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January 5 - January 14, 2018
What if we ceased to pledge our allegiance to the bottom line and stood, instead, with those who line the bottom?
No . . . the rejected—the widow, orphan, stranger—are to be favored.
Oscar Romero wrote: “A church that doesn’t provoke any crises, a gospel that doesn’t unsettle, a word of God that doesn’t get under anyone’s skin, a word that doesn’t touch the real sin of the society in which it is being proclaimed—what gospel is that?”
Hafez asserts, who only knows four words. Every child has known God. Not the God of names, Not the God of don’ts, Not the God who ever does anything weird. But the God who only knows Four words. And He keeps repeating them, saying: “Come dance with me.” Come Dance.
We have settled for a “partial God,” as Richard Rohr puts it, when every minute of every moment we are asked to “move beyond the mind we have” and land increasingly on a renewed and expansive view of God.
We are human beings, so we endlessly create God in our own image. We can’t help ourselves. But certainly we can catch ourselves.
Our sense of God always beckons us to grow, to reimagine something wildly more breathtaking than where our imagination generally takes us.
God leans into us so that we can find our way to this inner absorption of God.
During Advent, we are called to prepare the way . . . to “make straight the path” and make smooth what is rocky. Our hardwiring is such that we hear these invitations as a demand to “straighten up” or “get our act together.” But it’s not we who needs changing—it’s our crooked path that needs to be smoothed . . . so we can be reached by God’s tenderness. One of the many impediments to hearing the only message God longs to communicate to us is our marriage to the pain we carry and the lament that accompanies it. With grace, we come to know that lament can’t get a foothold if gratitude gets there
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Not a rock in the path. Mountains reduced to a plain so the tenderness can get right to you.
“Let us . . . strive to enter into that rest,” we read in Hebrews,
As a Folsom inmate put it, “grabbin’ God’s outstretched hand and goin’ for a walk.”
The God who always wants to clean the slate is hard to believe. Yet the truth about God is that God is too good to be true. And whenever human beings bump into something too good to be true, we decide it’s not true.
Some things are random and other things are meant to be in our control. So God is with me when “shit happens” and God is rooting for me when I need to decide things. And I’m okay with that. I don’t need God to be in charge of my life. I only need God to be at the center of it.
I believe that God protects me from nothing but sustains me in everything.
Often enough, we get in the habit of shaking our fists at God and saying, WHAT do you WANT from me? We are programmed this way as humans. But I suppose it would be more accurate to ask God this: What do you want FOR me? For starters: life, happiness, and peace: My joy yours. Your joy complete. That’s it. Nothing less than that.
Our lives, fully expressive of God’s pleasure, delight, and loving-kindness. Pretty much it.
God is too busy loving you to have any time left over to be disappointed.
When we are disappointed in each other, we least resemble God.
God loves us whole and entire, and as a community,
God holds our garbage and recycles it into love.”
Generosity in Buddhism is to be relieved of the “stain of stinginess.”
“All of you,” he began, “are diamonds covered in dust.” He choked up a bit. “You . . . can wipe your dust off here.”
“Ever since Happiness heard your name,” the poet Hafez writes, “it’s been running down the street trying to find you.”
“Who can conceive what the Lord intends?” No one escapes the notice of God.
“And holy befold.” I never correct him, because his version is better than the original—indeed, it is the sacred, the holy, unfolding right before our eyes.
We live amidst a universe soaked in grace that invites us to savor it.
It’s the holiest person, I would assert, who is on the lookout for such moments of spaciousness and calm. Like Mando, sitting on his porch, finding his heart once again restored to some beauty, innocence, and wholeness.
Hafez wrote: Slipping on my shoes, boiling water, toasting bread, buttering the sky, That should be enough contact With God in one day To make everyone “crazy.”
Every single moment of our lives asks us to be charmed, captivated, enticed, thrilled, and pleased. We don’t wait for such moments to fall out of the sky; we just put ourselves on high alert to catch these moments as they happen.
Being alert to the sacred in our midst is a choice that gets more meaningful as we practice it.
C. S. Lewis wrote that “holiness . . . is irresistible.”
It would seem that, quite possibly, the ultimate measure of health in any community might well reside in our ability to stand in awe at what folks have to carry rather than in judgment at how they carry it.
Sergio
“After all,” he continued, barely getting out the words, “how can I help others to heal if I don’t welcome my own wounds?”
We are at our healthiest when we are most situated in awe, and at our least healthy when we engage in judgment.
Standing at the margins with the broken reminds us not of our own superiority but of our own brokenness.
The embrace of our own suffering helps us to land on a spiritual intimacy with ourselves and others. For if we don’t welcome our own wounds, we will be tempted to despise the wounded.
We spend so much time asking where our suffering comes from, it leaves us little time to ask where it leads.
In the highpoverty urban communities of Los Angeles County, one in three youth suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. That’s twice the rate of soldiers returning from war.
It isn’t simply that being poor means having less money than the privileged; it’s that being poor means living in a continual state of acute crisis.
The poor are always one straw away from calamity and catastrophe.
Certainly, if we live in the past, we will be depressed. If we live in the future, we are guaranteed anxiety. Now is always vast and new. Like any practice, it’s not about technique or program. It’s a decision.
Walt Whitman wrote: “I am larger, better than I thought, / I did not know I held such goodness.” Voilà.
Richard Rohr was right: “We don’t think ourselves into a new way of living. We live ourselves into a new way of thinking.”
In Mark’s gospel, Jesus cures a deaf man. He says, “Be opened,” and things that have previously held the man back, an inability to hear and speak, are lifted.
“Happiness,” Thich Nhat Hanh tells us, “only comes from kindness and compassion.”
When a homie is sitting in front of my desk, the mantra on a continuous loop in my head is “Stay listening.” Another handy one is “Now. Here. This.” Listen here and now and only to this person.
For unless love becomes tenderness—the connective tissue of love—it never becomes transformational. The tender doesn’t happen tomorrow . . . only now.
“This is the first, wildest, and wisest thing I know: that the soul exists, and that it is built entirely out of attentiveness,” Mary Oliver writes.
