Christmas

   Simply stunning

      Surprise surprise

It turns our upside down world right side up

   The weak are the strong

      While the strong are the weak

   The famous are the unknown

      While the unknown are famous

   Silence is God’s language

      While endless words are human babble

   Doing nothing is the ultimate doing

      While endless business is doing nothing

   A little child shall lead them

      While self proclaimed adult leaders shall mislead them

   Innocence is true sophistication

      While sophistication shows the emperor has no clothes

   The forgotten in the world are the remembered

      While the remembered in the world are forgotten

   The least among us become the greatest

      While the greatest become the least

God brings a new message at Christmas

   If it is what we expect

   If it is what it has always been

   If the religious proclaim it as truth

   If it excludes anyone

   If it doesn’t startle and shake us

      It isn’t God’s Christmas Message

Dear Spiritual Companions,

In just a few days Christians worldwide will be celebrating the gift of God coming in our form.  Although this is unique to me and the rest of my Christian brothers and sisters, I think it also offers a gift to others of  different religious understandings of God.  I believe this to be true because it captures some basic truths for everyone.  I see three distinct revelations coming through the act of a Wee Babe being born in a forgotten part of the world.  It reveals vulnerability, than surprise and finally God being in our human form.

To live in this human form is to be vulnerable.  At any moment this physical existence can end or be changed in radical ways.  We often run around spending our days trying to disprove this by trying to be in control of our lives.  The sad awakening eventually comes one day when we are found in circumstances which reveal our powerlessness.  No matter how hard we work to stay young we grow old.  We may forestall the inevitable, but the day of reckoning does come. Making peace with our vulnerable nature is an ongoing spiritual theme in any religion.  When we are able to see God coming as a small helpless infant we see God revealing how to be vulnerable.  God does not run away from weakness or try to control it.  No God simply lets it be what it is.  For God to grow in our world or within us we need to take care of the symbolic infant in our lives.  If we do not care for the vulnerable in the world they die.  If we do not reach out to the vulnerable parts of ourselves we die.  So what can we do?  Do what God does – enter the most forgotten parts of life and reach out in love.  In this season of giving our gift becomes our courageous acts of being with the least fo these in the world and inside of us.  The paradox of doing this is by becoming vulnerable we are suddenly strong.

Are we ever surprised by life?  I hope so because life is meant to be a surprise!  How else can one explain the wonder of a paradox of weakness being strength, a little infant leading them, death being the prelude to life everlasting?  Want some more?  There is no such thing as death.  Yes our physical body expires, but our spirit simply moves onto the next surprising step in our spiritual evolution.  God surprises us by enabling us to let go of anything which causes us fear or any other attachment to this life.  There is a funny statement that goes like this, “Everyone wants to go to heaven, but no one wants to die.”  Sure we like this life, but I think behind that statement is the fear of what will happen after we die.  No need to fear because God has so much more in store for us, and I am not talking about some kind of hellish end.  That is another big fallacy that drives us to fearfulness.  Here is another surprise for us – Whatever we expect to occur when we die will occur.  We create our own ending story.  The other big surprise is if we are one of those persons who see Hell in our future that expectation will not change God’s true nature of Love.  Our personal concept of hell will be overcome by God’s Unconditional Love for all of creation.  God wants to surprise us whether in a Christmas Story or in the few truths I have shared with you.  Think of the other fearful things of life you have always thought were true.  Take them to God and wait for another surprise that will allow you to live in a peace that passes all of our human answers!

If you are still with me let’s talk about the last gift - God is coming in our form.  In Christianity we have taken a small step – we see Jesus as God’s Son.  God came in His form.  If we want to take the ultimate leap of faith we can claim that God is here in our form too.  All great spiritual masters have told their followers this because they have experienced this in themselves. Religious leaders, on the other hand, don’t want to take that big of a leap because they don’t believe in themselves let alone anyone else.  Jesus was perfect so therefore He could be God in human form, but we are far from perfect.  That is true to a certain extent.  We get stuck on the idea of making mistakes or not getting life right.  Perfection though means to be all that we are, which entails our best and worst moments.  Only those who dare to accept the totality of themselves will see God.  The worst moments have been created as opportunities by God to reach out to us in love.  Our world says I will love you if you do this or that.  God says I love you no matter what you do or don’t do.  Life is an adventure to develop one’s understanding of who we are in God.  All that happens in this life will fade when we die.  It cannot compare to what continues on in us as we journey with God in all the lives to come or whatever is going to happen after we leave this human form.  We take ourselves much too seriously.  It is time to lighten up by letting go of our fears and attachments to the truths that don’t exist.  God will be with us through all things as God has always been with us for we are created in God’s Image.  How could God be anywhere but inside us?

As a Christian I celebrate the gift of this Season.  As a fellow traveler with anyone on any other religious path I celebrate that your understanding of God simply adds to mine.  I hope the same is true for you.  May we all embrace the God coming in our form on December 25 as well as every other moment of life.

Gary

Ever had an emotional bowel movement

   What is that you say

      It is simply feeling what you are feeling

When our emotions build up

   We need to let them go

      Let ourselves feel whatever we are feeling

It cleanses us of whatever is constipating our Being

   That heavy inner emotion is released

      We feel the lightness of letting go

But I have a hard time doing that we say

   I am afraid of what I may encounter

   I may not be able to stop feeling once I start

   It may be too painful

   I have come to find comfort in held onto emotions

   Someone I don’t want forgiven may be set free

Those are simply limiting thoughts

   They hold us back

   They keep us bound up with what has been

   They stop us from living in this moment

I want to be set free from this inner prison

   Where the walls are my feelings

   Where the guards are past messages of the way one has to feel

   Where my cell is filled with memories of unmet hurt and loss

But the door to freedom is always available   

   We are released through an emotional bowel movement 

      Free to feel what we are feeling

We may even find ourselves feeding on the inner dimensions of

   Peace

   Love

   Kindness

   Or whatever we define as a joyful feeling

Time for an emotional bowel movement?

