, we are never to doubt that we are deeply loved by God.
Ours is a never-ending struggle to shut out the loud voices of the world that tell us to prove something, be something, and do something. We need to begin to listen with an ever-increasing attentiveness to that soft, gentle inner voice that call us the Beloved. We need to say to ourselves over and over, until it imprints on our brain and fills our broken heart, “I am loved by God more than I can ever begin to understand.”
It is well to remember that our worth is more than the result of our efforts. Our preciousness is not given to us by those with whom we live and work in chronological time. It is given to us by the One Who has chosen us and Who calls us His Beloved.
“You are My Beloved” reveals the most intimate truth about us and expresses the core truth of every created thing. The eyes of love see everything as precious, of infinite beauty, and of eternal value. God delights in each of us, not because we have a special talent or ministry—no. In some mysterious way, I matter to God because nothing and no one in all of creation can reflect His love back to Him in exactly the same way I can.
It is in prayer that we first begin to recognize our marvelous and unique worth, for it is in prayer that Jesus gives us His Spirit, and it is His Spirit that opens our hearts to a new dimension of love and a greater capacity for loving. Prayer reveals to us the tremendous truth that to be a person is to be a precious gift we can offer back to God and to others. But we can give that gift only insofar as we have claimed it for ourselves. Ultimately, the spiritual work for all of us is to begin to take our identity from the One who is constantly whispering, “You are My beloved.”
Paradoxically, all of the spiritual work and activity we have done on our journey to bring us to this place must now be let go of. Everything has to be still. Nothing is so one with the nature of God as stillness. We become completely transparent to Love like a windowpane, so clean that 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.’ Pure Spirit touches pure spirit and the love of God pours through us, empowering us to give the gift of divine love to others simply by being present to them.
The post Beloved appeared first on The Hidden Life Awakened.
June 5, 2019
June 6
As we choose to embrace the joys and sorrows of each necessary season in faith and trust, the fog shrouding our soul slowly lifts and we behold His glory.
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May 29, 2019
The Big I Has To Die
“Then He walked a short distance away, and overcome with grief, He threw himself facedown on the ground and prayed, ‘My Father, if there is any way you can deliver me from this suffering, please take it from me. Yet what I want is not important, for I only desire to fulfill your plan for me.’ Then an angel from heaven appeared to strengthen Him.” Matthew 26:39 (TPT)
The sacrament of letting go and dying to self is a visible sign of invisible grace, a beautiful acknowledgement of the redeemed inner life coming to expression in the outer life. It is a heart attitude of submissive consent, total surrender, and radical abandonment to God’s will. It is the sacrificial and costly offering of ourselves to God, Who created us in love and longs to recreate us in mercy. It requires absolute trust and our consent to let God be God in the present moment, no matter what it contains; and it is a choice we have to make over and over again.
We must be open to God’s working in circumstances which are often painful and be prepared to accept what happens. Until we let go of our resistance, denials, illusions of control, and negative thought patterns and accept our reality, we can never know truth or freedom. God lives in what is and, therefore, we must live in what is. Our work is to become whole people in the world of our reality.
Dying to the life the Big I craves and coming into the abundant life of Christ enables us to live into our longing rather than trying to resolve it, and to enter the new spaciousness of our emptiness. Dying to what we want, when we want it, how we want it is so hard, because we love what we desire and what we possess, and we continue to believe we can control, fix, and change our circumstances. We must let go into enduring trust in God’s love and mercy that allows us to be just as we are and our situation just as it is.
There is nothing in the universe that is good enough and strong enough for us to trust in completely—nothing but God. It is only through consciously entrusting ourselves to the immediate presence of God with us in every situation that we can hope to feel safe enough to begin entering into this sacrament of letting go. Whether we feel God’s presence or not, we can choose to act in accordance with it. And because God is never absent from us, trusting is always possible.
This process of trusting, dying to die to the Big I, and letting go is the work of God’s grace; and grace always leads to radical freedom and gratitude. Our knowledge of God is perfected by gratitude. Gratitude claims the truth that all of life is pure gift, the gift of Love to be celebrated with joy. The beauty and freedom that flows out of gratitude is the gift of letting go. We no longer want to possess or hold on to anything. We are free now to love, to be compassionate; free of our selfish, self-centered self. To be grateful is to recognize the Love of God in everything He has given us; and He has given us everything. Every breath we draw is a gift of His Love, every moment of existence is a grace. Gratitude, therefore, takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder and to praise of the goodness of God. For the grateful person knows that God is good, not by hearsay, but by experience. And that is what makes all the difference.
