Kitty Crenshaw's Blog, page 7

A Letter About Betty

Dear Ones,

Our sweet mentor and beloved friend, Betty Walthour Skinner, has gone home with the angels into the outstretched arms of Jesus. We will miss her terribly, but rejoice that she is free from pain at last and face to face with the One she has loved so well. She had no fear of death and looked forward with joyous anticipation for its merciful release into the Light. These are her words.

Death is intertwined with life, and to embrace it without fear is to embrace all of life with a burning and infinite passion. We are born out of Love and will die into Love. Thus, eternal life is not a perpetual future, but rather a perpetual Presence.

Betty often spoke about the room with a beautiful view of the mountains that she had asked her best friend Jesus for and told us that He had prepared one for her six thousand feet up in the high hemlock forests of heaven. Her beloved mountains were the sacred place of her healing and freedom.

Out of the earth rise the mountains. From the rim of the meadow, withered with moss, Rises the falcon in his feathered cloth. Through the soft rain, mist glistening like mica, The quilts of wildflowers begin again.   When I die, I would like to die On a day of mist and mica and of rain. Descending rain, ascending rain, endless rain, The kind I know will never end.   My ceremony, One of shoveled ashes, Shoveled out into the sky, Free of sorrow and the pain of letting go, Free to soar to heights Like the falcon in his feathered cloth. BWS

The thread that runs through Betty’s life and writings is enduring trust in God’s loving presence in all things and an intense desire that her life be poured out for others. Her story bears witness to the truth that God is a self-bestowing God who persistently presses in to meet, to change, and to fill us in our most profound need with healing love, bringing us into oneness with Him and with each other and with all of creation. It is a deep and abiding testimony to the existence of a Reality that will transform the lives of those human souls who are free and open enough to receive it and who are willing to persevere in this holy work. 1 Her writings are the fruit of Love in mystical understanding, born not simply out of the intellect or information but rather out of her sacred encounters with the Beloved. It is our privilege to offer you the gifts that came from her suffering and perseverance in the hope that her story might light a path for your healing into wholeness and make you a little more homesick for God.

Our saintly friend has come to the end of her journey now. Though we will no longer have her physical presence, she will continue to gently reach out to us in spirit, perhaps even more deeply now, saying, “Take His hand now, even as I am offering you mine, and in the warmth of such an all-compelling love, let us follow Him together.”

  I join hands with others and the earth, Step into this costly dance. For eternal is the wheel, and endless is the dance That grinds the seasons of the soul Where nothing falls but into Life.   Grace brought me to this place, This gentle hill and ground Where all Beauty is first found. My story lies upon it. I rest beside it in the dark. For what I found, I am. And where I am is Home.      Betty W. Skinner Born: February 9, 1926 Reborn: August 17, 2021                                        

Walking Out Of The Darkness

Rembrandt. The Return of the Prodigal Son. Hermitage Museum.

Our true home is in God, yet we continue to run away in a futile search for a place of belonging. The further we run, the more faintly we hear His love call and the more entangled we become in the manipulations and power games of the world. Caught in a web of unfulfilled needs and wants, we feel victimized, fearful, anxious, and depressed. We begin to wonder if anyone really cares or if life has any meaning at all. Will we accept this rejection from the world that imprisons us, or will we choose to return and claim our true freedom as God’s beloved? Our journey home begins when we finally come in touch with the truth that we were born out of Love and were created to live in and offer that Love to others. Everything is secondary to this great hope. We no longer need permission from the world to live our lives. We are free to rise from the ashes of our poor choices and start walking towards home—away from the desolation of the world.

The distance between turning around and arriving home is our life’s journey. The journey is hard, and we all stray from the path, but we do not all return, so it needs to be traveled wisely and with discipline. We set our compass to True North and step forward in faith and trust with an open heart and open mind, leaving regret behind. When we inevitably veer from the path, we pay attention and catch ourselves, then without judgment, trusting that nothing is wasted, we choose to leave the negative place and walk out of the darkness. Tragically, some set off in confidence but choose to detour too far from the path, telling themselves that they will come back further down the road, hardening their hearts more and more to the searching call of the Shepherd—until they look back and can no longer find the path. They are lost to themselves and God.

Jesus makes it clear that the way home is the way of a newborn child listening always and intently for its mother’s presence, clinging to her in deepest trust. Becoming a child of God is living towards a second innocence, simplicity, and purity that can only be reached through deliberate choices, walking the narrow way, and keeping our eyes on the prize. We have the promise that we are not alone even in our darkest times. God is with us when we cannot see Him or even sense His presence, and therefore we have hope. We can cling to the tiniest shred of faith, and we can hold out the light of love to others even when we ourselves feel totally unloved and abandoned.

