Kitty Crenshaw's Blog, page 35

February 9, 2018

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

Transformation Not Restoration

Betty Skinner, the inspiration for The Hidden Life Awakened, discusses healing and the discipline needed to move toward transformation:

February 5, 2018

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

On Retreat: February 2018

Our prayer is that “On Retreat” will help you break from habituated patterns of mind and frantic activity, make more space for God, and step into a new way of seeing, believing, and abiding.  Each retreat will focus on a healthy body, a serene mind, and a powerful spirit. Your devoted guide will be modern day Christian mystic, Betty Skinner.

Affirming the Hope Hidden Within You,

~Cathy and Kitty

The Giving and Receiving of Love

 

A Healthy Body

Hydrate: Drink a little water or green tea to begin.

Move: Do a few simple stretching exercises to energize your body.

Rest: Silently integrate the inner peace of your stretching practice for a few minutes.

A Serene Mind

Begin this portion of your time with God by sitting with a warm cup of coffee or tea or water in a comfortable chair in a quiet place. Light a candle as a symbol of God’s presence with you.

Opening Prayer

Let Betty’s lovely Centering Prayer quiet and refocus your mind.  Read it from page 53 of The Hidden Life Awakened, or listen to Betty read it (click here to listen).

A Reflection

A young father sat by his daughter’s bed most nights to talk with her a little about her day. As he got up to leave, he would always ask if he could bless her. He put his hand gently on her head and repeated the blessing God instructed Moses to teach the priests to say over the Israelites. You may have heard it.

“And now, the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make His face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you. The Lord lift up His countenance upon you and give you peace.”  Numbers 6: 22-26.

There are other versions that say, “The Lord turn His face towards you”, but countenance evokes a far more beautiful image. It implies a facial emotion and expression of approval. Over and over this young father had looked on his child with loving approval as he blessed her.

When she was just seventeen, she found him crumpled on the floor in agony. Instinctively, she knelt by him and asked if she could bless him. She placed her hand gently on his head and spoke the blessing he had prayed over her for so many years. She didn’t know why he was in agony, she didn’t know he had just heard his brother had suddenly died. The love-blessing she had received into her deepest heart for so many years burst unbidden into her consciousness as she absorbed the grief of her father. This is the giving and receiving of love.

A Reflection from Betty

It was in my garden that I began to get a sense of the flow of the giving and receiving of love, because every morning it offered me so much beauty in return for my care.

  Such giving and receiving, opened my heart more and more to God’s voice, reminding me that in Him there is nothing but love, and that I was created out of His first love for me. It is this First Love that I had to keep returning to in prayer. The returning is difficult—it is a great struggle—but if we are faithful, we will taste peace somewhere deeply hidden within our hearts, far beyond feelings and emotions.

Now at ninety, I can still sit, talking, touching another life and feel the love flowing between us. Our spirituality is all about dying to our ego in order to enter into this giving and receiving of love. 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—no strings, no conditions, no counting the cost. This is the relationship I was drawn into and long to bring others into.  

 

A Powerful Spirit

Spend a little time now, letting the Living Word speak to your heart.

Divine Reading

Psalm 103

Numbers 6:22-26

Rest Quietly with God

Use your imagination to visualize Jesus sitting there with you or in any other setting that brings you peace.

Reflective Writing

For a few minutes journal every thought that arises without censoring as a child would. This is the indwelling Spirit speaking truth to you. Trust this for now.

 

 

 

 

This Sunrise of Wonder

In 1986 Queen Elizabeth asked Reverend Mayne to become the Dean of Westminster Cathedral. He served there until 1996. This Sunrise of Wonder, his joyous autobiography written in 1995 for his grandchildren about what it means to be human in a world filled with wonder, touched Cathy Snapp and Kitty Crenshaw so deeply that they took a chance and wrote to him in 2002, well before they had completed their first book. This is the lovely note they received from him.

Dear Kitty and Cathy,

Thank you so much for writing me about the book of Betty Skinner’s life. She certainly sounds an inspiring woman, and I’m sure that many will be helped and encouraged by what you eventually produce from such fine material. I will gladly remember your work and I wish you well in achieving your goal.”

