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Posts tagged ‘Faith’

Apr 21

Be Unreasonable

“Everything in the universe has a rhythm, everything dances. ”― Maya Angelou

“Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.”— George Bernard Shaw

When you fall down, get up;
When others disappoint, offer grace;
When you have a hard day, keep going;
When others show what’s wrong, find what’s right;
May you see good in yourself, amplify;
May you see good in your neighbor, connect;
May you see good in the world, participate;
Optimism, action, love, generosity, joy, resilience, forgiveness, laughter, kindness, beauty, faith, imperfection, action, effort, compassion, hope, grit;
These transform self, others and the world.
Go change the world, one small thought, word, act at a time.

“What will matter is the good we did, not the good we expected others to do.”― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

Apr 8

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Fresh Courage

“When there is nothing left to lose, we find the true self—the self that is whole, the self that is enough, the self that no longer looks to others for definition, or completion, or anything but companionship on the journey.”― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“Adversity is a natural part of being human. It is the height of arrogance to prescribe a moral code or health regime or spiritual practice as an amulet to keep things from falling apart. Things do fall apart. It is in their nature to do so. When we try to protect ourselves from the inevitability of change, we are not listening to the soul. We are listening to our fear of life and death, our lack of faith, our smaller ego’s will to prevail. To listen to your soul is to stop fighting with life–to stop fighting when things fall apart; when they don’t go our away, when we get sick, when we are betrayed or mistreated or misunderstood. To listen to the soul is to slow down, to feel deeply, to see ourselves clearly, to surrender to discomfort and uncertainty and to wait.”― Elizabeth Lesser

In the twists and turns.
On the roads not chosen.
Unexpected yet here.
In smooth sailing.
Alignment, ease, going great.
In all of the in between of the ebbs and flows of life.
May you know you are so much more than your circumstances, trials, challenges.
Patience. Companionship. Love.
New day.
Look in, out, up.
Fresh courage.

“Have patience with all things but first with yourself. Never confuse your mistakes with your value as a human being. You are perfectly valuable, creative, worthwhile person simply because you exist. And no amount of triumphs or tribulations can ever change that.”― Saint Frances de Sales

Apr 7

On What Matters

“There are two ways to do anything. We can do it in order to make life better for me, or we can do it in order to make life better for someone else, as well as for me. The first way gets the thing done; the second way gets the thing done and makes life a sacrament.” – Joan Chittister

“My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.
Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,
which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,
which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.”

May I go further than merely getting things done.
Creating never-ending lists of to dos.
Plans, steps, short-cuts, hacks, tips and tricks.
Making my days transactional.
Progress, efficiency, speed, one-dimensional, flat, no flavor, skimming the surface.
Deep into being, becoming, wonder, enough and overflowing, grateful even in the chaos and incompleteness, joy, relationships, connection, presence, laughter, inquiry, emergence, clarity, guidance, awe, reverence.
Daily living as a sacrament, altar, liturgy, offering, holy ground.
The rigorous fulfilling work of loving the world.

“Meditation practice is like piano scales, basketball drills, ballroom dance class. Practice requires discipline; it can be tedious; it is necessary. After you have practiced enough, you become more skilled at the art form itself. You do not practice to become a great scale player or drill champion. You practice to become a musician or athlete. Likewise, one does not practice meditation to become a great meditator. We meditate to wake up and live, to become skilled at the art of living.”― Elizabeth Lesser, The Seeker’s Guide: Making Your Life a Spiritual Adventure

Apr 6

Blossoms Breaking Open

“How strange that the nature of life is change, yet the nature of human beings is to resist change. And how ironic that the difficult times we fear might ruin us are the very ones that can break us open and help us blossom into who we were meant to be.”― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“May you listen to the voice within the beat even when you are tired. When you feel yourself breaking down, may you break open instead. May every experience in life be a door that opens your heart, expands your understanding, and leads you to freedom. If you are weary, may you be aroused by passion and purpose. If you are blameful and bitter, may you be sweetened by hope and humor. If you are frightened, may you be emboldened by a big consciousness far wiser than your fear. If you are lonely, may you find love, may you find friendship. If you are lost, may you understand that we are all lost, and still we are guided—by Strange Angels and Sleeping Giants, by our better and kinder natures, by the vibrant voice within the beat. May you follow that voice, for This is the way—the hero’s journey, the life worth living, the reason we are here.  ”― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

May you find peace, equanimity, joy in this day.
Welcome them home like an old friend.
Put down the unnecessary.
Mute the noise.
Opening to answers different than your own.
Paths off trail.
Possibilities unfolding.
Broaden and deepen.
Sweetened by hope and humor.
Guided and held.
In the present moment.

“Whatever is happening, whatever is changing, whatever is going or not going according to my plans—I release my hold on all of it. I leave behind who I think I am, who I want to be, what I want the world to be. I come home to the great peace of the present moment,”― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

Apr 5

The Art of Just Being

“It’s not about getting over things, it’s about making room for them. It’s about painting the picture with contrast.”― Brianna Wiest

“The key to finding happiness in this life is realizing that the only way to overcome is to transcend; to find happiness in the simple pleasures, to master the art of just being.”― Brianna Wiest

Nuance.
Shades.
Shadows.
White space.
Hues.
Tones.
Muted.
Bright.
Contrast.
Rarely black and white.
Nor ordered perfectly.
Allow and enter the beauty, depth, mystery, color, unfolding, cadence, symphony and rhythm.
May you allow happiness to rise right where you stand now.
The beautiful art of just being, embracing and being held in gratitude and grace.