It is well to remember that feelings always follow choices. If we continue to act only on what we feel, we will stay stuck. Fear will paralyze us, but fear is a lie of the mind. God is Love, and Love casts out fear.1 We no longer have to be slaves to the darkness. The world has brutalized our thought processes, but we now know that we can literally rewire our brains by the practice of refusing negative thoughts and choosing positive thoughts and emotions instead.2 We can return to the path and live what we know to be the truth rather than by what we are feeling at any moment. Choice by choice, small step by small step, we learn to reclaim trust in the Love that destroys all fear and empowers us to persevere in hope.

In prayer, we reawaken and reclaim our ability to hear God’s eternal love call. Prayers of praise and adoration help us keep our eyes on the goal. But most importantly, our prayers point to the real and powerful presence of the Divine Spirit of Jesus with us, our never-failing guide, Who strengthens us for the journey, Who redeems all our choices, and Who leads us out of the darkness into the light and life of Home.

Dear friend, on the path coming home. My ears are no longer my own, The sweetest of voices entered through them And pierced to the depths of my soul.   Dear friend, on the path coming home. Press in, press in, oh, press in Your ear ever close to the Source. You will hear, though you still may be sleeping His voice gently awakening within. You will know with a knowing beyond knowing   How Love’s Spirit weaves the ways of your days, How Love’s fire kindles the twigs of desire, How Love’s longing becomes your belonging.     BWS  

August 5

The old voice in our head tells us we are wasting our time. The new voice in our heart tells us that if we don’t change, we won’t grow. ~Betty

A Letter From Betty

Dear Ones,

In my room here at the nursing home, there is little for me to do. I can no longer see to read, I can’t hear, and now my rapidly waning strength keeps me from my walks in the garden. But I can still talk to my dear Friend, Jesus, I can still sing, I can still lift those I love in prayer, and I can still relive my precious memories. As I reflect anew on my inner journey, travel once again by memory, from decade to decade. Each of my nine decades has affirmed one reoccurring theme: a call, the cry to let go into the Light.

For years my hidden life and my visible life were in great conflict and tension. My visible life was imprisoned in guilt, fear, and unspeakable pain. At the same time, the haunting voice of my inner life was gently inviting me to stay, to embrace my pain, to fall headlong into the suffering. At forty-two, the intensity of this relentless struggle sent me reeling into a debilitating clinical depression. It was here in the darkest of my times that God’s mercy not only awakened me to its Light but to a life-changing truth: that the Light was not only the drawing power of God’s great love but was the very presence of Divine Love Itself. I felt a surge of assurance, a freedom I had never felt before. In retrospect, I was closer to the Source of all healing, the Center of the Circle of Love, than I ever could have imagined at that time.

Very, very slowly, in faith and obedience, one step at a time, I came to understand that to reach my destination, the Center of the Circle, intimacy with the Beloved would cost me nothing less than everything. Again and again, I was called to periods of solitude and silence, intensive listening, discerning choices, and depths of patient waiting and trust. Yet as I chose to yield to the draw of the Light, to gaze at its luminous field, I began to see and to perceive my visible life with new eyes, new ears, and a new heart. I began to feel this Light and Love healing and connecting all the pieces of my broken and shattered life. At last, I came to a deep inner knowing of Whose and who I am, ultimate freedom, and the supreme gift of healing and wholeness. I sensed the Sacred Source at the center of the circle drawing all things into Itself and I, as His chosen, being drawn freely along with it. There was no resistance.

Entering this Light filled me with an abiding presence and peace, a quiet strength and certainty. It continues now to sweep me along in its divine love flow spilling over with the beauty, mystery, and wonder of God, weaving an ever-deepening tapestry of Love, the Face of Christ, the explosive story of my heart.

I have shed the green and sleeping leaves of youth
Stripped by the wind of the spirit down to truth.
Emptied and alone, I stand uncluttered.

A lens for lives beyond my own:
A frame through which another’s fire may glow;
A harp from which another’s passion soars.

Blow through me, O wind of spirit and of life.
So simple and so humble have I come.
Pared down at last to bone
So fragile yet so fearless have I grown.
BWS

July 22

Writings that inspire and are lasting are not written for the multitudes. They are written from one Light to one Life in the Spirit of Love. ~Betty

A Prayer of Veils and Altars

Paul Signac. Place des Lices. Carnegie Museum of Art.