A further reflection from Betty in The Hidden Life Awakened:
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
Love gently comes in, enlarging our soul and filling the emptied space with the Spirit of God, the fullness of Christ. More and more, as we empty ourselves of self, we experience God’s presence surrounding us. It is something beyond expression, a sweet moment of belonging to everything, a sense of the fullness of God’s love being returned to us by every created thing: the people in our life, the trees, the flowers, and all of the earth. This is the abundant life, the Divine Spirit of Love filling our emptiness. We can live in this place now—we don’t have to wait for heaven. The choice is ours, right here, right now.
To watch Betty talking more about letting go, click on this link.
The post The Big I Has To Die appeared first on The Hidden Life Awakened.
May 22, 2019
May 23
It is in the emptiness and stillness between faith and love, in the hollow of a heart carved out by despair, that hope takes hold. ~Betty
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May 15, 2019
The Interior Castle
St. Teresa of Ávila was a 16th century cloistered Carmelite nun who lived in Spain during the Inquisition and wrote this masterpiece of mystical literature as a guide for spiritual growth. She wrote it, not because she wanted to, or thought she had the skills, but in obedience to her superiors. As a result, it is delightfully self-deprecating and conversational, yet written with powerful certitude and wisdom that can only be derived from firsthand experience. It is one of the most wrinkled and marked up of all Betty’s beloved “Rubber Band Books.”
Teresa begins:
Few tasks which I have been commanded have been so difficult as this present one of writing about matter relating to prayer: for one reason, because I do not feel that the Lord has given me either the spirituality or the desire for it; for another, because for the last three months I have been suffering from such noises and weakness in the head that I find it troublesome to write even about necessary business. But, as I know that strength arising from obedience has a way of simplifying things which seem impossible, my will very gladly resolves to attempt this task…
and then:
While I was beseeching Our Lord today that He would speak through me, since I could find nothing to say and had no idea how to begin to carry out the obligation laid upon me by obedience, a thought occurred to me which I will now set down, in order to have some foundation on which to build. I began to think of the soul as if it were a castle made of a single diamond or a very clear crystal, in which there are many rooms, just as in Heaven there are many mansions. Now if we think carefully over this, sisters, the soul of the righteous is nothing but a paradise, in which, as God tells us, He takes His delight. For what do you think a room will be like which is the delight of a King so mighty, so wise, so pure and full of all that is good? I can find nothing with which to compare the great beauty of a soul and its great capacity.
“The door of this castle is prayer.”
Here follows a brief overview of the seven mansions that might be very loosely visualized as concentric circles leading inward to the center of the soul. Radiant Light emanates more and more brightly from the innermost dwelling as the pilgrim approaches. Teresa reminds the reader that the only entrance to this glorious dwelling is prayer and that the path is never a straight one. Thoughts will continually distract and divert us, so she insists that we be humble and very patient with ourselves. “Just as we cannot stop the movement of the heavens…we cannot restrain our thought. Then we send all the faculties of the soul after it, thinking we are lost,…yet the soul may perhaps be wholly united with Him in the mansions very near His presence, while thought remains in the outskirts of the castle.”
Mansions 1-3 (Purgative) Active movement away from sin to self-knowledge
1. Making the humble choice to enter the crystal mansion, but battling the “vipers and snakes”of addictions and habits of mind that have encumbered for so long.
2. Excitedly growing through rational efforts: prayer, good books and sermons, but still struggling with life on the rough edges of the diamond.
3. Safer now from old temptations, experiencing insights and some sweetness in prayer, but still dominated by the rational mind and periods of arid prayer.
Mansions 4-5 (Illuminative) Passive movement into supernatural prayer
4. Finally moving from the head into the heart and greater intimacy with God. There are moments of ineffable peace when the soul drinks directly from God in preparation for the gift of supernatural prayer.
5. The soul experiences what is called the Prayer of Quiet; when it falls asleep to the world and rests in God. However short the duration of the experience, the soul is overwhelmed with Light and Love and the certainty it is united to God.
