Monthly Archives: January 2023
Pass On the Good News Your Way
A wonderful blessing of face book and other sharing internet places is that we can pass on what truths have been grace for us and their source. And those of us who feel called to share are encouraged when someone “gets” what we share and finds it helpful. A very erudite elderly priest who had founded a college in the Philippines once commented about another priest who wrote an amazing amount of novels with moral themes. He said, “That man has never had a thought he didn’t share with the world!” I don’t think he was saying it as a compliment!! Perhaps this is a difference between the ministry of an introvert and an extrovert!
I worked with the MBTI about how differences in inborn personality types affect our learning/teaching style, our very different ways of expressing love even in marriage, and the way we relate to God and with others spiritually, and how middle managers need to understand the big differences in what rewards motivate different people. I know from experience how different styles of discipline have very different responses from even my own five children.
Understanding how different we are is a huge challenge. Even knowing what I learned decades ago, now in my eighties I’m finally understanding the importance of other ways of being in the world in all aspects of life. I think for our mental, emotional, spiritual growth it takes a lot of time, challenges, and even grace to begin to value all the differences in people enough to recognize we need all of them to work together in different areas and ways and times.
As an extrovert, with all the new outlets, I tend to share everything I am currently learning or finally understanding. The hard part isn’t seeing that many people aren’t in a place in their particular journey to understand and value what I share. I, as an extrovert, struggle when I realize that many times when people actually hear and “get” what I’m saying and even apply it to their own lives, they don’t necessarily share it!
My expectation or hope that they will is admittedly mostly an ego problem. But to me it is also a spiritual problem for our world…..not that my insights are world changing. But so much of mine do come from my spiritual journey and the totally unconditional Love that God has expressed in Jesus. I don’t think I would have them without that grace. And I realize again that people whose strength is responding intellectually and people whose gift is responding emotionally are on a different schedule on their journey. And a whole person response to Jesus takes both. Once more that is a reason for us to value both those who value law and those who respond to Love and find a way to work together since it takes a lifetime to get those two sides of us working equally well.
I hope that makes sense.
In my youth I played by the rules mostly out of fear of rejection or judgment by others. After I was simply overwhelmed by an experience of the love of God, I struggled with the feeling that the law was a prison of sorts that limited curiosity and creativity. So, one day as I was doing breakfast dishes, I prayed, “Lord would you show me how law is loving.”
The next moment I heard a thumping at the door. When I opened it, our dog had dropped a bird there. The bird was flopping around and seemed to have a broken wing. I brought the bird in and wrapped a dish towel around it, to keep the wing straight. I decided to make a sort of incubator to keep it still in a round bowl on the stove near a kettle steaming slightly for warmth. It simply wouldn’t accept the limits, thrashing around and almost throwing itself against the hot kettle. So, I wrapped it with a larger towel carefully and held it, trying to soothe and eventually trying to feed it. It simply thrashed and fought until it died. As I was burying it, it hit me. The law is our incubator until we become spiritually mature enough to love others as we love ourselves and to accept the limits that requires. Let’s face it, that takes time and a lot of grace.
Consequences are built into life and if we cannot accept limits, we end up learning the hard way. We are unfinished people at every age. It takes a lifetime of challenges and grace to learn to love others not only as ourselves, but as God loved us in Jesus.
If we believe intellectually in the God of Jesus or have been awakened by an experience of that Love, we are called to share in both word and deed using whatever gifts God has given us and working together at encouraging and helping others to do the same.
Jesus fleshed out God’s Love for us. Pass it on.
Good Things Becoming Addictions to Avoid Emotional Pain
Addictions can be good things, used for the wrong reasons. Pleasure trumps pain. It can be the pleasure of completing tasks, making crafts, even a juicy apple, even exercising. If something has the power to make us uncomfortable with ourselves or to threaten heartbreak, any of the above or almost any thing else, can be an addiction used to avoid emotional or mental pain. Our spiritual journey involves a lot of uncomfortable things like admitting we avoid reaching out to people who unintentionally hurt us instead of risking being honest and reconciling. Years ago, I cut two women out of my life who had been very kind to me. One had unknowingly made me feel ridiculous and the other had spoken about a “fag” she was actually fond of, not knowing I had gay sons. Neither intended to hurt me. I let them die without ever explaining. Avoiding people who are different from ourselves keeps most people divided politically and spiritually. Because we are simply blind to one another’s ways of being in the world, we can’t put ourselves in each others ways of being, seeing, and valuing. . Another abuse of perfectly good things is finding ways to not grieve losses that have the power to break our hearts. My first response to most things is emotional. This makes me vulnerable to hurt and a tendency to find ways to avoid experiencing painful losses. I did not grieve the loss of my much loved father for six years. We didn’t live near each other and he died on the other side of the world. It was a closed casket funeral. So, I managed to unconsciously just pretend to myself that he was somewhere else. When my husband died four years ago, I spent the first year or so focused on learning to live alone for the first time in my life. Then Covid hit and I focused on surviving it by diet, exercise, and writing and getting published in a couple of county newspapers. Finally in the fourth year, I found I could not enjoy even happy memories without crying. It’s been a process of getting brave enough to let myself go into that dark scary place of heartbreak. I’m a devout coward frankly, but there is where I find God and grace when I risk it. And then the happy memories can heal me. In my old age I’ve begun to recognize how many ways I have of avoiding dealing with things about myself or my life that when faced can be healed by the Love of God, which is grace for the journey. Self knowledge is often painful, because we so badly want to be, if not perfect, at least better than somebody else. Knowing that unconditional love of God expressed in Jesus frees us to begin to accept the imperfect us God created us to be and to admit we need even the people who are different from us, who sometimes inadvertently make us feel inferior or superior. When it’s not either, it’s complimentary differences. I’m not explaining this very well. But until we understand the differences that we are born with and which are all needed, conflict can’t be avoided and we can’t help each other make this a better world.
