Kitty Crenshaw's Blog, page 3
June 8, 2022
The Heart Is So Fragile And Shy
Caravaggio. The Penitent Magdalene. Doria Pamphilj Gallery.
The deepest desire of our hearts is intimacy—to be known, understood, and loved.
But we are afraid to be known because we carry deep scars from profound suffering and regrets. We have all fallen short of God’s glory, but we have not yet learned to let those burdens fall away into the abyss of God’s mercy. Our heart wings are so fragile that they break from just a word or a complicated glance, so we keep them folded in for protection. Instantly and unconsciously, we withdraw when threatened like a sea anemone with prickly spines when touched. So, approach with deep acceptance, honoring another’s fragile heart with the language of mercy and compassion.
The compassionate heart is toward and for the other. It emerges from a place in the center of our being that searches and stretches to love and be loved and be free enough to set others free. We have to ask ourselves if we are willing to risk our own fragile heart to connect with another’s. Will we open in a generous willingness to be known and tell our own stories of suffering to offer hope and encouragement to others? Will we tell them with encouraging words and tender eyes that we share their wounded places and that their suffering aches inside our hearts too? We are called to become a place of nourishment for our brothers and sisters, quietly shouldering their pain in the great and holy act of compassion.
Communication has many levels, and we want to reach the highest. The language of the compassionate heart is always upbeat and encouraging. Within every exchange, God is there. In communion with Love, we see every person as infinitely precious and worthy of love. We must try not to leave an encounter with another without offering something for them to take away—a word that will be everlasting. The voice of the Spirit has profound and lasting power that can change another’s heart. To listen for that voice and let it speak through us is our work—and this work is beautiful, far-reaching, and powerful.
The question always before us is how better can we love? Did my eyes and words build confidence and redemptive threads of trust in a fragile heart today? Home is the most challenging place to do this work because we are so vulnerable there. Our self-protective ways can quickly become love extinguishing when we forget to pause and pay attention and receive our loved ones with a tender touch and warm words that telegraph their belovedness and offer them safety. Might we, in humility, open to a new and unselfconscious dimension of love that seeks nothing for itself but offers everything to others?
May my gentle eyes shine Love.
May my merciful ears hear Love.
May my soft hands reassure Love.
May my tender words speak Love.
The Heart Is So Fragile And Shy.
Caravaggio. The Penitent Magdalene. Doria Pamphilj Gallery.
The deepest desire of our hearts is intimacy—to be known, understood, and loved.
But we are afraid to be known because we carry deep scars from profound suffering and regrets. We have all fallen short of God’s glory, but we have not yet learned to let those burdens fall away into the abyss of God’s mercy. Our heart wings are so fragile that they break from just a word or a complicated glance, so we keep them folded in for protection. Instantly and unconsciously, we withdraw when threatened like a sea anemone with prickly spines when touched. So, approach with deep acceptance, honoring another’s fragile heart with the language of mercy and compassion.
The compassionate heart is toward and for the other. It emerges from a place in the center of our being that searches and stretches to love and be loved and be free enough to set others free. We have to ask ourselves if we are willing to risk our own fragile heart to connect with another’s. Will we open in a generous willingness to be known and tell our own stories of suffering to offer hope and encouragement to others? Will we tell them with encouraging words and tender eyes that we share their wounded places and that their suffering aches inside our hearts too? We are called to become a place of nourishment for our brothers and sisters, quietly shouldering their pain in the great and holy act of compassion.
Communication has many levels, and we want to reach the highest. The language of the compassionate heart is always upbeat and encouraging. Within every exchange, God is there. In communion with Love, we see every person as infinitely precious and worthy of love. We must try not to leave an encounter with another without offering something for them to take away—a word that will be everlasting. The voice of the Spirit has profound and lasting power that can change another’s heart. To listen for that voice and let it speak through us is our work—and this work is beautiful, far-reaching, and powerful.
The question always before us is how better can we love? Did my eyes and words build confidence and redemptive threads of trust in a fragile heart today? Home is the most challenging place to do this work because we are so vulnerable there. Our self-protective ways can quickly become love extinguishing when we forget to pause and pay attention and receive our loved ones with a tender touch and warm words that telegraph their belovedness and offer them safety. Might we, in humility, open to a new and unselfconscious dimension of love that seeks nothing for itself but offers everything to others?
