“Go, now, your sins are forgiven. Which is harder to say? Your body is healed or your soul is healed? You have forgiven yourself in the same measure that you have forgiven others. Forgive yourself as We forgive you. Forgive, and Live.” (Paraphrased from The Wise One)
I: I’m trying harder to catch what You are saying.
One: You aren’t really trying hard enough. You keep letting the flotsam and jetsam of this world, of your emotions and of your limiting of Time, clog the flow of the Stream. You say you want to hear Me but you are afraid, and so you put up blocks, and fill your ears with anesthetizing ear buds, and put blinders around the eyes of your Soul. You allow all of your scars and fears to interrupt the airwaves of Our communication to the deepest, truest you. And so, your mind is consumed with chatter and not communication. You let your mind keep talking. Just listen. Just try, for even just a moment, to listen.
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I: No one loves me. Not even him. Not even her.Not all those whom I have done this and that and the other for. No one.
One: All love is fractured and fragmented, and comes to you in broken pieces, just as your love has been felt as incomplete shards in their hearts. Only We put all the pieces together, but you can not see the Whole now. What you must do is stop considering love piecemeal — “here today, gone tomorrow”… “he loves me for this but not for that”….. “she doesn’t really love me”… and so forth and so on. Love will never feel whole until you see that Love is not a reality from one individual or group or accomplishment, but all Love is from Us and Ours, through others, through you, through time and space and hands and feet and hugs and smiles. And while Love is seemingly imprisoned by the powerful frailty of words and actions, true Love is always free and freeing and if you let yourself love and be loved, Our Eternal Love will give you the freedom to see the reality of Our Universal Love in every little broken heart and mismanaged and awkward event and in every piecemeal, incomplete, unsatisfying and yet, truly noble action of love that humans try to share with other humans in their quest and desire to love and be loved. You will know you are loved. In him. In her. Yes, even in them. And then you will know how to love even that most difficult of all beings to love — yourself.
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I: How can I feel and believe You love me, when I am not even sure that You exist? Are you real? Or are You All something each person creates out of the need of psyche and the crutches and clutches of culture?
One: You have done well to study and search, little child. You have done well to open your mind and heart to follow after Truth, wherever it may appear. You are braver than you once were. You have overcome much and fought a good fight against your weaker selves. But at the very center of your being is still the greatest foe of all — Fear. Please, remember you are and always will be just a little child in the ways of Truth and Reality. Because you are so small, We can not be all to you that Parents are to Each Other. You have much still to learn, that is true, but some times you need to put away your books and groups and meetings and even your very thoughts, and you will be assured that We Are and We Have Always Been and We Will Always Be… And there is nothing that can separate you from Us…… if you will simply…..
I posted this famous quote by Fred (Mr.) Rogers today, and then a friend texted me back those questions and concerns that go raging through many of our heads and hearts in this day and age. I thought my own thoughts might be of use to some of my blogging friends who are some of the “unseen, unsung” helpers in my own life. Thank you to all of you who keep trying to help others in these times. I hope you can each believe that you make a difference in the world — after all, isn’t that really why we write?
Dear ________________,
I am beginning slowly and painfully to discover a few things:
1. Although I continue to believe as D.L.Moody said that one should have a Bible in one hand and a (valid) newspaper in the other, there is much more opportunity today to endlessly be sucked into “news” and what is ultimately the “junk food” of our times, than to be sucked into spiritually enlightening “food”. There is always bad “news” but I don’t have to believe that it is more powerful or ultimately more true-Truth, than something beyond anyone or any nation or any time and place, whatever people may call the “Other Reality” and what I think of as true Truth and God’s redeeming love for our planet and His children. It helps to say to myself what a friend said wisely to me yesterday, “If it is something that is out of your hands, don’t let it take up too much space in your head.” Hard for me but helpful. This friend is always one of my own “helpers” not just for me but quietly in the world. At the same time, I want to believe that if I do a small unsung kindness here and someone else in the world is doing an unknown kindness over there, then all the little truly unselfish kind things that all the little people do as “helpers” will always tip the scales in the world towards Martin Luther King’s “arc of justice” and towards the mustard seed of faith and the mighty waves created by the power of truly loving hearts. And —
2. Sometimes my being the sort of person who is always trying to help others is more about me than it is about them. There is a difference between being ready and alert to help a need that appears than what we often do which is to look for ways to “fix” people or ways to disguise what the human hubris always is in part, a way to assuage our own ego needs. One struggles with comparing one’s “intelligence” or “compassion” with what one assumes is another’s lack of these things, and so the big beam grows in one’s eye. And conversely, I often neglect loving myself enough to be a helper to myself (Psychology 101 is still a distant achievement for me — LOL)
Anyway, a couple great books to recommend that were recommended to me by some of my “helpers” in the world doing good for others in quiet, unsung ways, “The Wild Edge of Grief” by Francis Weller (helps with grieving for what is happening in the world and on our planet as well as personal griefs). And the other is the Powers trilogy by Walter Wink, which helps put what is really happening in the world in a Judeo-Christian but rather radical context which is both empowering and mind-blowing.
Love you. Thank you for your kind sweet words. I hope to get to your neck of the woods this fall and actually see you, dear friend.
And so Blogger-Pals, carry your weight today because the only way out is through, but also look up, see the sun or lovely clouds that bring rain or the stars that are out in your own “neck of the woods” and know that our grief makes us human and compassionate and better able to be “helpers” in the world; but our love for ourselves and others and the place in which we live, and the planet which I sure do hope we can help survive — all the love in the world, whether they are tiny drops of water like mine, or big rolling waves like Mr. Rogers’, or Martin Luther Kings’, or Jesus’, or Buddha’s, or… ______________(insert the name that comes to your mind in the blank) — all the helpers are here. May you seek and find them today and then go out and do likewise,
He bought up every thing in the whole, whole wide world.
He bought all the pleasures, the birds and the bees.
And he plotted and planned how to buy even more,
as he gassed the whole planet and chopped down all the trees.
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He bought all the finish lines, so he won all the races.
He bought so many mansions, he couldn’t remember all the places.
He bought a new spouse and he bought a new face,
and when he owned the whole planet, he bought outer space.
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This man for an instant in time was quite famous.
This rich, famous man owned the world — the whole cosmos!
Who is he, you ask? Who is this great mystery?
No one knows any more, he is buried in history.
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The richest and ruling-est here on this earth,
think that profit and power reveal one’s true worth.
But even by owning every thing one can buy,
no one can buy out of the fact we all die.
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The poor man bought every thing, below and above,
But in the end, what he never owned — was what lasts –
only Love.
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“For what is the lasting profit, if we gain the whole world, but in the process lose our souls.” (Jesus of Nazareth, dirt poor but definitely remembered by history)
Jane Tawel 