I do know that having someone who understands us and can simply cry with us rather than trying to fix us is a key to freedom to accept ourselves, our limits, our pain and thus paradoxically become able to grow. It’s scary because we’ve spent our lives perfecting our image and letting down the mask always involves risk. And though I still struggle with it, I know from experience it’s the key to spiritual growth and true community across our differences..
How Many Loving People Are Needed to Save the World?
In the Scriptures Noah and his family are saved from the flood because they were good people. Abraham bargains with God to save the people in an evil city, “If ten people are righteous, will you spare it?” We might look at Jesus as the one righteous human, convincing God we are worth saving. I read a book once called the “Hundredth Monkey” about how on an island certain monkeys learned a new survival skill and when the number reached 100, they all seemed to “get” it. And it was found that the same thing was happening with monkeys on other islands. Sunday’s scripture from Isaiah was about the “people of God” having been through dark times, but now God was doing an new thing and they would be blessed. How many people learning to love rather than hate or fear others do you think it would take for change to happen in our world? If you are given the grace to be one by your knowing first-hand the love of Jesus, please please share it!!!! Love, not law, changes people. We can love and help people, but the Love of God fleshed out in Jesus can heal and change wounded frightened angry people. Find a way to share it, not impose it, or come over as righteous or chosen. Those of us who have accepted that love need to admit how much we needed it and how much we still need it and how that love is the grace we all need to become the people we were created to be. (Not like anyone else, just our own best imperfect human self.) The Love of Jesus is the fuel for the spiritual journey until our last breath. Share it! It can make a difference for other people and maybe if enough people open up to that love it can make a difference for our world. This isn’t about being chosen or saved this is about being healed and changed by Love that has no conditions. It’s about grace.
Justice and Love
Justice is not about pay back. Justice is about fairness and caring about all people. God is not a vindictive God. But acts have consequences good and bad. It’s the way we have to learn if we don’t know we have the love/grace of God to guide and strengthen us. Our lives are a school. They are a spiritual journey of learning to love even when it costs. And that includes loving God even in the hard times. And it even includes being the person in need of others’ care, so they can grow in loving and we can grow in walking humbly with our God.
The Evolution from Law to Love: The Commandments to the Beatitudes.
I’m pretty sure that law and the concept of sin and consequences were created to try to help us live in the groups we need to survive and prosper. Society is a two-edged sword. It keeps us from having to do everything for ourselves from fighting off wildlife, planting, harvesting, to creating clothes and shelter, thus giving us time to think, create, explore, and ask questions about the why, not just the how. But, since humanity is a work in progress the old adage, that there’s both a goody and a baddy to everything, holds true for society. Society helps us survive physically, but it also challenges us to learn to love.
The commandments were first of all, simply practical. The laws were aimed at keeping us alive, both as individuals and humanity, long enough to become loving. Whatever the Intelligence called God is, that created and nourishes life, it lives within each of us. It is a source of grace to become more loving, than competitive and combative. And we are like cells in a body. Each of us not only affects those closest to us, we affect the whole for better or worse, even the generations following us.
Self-honesty and understanding, rather than guilt, are the beginning of learning to love. And those take courage and grace. The divorce rate makes it obvious we haven’t become enough like Jesus to even love those closest to us, never-the-less those different from us or even “against” us. The commandments are the basic tools of survival for society. But Jesus showed us the next level through teaching and living the spirituality of the Beatitudes. They call us beyond the fundamentals of the Commandments and just survival. They call us to freedom, the freedom to love others.
Caring is prayer. Prayer is in the intention, whether expressed in words, thoughts, feelings, candles, symbols, acts of kindness, or forgiveness. There is power in prayer. But both wisdom and love are needed to use the power for others, to understand that all creation, without exception, is one.
Jesus is a turning point in humanity’s journey. He fleshed out a love that sacrifices for not only the weakest physically, but the weakest spiritually. This is not survival of the fittest.
His resurrection also illustrated that this life span isn’t all there is. Jesus is the living example of the potential of God’s grace even within our own humanity.
His resurrection shows us death is simply a door to eternity. When we believe this, it gives us a very different value system than death as the finish line. And His openness and love for all show us the way to overcome the finality of death.
Laughter: Carbonated Grace 