May my gentle eyes shine Love.
May my merciful ears hear Love.
May my soft hands reassure Love.
May my tender words speak Love.
June 1, 2022
June 2
Healing love is sacrificial. If we aren’t willing to take the initiative, reconciliation might never happen. ~Betty
May 25, 2022
All Creation Is Birthed In The Womb Of God
One Human Cell.
Everything in creation is an utterance of God, breathed and born in the womb of God. Julian of Norwich, the beloved 14th-century Christian mystic whose Revelations of Divine Love is generally considered one of the most remarkable documents of medieval religious experience, loved to refer to Jesus as both Father and Mother from this understanding. “Our Savior is our true Mother in whom we are endlessly born and out of whom we shall never come.”
What did Julian mean? Perhaps it means that we are endlessly loved and sustained within the Divine womb yet reborn over and over to a higher understanding of Whose and who we indeed are. If we choose to continually die to the false self we have created to survive in the world, we will be reborn into the womb of glorious oneness with the Beloved and His beloveds. Jesus confounded Nicodemus when He said, “no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.”1 Later, He reminded His disciples that unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains a seed, but if it dies, it is reborn and bears much fruit.2Knowing He was going to His death, Jesus prayed for His friends, “that they may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us.” 3 Prayerfully, may we grasp the simple but radical truth that God’s love-longings birthed us and every living thing in and of His very womb. Therefore, to lovingly behold another person or a flower among the weeds or a tree standing exiled on the side of the road or a sudden breeze in love and gratitude is prayer because it honors our Father and Mother God from Whose womb it comes.
The great Russian writer, Fyodor Doestoevsky, calls us from eternity to “Love all God’s creation, both the whole and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of light. Love the animals, love the plants, love each separate thing. If thou love each thing thou wilt perceive the mystery of God in all; and when once thou perceive this, thou wilt thenceforward grow every day to a fuller understanding of it: until thou come at last to love the whole world with a love that will then be all-embracing and universal.” 4
Our friend Betty reminds us in The Hidden Life Awakened that “we desperately need to recover this sense of the Beyond in our midst in order to revive the springs of mystery, beauty, and wonder. Creation is the Spirit’s scaffolding. We cannot touch the Spirit, but we can see and touch creation and allow it to speak to us about the Spirit. Until we can hear the rose speak its message of love to us, we cannot pass beyond its form and allow the Eternal Artist to speak to us through it. All of creation runs on Divine energy that, at its core, is unconditionally loving. The very heartbeat of God is resonating in creation, ever ready for us to discover the hidden mystery of the Creator’s love to which it points. Our work is to begin to reconcile the seen and the unseen and intertwine them within our hearts, renew the depth of our relationship between our spirituality and the mystery of creation, and develop a keen sense of it warming, embracing, and speaking to us. To immerse oneself in the mystery and wonder of creation is to come to know the God beyond and the God within.”5
Ours is a world in which matter is the bearer of Spirit. God clothes Himself in the beauty birthed from His womb. The most profound mystery about us is that the physical covering we carry is, in reality, the temple of the Holy Spirit and a bearer of Christ to the world. We and all created things are inestimably more than random atoms and molecules exploded into being ex nihilo. Every one of the trillions of cells in our body and every cell in creation is a visible sacrament and vehicle of amazing grace. The Incarnation was the ultimate example of this. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Jesus.
May 18, 2022
May 19
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. ~Betty
May 11, 2022
Letters From Betty
Dear One,
It was so special to hear your voice yesterday. Your timing was perfect as I was alone and had committed the day to silence and prayer. When the phone rang, I was reading a letter St. Therese of Lisieux wrote to her sister while on a beach in France. As we shared in our conversation, nothing is coincidental. Everything is providential.
I listened with the ears of love to all you told me about your spiritual experience on the beach a few weeks ago. I could so identify with the walks we used to take in the late twilight times and the little talks we had then about the beauty of the ocean, the sounds of the surf, and the twinkle of that first evening star. Many of these experiences slip quietly into our subconscious as our life matures. Much of what God has revealed to us of His beauty throughout our lives gets lost in the tides of suffering and pain.
