Kitty Crenshaw's Blog, page 39

October 16, 2017

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 Skinner

The Essence of Christian Spirituality

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 Skinner

The post The Essence of Christian Spirituality appeared first on The Hidden Life Awakened.

Essence Christian Spirituality

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 Skinner

The post Essence Christian Spirituality appeared first on The Hidden Life Awakened.

Revelations of Divine Love

One morning during her prayer, Betty asked, “Lord, I’ve got these two weeks, Bryant is gone, and there’s nobody here. What do You want me to do with the time?” She walked over to her bookshelf trying to discern as best she could which book He wanted her to take with her to the mountain that day. “One of the books my sister mailed me was Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich, but I hadn’t read it because the title sounded a little spooky to me. The Holy Spirit seemed to be pressing me to take Julian’s book, which was her personal account of experiencing God in sixteen ‘showings’ she had been given.” Betty made the choice to trust that and put the book in her rucksack and headed to the mountain.

It has been said that when the student is ready, the teacher will come, and now Betty was ready. She had spent countless hours sitting in what she called her meadow, the beautiful, open, grassy space on top of Rock Mountain where her grieving tree stands. After the long climb up, it is a wonderful respite spot, but it is also right on the beaten path. There are always hikers passing through, so she began to look for a place where she could be alone and read out loud.

As she walked along, trying to discern from God where to go, she turned off the trail about halfway down the south face of the mountain. She passed through a brushy patch of rhododendrons and came out onto a broad, flat rock with a magnificent view of the valley and neighboring mountain. There was an old white pine tree that had been struck by lightning still clinging to the rock. The branches hung low and provided shade for the hot summer days. That day the air was warm and clear and there was a light breeze, so she sat down in the soft pine needles that cushioned the rock, opened Julian’s book, and began to read out loud. She read it repeatedly, trusting God to interpret its essence to her. She returned to that hidden place over and over again. The more she returned, the more God taught her through Julian, and the more precious her relationship with her saintly friend became. She loved her little hideaway and it became very sacred to her. Later she named it Julian’s Rock.

“Julian of Norwich was a fourteenth-century anchoress who lived in England during the Crusades and the Black Plague in Europe. At the age of thirty, she received sixteen revelations from God and then spent the rest of her life getting them down on paper. She lived in a small anchorage that was attached to a corner of the ancient stone church. One window of the anchorage opened into the church, so she could take the sacraments, and the other window opened out into the world, so people could come to her for spiritual direction. Each time I approached Julian’s Rock, I would visualize myself coming to her little window to talk with her and glean her wisdom.

“Summer after summer, day after day, I returned to Julian’s Rock and read everything I could about her. 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. With a knowing beyond knowing, she grasped that He would do no less for her: He created her, He loved her, and He would care for her. From Julian, I learned that every circumstance in my life would work together for good whether it felt good or not. God said to her, ‘I may make all things well, I can make all things well, I will make all things well, and I shall make all things well. And you yourself shall see that all manner of things shall be well.’

“Julian’s descriptions of Christ as He was dying on the cross were intensely vivid. In one of the showings, she heard Jesus tenderly saying to her, ‘Julian, have I died enough for you? If I could suffer more for you, I would.’ Her revelations taught me to see that everything is the voice of Love, even unspeakable pain. Pain got my attention, brought me to the end of myself, and led me home to God. Without the pain, I would never have been pressed to engage in this spiritual journey that finally led to such joy and gratitude. Our Father tenderly loves me. He is in control of my reality, so my reality, however it may look to me, is always good. Whatever is, is good. There is a huge freedom in understanding that. As Julian so sweetly summed it up, ‘Then we can do no more than look at Him rejoicing, with a noble, powerful desire to be entirely made one with Him—to be centered in His dwelling, rejoicing in His loving and delighting in His goodness.’ Julian taught me that. She was very real to me. She was my mentor. She still is.

“Year after year, I sat there and pondered all that God was teaching me. I sat there in the heat, in the sunshine, in the cold, or in the rain. It didn’t matter; I watched it all. I watched as the falling raindrops splashed up off the rocks, returning to God, and got in touch with the descending and ascending way. I couldn’t possibly ascend to God unless God first descended to me. My part was just to be open enough to receive Him. I had to be humble enough to descend with Him through my pain to the ground beneath on which I could stand, before I could hope to ascend with Him to the higher places. If I had been afraid to persevere to the solid ground, I would have stayed stuck in the muddy bitterness of my pain. He has descended into me. I have descended through the pain. Now I can ascend with Him.

“As I sat there and watched that old pine tree disintegrate, I thought a lot about my own dying—not physical dying but the inner process of dying to all that I had been clinging to. All of the listening, the surrender, the trust, and the obedience was finally bringing me to the center of the reality of God—which is Love. I can’t explain exactly how this understanding came about, but reading Julian affirmed me in it again and again.

