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Posts tagged ‘God’

Jan 19

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Daily Bread of Attention

“The sky is the daily bread of the eyes” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

“People encounter God under shady oak trees, on riverbanks, at the tops of mountains, and in long stretches of barren wilderness. God shows up in whirlwinds, starry skies, burning bushes, and perfect strangers. When people want to know more about God, the son of God tells them to pay attention to the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, to women kneading bread and workers lining up for their pay. Whoever wrote this stuff believed that people could learn as much about the ways of God from paying attention to the world as they could from paying attention to scripture. What is true is what happens, even if what happens is not always right. People can learn as much about the ways of God from business deals gone bad or sparrows falling to the ground as they can from reciting the books of the Bible in order. They can learn as much from a love affair or a wildflower as they can from knowing the Ten Commandments by heart.”― Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith

Skies ablaze with color and hue
Flowers in bloom
A song that moves you to dance
A long embrace
Smiles to laughter
A text or call to say “hi”
Daily bread of attention and gratitude
Overflowing, abundant, enough, imperfect
From what’s missing or what was to what is
Finding nourishment on the ground we stand
To change our view and be changed
To love well today.

“People are not hurdles on the road to God. They are the road.”—Martin Buber, Between Man and Man

Oct 10

Fire all other gods

“When one knows the God of Love, fire all the other gods.” – Fr. Greg Boyle

“The most difficult times for many of us are the ones we give ourselves.”― Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

Our way,
Being right.
Someday when.
Keeping score.
Carrying rocks.
Throwing stones.
Missing this day.
Think again.
Better yet, create space to not think at all.
Open heart.
Light spirit.
Relax, rest, reflect.
Nowhere to be but here.
Steeping in pause, praise, peace.
Love, the journey and destination.

“The outward work will never be puny if the inward work is great.”― Meister Eckhart

Feb 20

Always Where We Are

“To walk quietly until the miracle in everything speaks is poetry, whether we write it down or not.”― Mark Nepo

“Whether through the patterns left in snow, or geese honking in the dark, or through the brilliant wet leaf that hits your face the moment you are questioning your worth, the quiet teachers are everywhere, pointing us to the unlived portion of our lives. When we think we are in charge, the lessons dissolve as accidents or coincidence. But when we’re humble enough to welcome the connections, the glass that breaks across the room is offering us direction, giving us a clue to the story we are in.”― Mark Nepo, The Exquisite Risk: Daring to Live an Authentic Life

God does not require silence to speak.
We require it to hear, see, experience and immerse into beauty, joy, grace, love that is overflowing and in abundance.
Signs, wonders, cues, clues, patterns, intuition, inclination, serendipity, coincidence, direction, clarity, discernment, guidance.
Written and painted all over each day, on our heart.
We are the obstacle.
We need quiet to overcome the noise of the world, others, self, ego to hear the still small voice that is narrating our life.
Inviting our participation and partaking.
Not the way we command and demand.
When we stop trying to change God to fit our way, we realize that we are the ones who need to change.
And if we don’t or do it slowly and imperfectly, we are still loved all the way through.
The miracle and gift of love that transcends all and descends to walk beside us in the details of each day.
Always where we are.

“life is always where we are.”― Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening

Dec 17

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The Slow Work

“The whole life lies in the verb seeing.”― Teilhard de Chardin

“Make of yourself a light,”
said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal — a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.” – Mary Oliver, House of Light

May inspiration lead to motion.
Love to action.
Seeing as if for the first time.
Slow steady work.
Currents always moving.
Some seasons on the shoreline.
To ready for reentry.
Whether we see it or not, we are changing.
We either resist or succumb to the unfolding within.
Make yourself a light.
Heed the call, the whisper.
Emergence at work.

“Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.”
― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Nov 17

Megaphone of Love

“Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”― C.S. Lewis

“Back on the caregiving roller coaster, I struggled to remember the lesson I had just learned so painfully with Mom: the end of caregiving isn’t freedom. The end of caregiving is grief.”― Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss

A friend’s Mom passed away yesterday.
Another friend’s Mom in July.
Mine in March.
Others a few years ago, some decades.
Grief is both individual and communal.
Same and different.
Fresh and lingering.
Deeper than platitudes.
Beyond the words of a Hallmark card.
Not a process but a winding, rocky, sometimes beautiful journey.
A bi-polar SOB.
Depths and heights.
Laughter and tears.
Drops and waves.
Never over, merely changing its form.
Do not go around it, avoid, or run from it.
Right through the middle.
Loss is overwhelming and always overcome by love.
Friends and family, show up.
Not just in the beginning, but months later too.
Simply be there and available.
Don’t assume, always ask and listen.
Actions over words.
Peace, love, light on this journey friend.
Love walks beside you softly, quietly, fiercely.