You asked me if I thought the little sparkles of light that caressed you in the black, black dark were hallucinations or truly God’s angels holding you, loving you, and bringing you to such a deep place of peace. I was especially interested in your endeavor to describe the colors that you said were beyond description. I want to quote a little piece from the letter I was reading by St. Therese. Indeed, she was not hallucinating when she wrote this:
I feel how powerless I am to express in human language the secrets of heaven. There are so many different horizons, so many nuances of infinite variety that only the palette of the Celestial Painter will be able to furnish me after the night of this life with the colors capable of depicting the marvels He reveals to the eye of my soul.”
I would encourage you to receive all of this experience as a gift from God to reaffirm His love for you and enable you to persevere. You have suffered affliction and pain way beyond anything most of us could ever imagine—let alone endure. I sense that God has given you more time here on earth to use this pain to express hope and encouragement to other sufferers.
Do all you can while you are in the rehab facility to regain your physical strength and continue to ponder the mysteries of God and the experiences you had that night on the beach. Reflect on the vision and depths of its meaning and the unspeakable sense of rest and peace that you felt. Such remembering is God’s way of not only affirming His love for us but of healing us.
Please continue to call me when you feel pressed and let me know how you are progressing in the work of your recovery. When you think the time is right, we will make plans to be together again.
I love you, sweet friend, and will into eternity,
Betty
May 4, 2022
April 27, 2022
Run To The Place Of Splendor
Felix Vallotton. Moonlight. Musée d’Orsay.
Morning slowly comes to consciousness,my prayersstretch tight across the silent skyawakened by the beauty of the golden dawnshake free the endless circles of a dark and fearful night.The senses fuse - sight, touch, and sound are oneand all to splendor run,rise high on blazing diamonds of a pure and selfless loveup to a sunlit day.Emptied of all denial and deceit,my povertyabsolute - at last complete,quietly into His epiphany I walktowards light seen in music that was never heardand softness spoken that was not a word.Oh, the love, the wonder in the blazing diamonds gaze!And I?I must arise in faith and goby inward passage from what earth I know. BWSexcerpted from The Hidden Life Awakened p190.April 20, 2022
April 13, 2022
The Profound Silence Of The Tomb
Mark Rothko. 1969 Untitled.
Holy Saturday—the quietest of all days. The tomb that held Your broken body was dark and silent. Heaven held its breath. A shimmering stilling making ready for glorious resurrection.
Precious Jesus, I have moved with You through the thirst of the wilderness, the horror of the cross, and now into the darkness of the tomb. I have come to the deepest of my sufferings. I find You there in the silent stillness. There are no more words. I will rest now and let darkness do its work in me. All things grow in darkness and silence. A grain of wheat will never be more than a single grain of wheat unless it is buried. Then it sprouts and produces a great harvest.1I await the dawning of the Light that will surely come. May I ever more fervently prepare to celebrate the mystery of Easter as the glorious feast of my redemption approaches.
From The Hidden Life Awakened pp210-211:
“The way of trust lies through Gethsemane and Holy Saturday. We move from Good Friday to Easter Sunday, omitting Holy Saturday—the tomb. Every phase of our Lord’s life and every aspect of His death speaks to us if we will open to it. Divine obedience was lived out at the Last Supper, accepted at Gethsemane, accomplished on the cross, and perfected alone in the darkness of the tomb. Our assent to time in the darkness of the tomb is so often the missing link in our lives. The wilderness of our suffering is not just a place of darkness and temptation. It is the place of our transformation through which the false self must move. It is the place of conversion where the emotional pain of a lifetime, stored in the unconscious, is revealed and then gradually let go of. This is not a time of separateness, although it may feel that way; it is a time that links us to the Eternal. It is in walking through the darkness that we learn to discern the voice of the Beloved and receive the grace of interior resurrection and the capacity for divine union. All things grow in darkness and silence. There are hidden depths that only the Spirit can reach. It is a hidden life.”