“Happiness is not something you can chase. It is something you have to allow. This likely will come as a surprise to many people, as the world is so adamant about everything from positive psychology to motivational Pinterest boards. But happiness is not something you can coach yourself into. Happiness is your natural state. That means you will return to it on your own if you allow the other feelings you want to experience to come up, be felt, be processed, and not resisted. The less you resist your unhappiness, the happier you will be. It is often just trying too hard to feel one certain way that sets us up for failure.”― Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You: Transforming Self-Sabotage Into Self-Mastery

Mar 28

No Greater Love

“A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.” – John 13:34

“No greater love has anyone than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” – John 15:13

Sacrifice.
Suffering.
Friendship.
Service.
Yielding.
Kindness.
Humility.
Companionship.
Generosity.
Compassion.
Redemption.
Unconditional.
Love.
All alive this day and each day.
Available to everyone.
Holy Thursday, the threshold to the Easter journey.
No greater love.

“If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.” – John 13:14

Mar 27

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Bit by Bit

“At the gates of time, blessing waits to usher toward us the grace we need.”― John O’Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?” “It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”― Margery Williams Bianco, The Velveteen Rabbit

In the culmination
The cumulation
Time and wearing
Imperfection
Stops and starts
In betweens
Ordinary days
Transitions and thresholds
Weathering
Joy and laughter
Wilting, weeding, seeding, planting, blooming
Growth, fruition, transformation
May you love your Realness and others too
A beautiful thing to behold and unfold
Loved into becoming.

“Faith is not an art. Faith is not an achievement. Faith is not a good work of which some may boast while others can excuse themselves with a shrug of the shoulders for not being capable of it. It is a decisive insight of faith itself that all of us are incapable of faith in ourselves, whether we think of its preparation, beginning, continuation, or completion. In this respect believers understand unbelievers, skeptics, and atheists better than they understand themselves. Unlike unbelievers, they regard the impossibility of faith as necessary, not accidental …”― Karl Barth, Reader

Mar 26

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UPrising

“To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.”― Karl Barth

“The best way to start praying, therefore, is actually to stop praying. To pause. To be still. To put down your prayer list and surrender your own personal agenda. To stop talking at God long enough to focus on the wonder of who he actually is. To ‘be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him’.”― Pete Greig, How to Pray: A Simple Guide for Normal People

Reflection to see what is without fiction, attachment or noise.
Pause to rest, to reorder, reframe, reset.
Stillness to be in awe and wonder.
To be filled and renewed, prepared to carry on with fervor and vigor.
A peace that passes understanding.
A joy detached from circumstances and worries, rooted in gratitude.
The power of prayer to change self rather than everyone and everything else.
An uprising, rooting, transformation.

“Joy is the simplest form of gratitude.”― Karl Barth

Mar 24

The Road to the Third Day

“It is why every single expression of faith is provisional—because life carries us always forward to a place where the faith we’d fought so hard to articulate to ourselves must now be reformulated, and because faith in God is, finally, faith in change.”― Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

“We are destined to be fully redeemed, and unlonely, only when the kingdom about which Jesus preached comes in all its completeness. In the meantime, we must give up attempting to find complete fulfillment through partial and pseudosolutions. We must face up to our loneliness, accept it, stop running from it, stop letting it propel us into all kinds of dissipating activity, and stop seeing its resolution as lying exclusively in a journey outward. As hard as that is to do, we must, at some point, stop our frenzied activities and look inward for an answer. The journey toward solitude begins with this first step.”― Ronald Rolheiser, The Restless Heart: Finding Our Spiritual Home in Times of Loneliness

Palm Sunday.
The start of Holy Week.
The final leg of the journey to Easter.
The third day only comes after day one and two.
May the sacred ground of this week stop you in your tracks.
Bring you to your knees.
Beyond cynicism, anger, denial.
No religion required.
Just an open heart.
Courage to take the journey in.

“Faith is not the same thing as being able to imagine God’s existence or even of being able to feel God on an emotional level. The mind is mostly unequal to the task to the task of imagining God’s existence and the heart is often just as inept at giving us any feeling of it. But God doesn’t cease to exist for that reason, nor is faith dead just because the imagination and the heart have run dry. God exists, independent of our perceptions.”― Ronald Rolheiser, The Shattered Lantern: Rediscovering a Felt Presence of God

Feb 29

New Wineskins

“All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.”― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“We defend ourselves with descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.”― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

Half full.
Half empty.
Overflowing.
The contents of the glass, the cup, the container, the wineskins.
How we measure, bucket, count, describe.
Circumstances.
Relationships.
Self.
The world.
Our thoughts, perspective, biases, assumptions, experience, judgments.
We would rather have the contents change than the container that holds it all together.
If the cup changes, transforms, grows, dies to become new, space is also created for new things to be poured into the cup, to be held.
How can I change to hold new things? To see differently. To count less. To enjoy more wherever I’m at on the journey.
For me, that’s what Lent is.
Rending, clarifying, renewing.
Not a day, but a season, the long game.
All found in the desert of contemplation, mirror looking rather than finger pointing. Laying down the old to pick up the new.
To not demand the world to change.
But to ask kindly and with compassion for me to change where needed and ask God to help make it happen.
The stuff of letting go, transition, thresholds, transformation.
Heavy and light at the same time.
And we are never ever asked to do it alone.
That really is the good news.
Imperfect, fumbling, tripping, picking up again, with joy and grace woven through and always loved.
Old wineskins, old wine.
New wineskins, new wine.

“And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; or else the new wine will burst the wineskins and be spilled, and the wineskins will be ruined. But new wine must be put into new wineskins, and both are preserved.” – Luke 5:37-39 NKJV

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