“Friendship … is born at the moment when one man says to another “What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

Aug 24

Blown Away by Beauty

“I think joy and sweetness and affection are a spiritual path. We’re here to know God, to love and serve God, and to be blown away by the beauty and miracle of nature. You just have to get rid of so much baggage to be light enough to dance, to sing, to play. You don’t have time to carry grudges; you don’t have time to cling to the need to be right.”― Anne Lamott

“Expectations are resentments under construction.”― Anne Lamott

Enter today with fresh thoughts, renewed hopes, bursting energy.
Without explanation, permission or approval.
Flip the story, change the narrative.
Put down the old and put on the new.
A shift in perspective.
An opening to allow possibility to root and bloom.
No shoulds, have tos, why nots, whens – the ingredients of limiting expectations.
Full presence in now, in today.
A path of joy, sweetness and affection.

“Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.”― Anne Lamott

Jun 17

Nearer, Beside, Within

“Try pausing right before and right after undertaking a new action, even something simple like putting a key in a lock to open a door. Such pauses take a brief moment, yet they have the effect of decompressing time and centering you.”― David Steindl-Rast

“He does not ask much of us, merely a thought of Him from time to time, a little act of adoration, sometimes to ask for His grace, sometimes to offer Him your sufferings, at other times to thank Him for the graces, past and present, He has bestowed on you, in the midst of your troubles to take solace in Him as often as you can. Lift up your heart to Him during your meals and in company; the least little remembrance will always be the most pleasing to Him. One need not cry out very loudly; He is nearer to us than we think.”― Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God

Pause. Look. Listen.
Taste. Savor. Be still.
Drink in beauty.
Be held in grace.
Believe. Hope. Love.
Crossroads. Intersections. Connections.
Temporal. Spatial. Spiritual.
Centering. Anchoring. Easing.
All things are possible.

“That all things are possible to him who believes, that they are less difficult to him who hopes, they are more easy to him who loves, and still more easy to him who perseveres in the practice of these three virtues.” – Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God

Jun 3

Faith into Deed

“The test of faith is whether I can make space for difference. Can I recognize God’s image in someone who is not in my image, who language, faith, ideal, are different from mine? If I cannot, then I have made God in my image instead of allowing him to remake me in his.”― Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations

May understanding be my first and last act.
Clearing the path for all.
Inviting and allowing difference.
A potpourri of belonging and hospitality.
Love well without rules or restrictions.
Love has none.
Gentle, kind, gritty and enduring.
It sticks.
A real Presence.
An anchoring.
Faith and truth into deed.
No more fear.
Still small voice that is never silenced.
Listen.
The answer will always be love.

“So meaning is made, not just discovered. That is what religion for the most part is: the constant making and remaking of meaning, by the stories we tell, the rituals we perform and the prayers we say. The stories are sacred, the rituals divine commands, and prayer a genuine dialogue with the divine. Religion is an authentic response to a real Presence, but it is also a way of making that presence real by constantly living in response to it. It is truth translated into deed.”― Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: God, Science and the Search for Meaning

“In an age of fear, moderation is hard to find and harder to sustain. Who wants to listen to a nuanced argument, when what we want is someone to relieve us from the burden of thought and convince us that we were right all along? So people mock. They blame. They caricature. They demonize. In an age of anxiety, few can hear the still small voice that the Bible tells us is the voice of God.”― Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

Jun 4

Spaciousness

“Salvation is a word for the divine spaciousness that comes to human beings in all the tight places where their lives are at risk, regardless of how they got there or whether they know God’s name. Sometimes it comes as an extended human hand and sometimes as a bolt from the blue, but either way it opens a door in what looked for all the world like a wall. This is the way of life, and God alone knows how it works.” – Barbara Brown Taylor

“Earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars.” – Barbara Brown Taylor

May you feel the touch, the embrace, the anchoring of the divine already present
Kneel at the altars that are real rather than false ones we fall too readily on
Notice the sacred and holiness in the ordinary moments of each and every single day
Hidden in plain sight, in reach, awaiting our attention and care
Walls into doors
Light amidst darkness
Blue lingering with clouds
Thick with possibility
Ripe for the receiving, taking and giving
Abundant and available.

“Whoever you are, you are human. Wherever you are, you live in the world, which is just waiting for you to notice the holiness in it.” – Barbara Brown Taylor

Mar 9

Ordinary Altars

“We carry within us the wonders we seek without us.” – Thomas Browne

“When I admire the wonders of a sunset or the beauty of the moon, my soul expands in the worship of the creator.” – Mahatma Gandhi

A run at the end of the day as the clouds roll in and temperature starts to drop. The finish in sight, the sun breaks through the clouds, kissing the frozen lake. A cross take shape but for a moment before fading behind again. An altar, an awakening, a whisper to deepen, widen, open, prompt awe. Signs and wonders woven in the ordinary to carry, hold and embrace. Choose well to what and for who you kneel to and for. God or gods.

“God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform. He plants his footsteps in the sea, and rides upon the storm.” – William Cowper

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