Mansions 6-7 (Unitive) Spiritual betrothal and union with the Beloved
6. The Betrothal. Loving God now with God’s own heart, the soul becomes consumed with desire for the Bridegroom. This sacred dwelling is sometimes accompanied by ecstatic visions and raptures but also by intense trials; even great physical and psychological pain.
7. The Spiritual Marriage is consummated. The soul dissolves completely into the Beloved. There is only Love. “…it may be called another heaven: the two lighted candles join and become one; the falling rain becomes merged in the river. There is complete transformation, ineffable and perfect peace; no higher state is conceivable, save that of the Beatific Vision in the life to come.”
and this from our twenty-first century mystic friend, Betty:
Now, in the twilight of my years, I feel very pressed to encourage people who are on their spiritual journey to persevere, to trust God, and to not stop short of the goal—the gift of the Giver Himself, Divine union. The gates of heaven are everywhere. Our part is to simply embrace and open to the new seasons of our inner and outer journey as preparation to receive this gift of Love. Divine union is for everyone, and the experiential knowledge of this Love and freedom is everything. At last, we are grasped by the hand of the Spirit and led into a wilderness free of distractions and temptations: a wilderness of trackless mystery, beauty, and sound. This is the ultimate food in the feast of our redemption—a foretaste of heaven. Once we have tasted it, there is no turning back. It gets sweeter and sweeter. It is a freedom that comes from a wisdom that transcends the intellect. It is an unknowing, a letting go of all we have known and falling deeply in love with God in whose heart we will finally find rest. Our soul, then, will finally expand to the point that we draw all humanity into it, and in the process there will be peace in our heart, joy in our life, and reconciliation and healing among our friends and family. This journey is costly, and it is sacrificial, but it is healing and brings with it the gift of sanctity. I can’t explain it, but it is so. ~Betty
Click on this link to watch Betty talk more about Divine Union.
The post The Interior Castle appeared first on The Hidden Life Awakened.
May 8, 2019
May 9
Prayerful 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. ~Betty
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May 1, 2019
A Letter From Betty
Dear Ones,
We are a family of the land. The endlessness of long leaf pines, of blackjack ridges and cypress ponds, of sand hills and palmettos. We are a family whose core and culture resonates and vibrates with the pain the land has inflicted and the beauty it has reflected. Through the decades, all my suffering silences have been poured out upon the land. Its silence absorbed my pain, softened my heart, and told me Whose and who I am.
Years have passed since the shattering news of my granddaughter’s death. She was twenty three, just blooming into life when Life took her. She was like the land, all spread out and beautiful, holding the potential for everything good. It isn’t not only this grief, but all of my griefs that haunt me. For so long, there was a void between me and the is-ness of things. My only expression was a gasping that spilled over into tears. I didn’t know that grief is a lump in your throat that you can’t swallow. There’s a slight nausea in the pit of your stomach.
When the concussion of affliction comes, we have to have somewhere to go with our pain, but where? How do we embrace such heavy and horrible pain? How do we make our suffering count? Most people don’t know what to do with their pain, so they run from it rather than sit with it, embrace it, and grow through it. I made a conscious and very disciplined effort to create some uncharted space to be alone-yet not alone-in silence. I wanted to allow time for my grieving to seep into mourning.
What is at stake here is the life of the Spirit within us. Pain embraced has divine purposes. We must feel the point of the nail piercing, the painful cut grafting. This is part of God’s ongoing process of redemption, dispelling more of our darkness, bringing us bleeding into the Light. Love and pain are two sides of the same coin. How can we ever receive the great consolations the Crucified Christ promises if we refuse to be crucified with Him?
The land never told me that affliction is deeper than pain. The cut is bone deep. You have to experience it to know it. Silence was my salvation. My silence, now filled with Presence and compassion and a stilling that waits to know why.
I sit, watching sun-reflected ripples chase across the dark, polished glass of my window here in the nursing home. There is a constancy about it, a rhythmic assurance, the ebb and flow of time entering eternity. Each entering depends on the infusion of Light. Somewhere hidden within these ripples of wonder lies the forever deepening mystery of Life-a healing, a merging of spirits, my granddaughter’s and mine; the Spirit of Love setting us both free, holding hands, traveling together among the stars. ~Betty
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