“I probably spent three summers reading, pondering, and rereading Julian’s book before I began to really grasp it. I would take one chapter or even a sentence or phrase, and read it over and over, trying to discern what it might mean. If I had read Julian any earlier in my journey, I don’t think I could have understood her. It took all the preparation of Scripture study and reading the great evangelical writers to bring me to that place. As I studied the Gospels, and now as I pondered Julian’s revelations, it so spoke to me that these people were just ordinary people like me, struggling and suffering and seeking and searching, yet they had been given the gift of the experiential knowledge of Christ, so perhaps I could be given that gift, too.”

“The Presence I felt at Julian’s Rock deepened my experience of the mystery and the beauty and the wonder of God. So summer after summer after summer, I returned to that place. As I returned again and again, these truths came alive to me. It’s so important to establish physical places in our lives where we have experienced the Presence. These places become sacred, and we return there to ask God to intensify our desire for Him.

“Jesus picked a beautiful place to pray the night before He was handed over to His passion. I think, after reflecting on this, that Jesus had been to the Garden of Gethsemane many, many times for prayer. I went to the Garden when I traveled in the Holy Land. It is a beautiful olive grove with old trees gnarled with age. It is a sacred place where the intensity of the Presence of the Father is still very, very real. My own sacred place was a pretty easy climb for me when I was younger, but I am no longer able to go there. I’m deeply grateful, though, that God has given me the precious gift of memory because I can always go to Julian’s Rock in my mind and feel His sweet Presence there. So I close my eyes now and I am there—right there.”

The post Revelations of Divine Love appeared first on The Hidden Life Awakened.

October 2, 2017

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

The Pure Heart and the Source

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

The post The Pure Heart and the Source appeared first on The Hidden Life Awakened.

The First Step

All right, Lord, I’ve been reading about what a good Christian should do and how I should live my life, but I want to say to You that it’s not working for me.

You promised me joy, You promised me peace, You promised me wholeness, and I’m not experiencing any of this.

My life is a total disaster. There’s got to be another way.

I do not doubt Your promises, but I don’t understand how to find them.”Betty Skinner

From the depths of our common humanity, Betty Skinner’s cry of the heart emanates and resonates. Whatever our given lot or chosen path, we have a deep sense that there must be more to life than we are experiencing. And there is so much more. There is treasure hidden within our soul; it is our true self—the person God perfectly and wonderfully created in His image to love and to do His work in the world.

We haven’t learned how to access and live out this reality, though, because throughout our lives we have all been wounded. Innocently and unconsciously, we have walled in our hearts with layer after layer of thick casing for protection, creating another self—a false self—keeping our true self hidden from others and obscured from ourselves; moving us further and further from the perfect freedom and peace we were created for. We then wound others and those we love out of the embedded fear, shame, and unhealed pain of the false self we have constructed.

Betty Walthour Skinner, now in her nineties, dared to take this journey inward out of desperation and desire and has lived all the fullness of its pain and joy. Her intense yearning ultimately led her from terrible suffering with clinical depression into that promised place of peace, rest, and fulfillment that awaits us all.

Hers is a story of a modern woman who, without any of today’s drugs or fancy therapies, embraced the burning fire of her pain and found her way to healing and wholeness.

Ironically, scientific research has now caught up and affirms and documents that everything she did in her healing journey was based, however intuitively, on a solid scientific foundation.

Since the first publication of The Hidden Life in 2006, many, many people have written to tell us how deeply Betty’s journey resonated with them and blessed them. During that same period of time, neuroscience began to be able to document and affirm the healing steps that Betty had intuitively taken, inspired only by trust and deep desire.

Also since the release of the first edition, Cathy’s professional career has deeply immersed her in this burgeoning field of research.

Neuroscience is growing in its capacity to map, through stunning new technology, how our thoughts, emotions, and choices register in the brain by a cascade of physical and energetic changes in the structure of its cells. Scientists now affirm that how and where we focus our attention dictates the content of the brain structure we create. By choosing to focus our attention (mindfulness and prayer) on uplifting emotional content (positivity and hope), and sustain¬ing that moment for twenty-five seconds (installation), we little by little change our brain structure, which changes mental activity, which changes biochemical communication in the body, which epigenetically changes gene expression and thus our physical, mental, and emotional well-being.

The effects of this self-directed neuroplasticity are cumulative, so every time we make a choice for hope, we are turning the part of us that chooses into something different than it was before. Just as it takes more than one footstep, though, to create a new path in the ground, it takes more than one thought to make a new pathway in our mind. We have to choose to cultivate the good we want in our mind over and over again. Somehow, the Apostle Paul understood this when he said, “Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

It is our heart’s desire to offer you the gift of a spiritual friendship with Betty to accompany and encourage you on your journey to renewal in the hope that her life’s story might light a path for your own healing into wholeness, and make you a little more homesick for God.

The First StepApril 12, 2017

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The post The First Step appeared first on The Hidden Life Awakened.