With All Good Wishes

Yours Sincerely,  Michael Mayne  

This Sunrise of Wonder is his collection and reflection on the writers and artists whose gifts awakened the coming together of his own inner and outer worlds and his wonderful gift of seeing and sharing the extraordinariness of everything. The title was inspired by this G. K. Chesterton quote:

“At the back of our brains, so to speak, there is a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life is to dig for this sunrise of wonder.”

Reverend Mayne’s encouragement to all of us is to find the wonder in all of life and “listen with your full attention to those who, as it were, touch your sleeve and invite you to see what the landscape and the journey look like to them. And most especially those who have a kind of reverent and infectious wonder.”

Betty Skinner is one of those who touches our sleeve and calls us to awaken to the wonder within and all around us. In The Hidden Life Awakened she reflects on the reality of Love’s astonishing presence in the world:

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.       

Wondrous Love! ~Betty                   

 

                                                                       

 

January 29, 2018

To make the choice for life, we have to be willing to let go of our old ways that aren’t working. ~ Betty

January 26, 2018

Everything is preparation; nothing is wasted. ~Betty

The Mystics Among Us

Our loving God reaches out to us one by one through many different means, but most often through the testimony of those who have experienced His love. In every generation there have been great preachers, writers, and teachers to help us find our way to the Beloved. In every generation too, there have been a few very ordinary people who have been awakened and transformed to an extraordinary degree by a direct and profoundly personal encounter with God. Theirs is a special love affair with the Divine, the goal and heart of all religion. We call them the mystics.

The reason we don’t often meet these people is that prayer, silence, and solitude—often in nature—is the way God has led them into this union. Solitude is the fertile ground from which they occasionally emerge, motivated by the fire of Love, to share life’s most hallowed possibility of passionate love, deep wholeness, and profound healing and joy. Always their messages are variations of God’s all-encompassing love and desire for us, often with the encouragement and hope from their own stories of enormous personal struggles fought and won. They then withdraw again into their private world of God’s love and presence.

Betty Walthour Skinner, whose story we have chronicled in The Hidden Life Awakened, is a 21st century mystic. Her burning quest, her “flaming yes!” to God throughout her ninety-plus years, and her all-consuming love affair with the Beloved is the marvelous thread that runs through her story.

The words below are hers, written in 1998.

“God speaks and we, as His people, are called to be still and listen to His Voice. Those who have learned to listen, who are truly drawn into the mystery, also are impelled to give away some of what they have received. They have learned that what is not given freely is lost to them as well as to others.

“We have difficulty embracing mystery and wonder.  We have a need to reduce everything to certain material, pragmatic and mechanical principles that we can grasp.  In so doing, we lose the very possibility of developing our “sixth sense” which is the sense of wonder.  It is well to remember that our inner world deals with words like transcendence, beyond-ness, mystery, beauty and wonder. This sixth sense, as we begin to develop it, brings together our inner and our outer worlds. As our inscape begins to match our landscape, we come to a place of inner harmony and begin to experience the Beyond in our midst.

“In what is called the mystical tradition, this consciousness of the Beyond is present in many believers in a very intense form. Their spirituality has been greatly influenced and directed by the development of their sixth sense, this sense of wonder, as well as other mystical graces they receive during prayer. Their words are words that give life, new minted, fresh and from the heart. They touch us at our very center. Theirs is not a secondhand theology.  For God in Christ does not offer those who hear Him a secondhand theology.  He offers them Himself: “The Word made flesh, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14)  In the beginning was the Word and it is the Word that gives life.  But in the end is silence, when all our halting words are stilled. It is the silence of gratitude and wonder.”

Wondrous Love,

        Betty

 

January 22, 2018

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

January 19, 2018

Becoming real is an unlearning. As we do the painful work of emptying ourselves of our ego and illusions, Love gently comes in, enlarging our soul and filling the emptied space with the Spirit of God, the fullness of Christ.  ~Betty