Abba Father, prayer is my noblest function and the altar on which I lay my deepest longings in the intimacy of Your perfect Love. It is the sacred space of our peaceful communion and Your powerful presence that I can freely go and take with me those You have given me to love. Prayer quietly turns my attention away from the circumference of the world long enough to allow my grief, anxiety, and fears to rise from the depths of me to be healed. Even so, I struggle to stay focused. I quickly lose the deep mystical sense of radical interconnectedness and belongingness to You. I see darkly through the veil.

I am a spiritual being on a sling-shot journey home through a material world that distracts me and blinds me to spiritual things. I forget who I am—earth’s dismal fog obscures my true identity as Your beloved daughter. I rush in and out of Your presence. I pray in bursts. Still, the desire in me for You in Whom all is lost, yet all is found will not let me go. It is an echo of Your far more encompassing and passionate desire for me. My broken heart is the place where Your mystery seeks entry. And so, I return in weakness and humility with hope.

Abba Father, prayer is my heart’s purest desire. In the returning to the altar, again and again, the veil that has hidden You from my finite knowing ever so slowly begins to thin. How could it be otherwise? “God’s mercy seat is no mere stall set by the vulgar roadside, where every careless passer-by may put an easy hand out to snatch any glittering blessing that catches his eye. It stands in the holiest of holies. We can come to it only through veils and altars of purification. To enter into it, we must enter into God.” 1

And so, I will be anxious for nothing but will prayerfully enter Your presence, asking boldly for what I need with thanksgiving, trusting that Your peace, which is beyond my comprehension, will guard my heart and mind. I will dwell on what is true and pure and lovely and worthy of praise.2 I will lift my heart and turn it toward You to receive and finally to reflect Your glory into the world as the light of the sun reflects from a mirror. I am Your living gateway. King of Glory, Lover of my soul, I offer You my heart and my gratitude—for that is truly all I have to give—in return for awakening me to the Great Mystery in which I live and move and have my being.

Dearest Holy One, as I quiet my soul now and enter its sanctuary with You, I pray that Your Spirit will come upon me and blow over me. Bring me to the foot of the cross, to the nailed feet, the gift of Your Son, and there in its shadow, in unspeakable gratitude, enable me to see with Your eyes, hear with Your ears, and love with Your heart. Teach me by faith, to know You without seeing You, by hope, to possess You without feeling Your presence, and by love, to desire You above all desires. Clothe me in Your compassion, kindness, humility, and love, so that others might feel the slightest brush of your garment as I pass by. I ask these prayers in Your name and always to Your glory, that many, many people might be blessed.

Amen

The Hidden Life Awakened p189

July 8

We were created in the image of God the Creator, and our unique expression is crucial to God’s design for the healing of the world. ~Betty

Name It, Claim It, and Tame It

Briton Rivière. Una and the Lion. Scottish National Gallery.

We wound others out of our wounds, and we sin out of our innocence. Nevertheless, we labor under the shadowy burden of guilt that we can’t seem to shake. Sin is a word that doesn’t sit well in our culture anymore, and the practice of confession and repentance has become outmoded. Society has given us permission to run from our imperfections and hide our transgressions even from ourselves, but by not seeing them, we are kept in bondage to them. The world’s great traditions have always understood the primary importance of confession and repentance. These practices mysteriously and wondrously free one from the bondage of shame, negative thinking and behavior, by bringing them into the light so they can be offered in repentance to a compassionate and forgiving God, bringing cleansing redemption and hope of change to the penitent and ultimately to the world.

You were wondrously designed in the image of God but have lost your way in the brutality of the world and done much you are ashamed of. Your innocent child’s heart has been buried under the weight of the burden you carry, so you have blindly wounded others out of the darkness so deeply embedded in your own wounded heart. You are fully accountable for those transgressions, but you are also fully free to find your way back to wholeness. Will you make the difficult choice to turn away from self-deception and see your ways with cleared vision and unflinching honesty?

To begin, this simple process Betty calls “name, claim, and tame” can be a tremendous help to you. When you are feeling unsettled, angry, anxious, fearful, or any other state of dissatisfaction, you can know that your neural structures of negativity are engaged and active, meaning oxygen, blood flow, and energy are moving through them. There are five basic negative thought patterns, or compulsions, that Betty calls the five Cs—competing, comparing, complaining, controlling, and condemning—that need to be tamed.

When you realize you are feeling any of these negative feelings, will you simply tune in and ask yourself which of the Cs might be controlling your thoughts. Then name it. Are you complaining about your life or the life of someone you love? Are you condemn- ing yourself or someone else because your expectations haven’t been lived up to? Are you attempting to control someone or something? Are you competing with or diminishing another person? Are you comparing yourself to others you perceive to be more successful? Now claim that the thought is simply a neural structure that has wired together and fired together in a certain way for too long through a familiar groove. Then, quieting any self-judgment, tame it by acknowledging that this is where your growth needs to happen. You will probably struggle with one of the five Cs more than the others, perhaps because of your genetic makeup or learned thinking, so be compassionate with yourself.

Then take that habit to the foot of the cross, asking God to transform it. Take it there again and again, leave it there again and again, and move forward into your life with hope and gratitude. Finally, you will awaken one day to discover that this way of seeing is no longer controlling you. God yearns to re-create you in mercy. Listen to Him saying to you, “I understand. You didn’t know what you were doing. I will even use that thing you did that you can’t forget for good. I have already paid the price for you, and if I could, I would do it again because I love you, and you are worth that much to Me. Go, sin no more, claim your innocence, and let my forgiveness envelope and heal you. You are free.”

-excerpted from The Hidden Life Awakened pp 36-37

To hear Betty talk more about this, click below

June 24

Everything is preparation; nothing is wasted.~Betty

We Need To Reclaim Sin

Lucien Freud. Bella. Private Collection.

We need to reclaim the idea of sin, but we must never succumb to its despair. We were created in the image of God for the joy of God. Such divine dignity brings with it the freedom to choose; we are free to choose good, but we are necessarily then free to choose evil. Life’s seductions continually tempt us to deviate from our True North. Still, if we vigilantly keep watch and correct course, we will never stray beyond the reach of Love’s affirmation and recreative mercy.

Sin is the destruction of one’s self and one’s relationships. Sin ruins us when we are blind to it. We don’t see sin in ourselves, but we see it in others—and they always see it in us. Our blindness has begotten anger, anxiety, self-pity, and self-hatred. Sin can destroy our deeply precious and delicate natures, causing its devastation at the very core of our beings.

Pride whispers we deserve more, so we tear down the other. Envy competes and compares and promises we will never be or have enough. Anger spews out words that sate us while destroying the other. Sloth stagnates us into thinking there is no point to it all, gluttony makes us crave what we want, and greed makes us take it. If we fail to look fearlessly and clearly at these inclinations, we gradually and imperceptibly give in one choice at a time to a life enslaved to sin that we justify by telling ourselves that is just who we are and therefore all we are.

Conceived in the perfection and beauty of their Holy Loving Parent, Adam and Eve were entrusted with the dignity of freedom that love requires. Still, they rationalized their choice to disobey by saying it couldn’t hurt to see what evil was. Their inclination to sin became our inheritance. However, to say that we are inclined to do evil is very different from saying that we are doomed to do evil.

There is radical hope in remembering our sacred identity, but when we ignore our sins, even and especially the so-called smaller ones like negativity or criticalness or thoughtlessness, we abandon our resistance before the battle even begins. Like the prodigal son, we must own our sin and return home to the Father, who waits with open arms. God gives us our nature, but we have to fight for our character.

To recover our passion for life will require quiet time, focused attention, true remorse, obedience, strength of spirit, and above all, intense desire. If we will attend to the deepest parts of our being, standing outside of ourselves, gently and objectively observing our sinful behaviors, refusing discouragement, and choosing—however imperfectly—to resist them, we will live into our divine pedigree. We will reclaim our stand on solid ground as persons without fear, uniquely created before all eternity, called to participate in birthing holiness into the world.

I know that you delight to set your truth deep in my spirit.
So come into the hidden places of my heart and teach me wisdom.

Purify my conscience! Make this leper clean again!
Wash me in your love until I am pure in heart.
Satisfy me in your sweetness, and my song of joy will return.

The places you have crushed within me will rejoice in your healing touch.
Hide my sins from your face; erase all my guilt by your saving grace.
Keep creating in me a clean heart. Fill me with pure thoughts and holy desires, ready to please you.

Let my passion for life be restored, tasting joy in every breakthrough you bring to me. Hold me close to you with a willing spirit that obeys whatever you say. Then I can show other guilty ones how loving and merciful you are. They will find their way back home to you, knowing that you will forgive them. 1

David—giant slayer, singer-songwriter, King of Israel, adulterer, murderer, man after God’s own heart. 2