Dear Spiritual Companions,

The older I get the more I am looking at old thoughts and ideas I thought were true  and discovering they may not be.  I have been the kind of person that tends to look at a person’s outer actions first, both of myself and of others and saying that is good or bad.  I have encountered something more important – one’s inner motivation for their outer actions.  If we are able to know what our inner motivation is our outer actions will be congruent with who we are.  Being a child of the 60′s we had a saying, “If it feels good do it.”  The only problem was how it could affect others.  I was too immature at that point to know what my inner motivation was so to do something simply because it felt good often created problems for me.  Compare this with the words from St. Augustine, “Love God and do as you please.”  In that line we are looking at the source of who we are – God first.  Now doing as we please also feels congruent because it is one with our spirit in God.

This sounds good, but there is one BIG problem – How do we know we are one with our inner motivation?  First we realize because we are human we make mistakes and that is alright.  Second we know we have to do our inner work.  I like to refer to doing our spiritual disciplines as our work.  Whatever enables us to enter into a deeper relationship with The Higher Power, by whatever Name you call It, is our work.  For some it is walking in nature.  For others it is reading The Holy Word of any World Religion, novel or good book.  For still others it is meditation or contemplation.  One can also pay attention to their night dreams and study their symbolic meanings.  To have a discipline means to regularly spend time meeting God in whatever discipline works for us.  God doesn’t care what form we use, God simply wants to be with us for extended periods of time because God created us for relationship.  Like a good friend we cannot discover who they are if we don’t spend time with them.  This then allows us to meet ourselves in God.  Now we know what leads us closer to honestly being who we are rather than doing a lot of talking about it.  We don’t find out who God is by talking about God, we discover God by being with God which reveals our inner motivation.  Now we go forth into our outer world doing what our True Self calls us to do.

Our world and the individuals in our lives have all sorts of ideas about what is good and what isn’t.  If we are not one with the Source of our life – God we find ourselves doing all kinds of things that we don’t want to do.  We suffer and have lots of Drama because we are listening to others rather than God.  We want to make others happy by doing what they want and miss out on the only true source of contentment - God.  We were created with needs that can only be filled by God.  Because we are not sure what it means to do God’s Will we often run around settling for the second best – the world’s idea of what true happiness is or what those in our family or our friends think true happiness is for us.  We end up being miserable.  The saddest part of this is we think we are going to eventually find the hidden gem of contentment but each time we live on someone else’s terms we are disappointed.  We run ourselves in circles trying to attain what we are already have in God.  We are a part of the human rat race for meaning, but as Lily Tomlin said, “Even if you win the rat race you are still a rat!”  When we come to this awareness of our life on not working for us all is not lost.  God says I have an alternative – “Love Me and do as you please!”

If we accept this then we are faced with the second challenge of living on our terms based in God – dealing with the fallout to our actions.  There will be lots of individuals and Institutions that will not be happy with our new freedom.  Our world and most of our relationships are built on doing what others tell us or think we should do.  It takes a huge amount of inner fortitude to deal with the response from others.  This is why we need to be clear about who we are in God first and foremost.  Without that we will be worn down by the response we will be receiving.  On top of that we also have to face our own inner demons who are questioning our actions.  We will face questions like Are you sure we are doing the right thing?  Not many others are doing what we are doing so what if we are wrong?  People aren’t happy with us and that doesn’t feel good.  On and on our inner questions and thoughts stand alongside others who are telling us we are wrong.  We begin to doubt ourselves and it is time to use our spiritual disciplines.  God is calling us back to our what we know is right for us.  It is time to Pick up our cross, Face our suffering, Be empty or whatever our Religion calls us to encounter so we can continue to Love God and do as we please.  A word of warning – our biggest obstacle may be how the religious leaders of our particular spiritual persuasion respond to our actions.  If what we doing contradicts the powers to be, who are more interested in perpetuating their false notions of God, we could be facing some religious warfare.  They are often driven by a need to keep us in dependent relationships so the Institution they serve can survive.  Our freedom threatens their way of doing things.  The Jesus, Buddha, Moses, Confucius, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and many others came to say to us and our leaders, “You have lost your inner motivation and are allowing someone else to tell you what is right for you.”  Don’t be surprised if you might not be called to join their ranks.  “Loving God and doing as we please” is the key to  living as these great leaders did and as God called them to live.

This spiritual journey of encountering our inner spirit in God and the resulting spill over into this lifetime of being in the world is just a small fraction of our time in God.  This human experience is not all there is by any means.  There is so much that we have already experienced and will encounter in God.  I say this to help us to live lightly and not take ourselves so seriously.  Even if we make a few mistakes along the way it doesn’t matter.  In fact, the errors of our ways may be the quickest way to God.  As the Dali Lama said, “Life is about being happy.”  I have not found any truer way to happiness than loving God and doing as I please.  What about you?

Gary

Winter

   The season of solitude

      Filled with the sound of falling snow flakes

They crash to earth awakening us

   To this instant filled with

      Our own flakiness

The cold north winds blow away our loose flakes

   Filled with unforgiven moments

      Resentments long past

      Life experiences not fitting our expectations

Now in the days of more darkness than light

   We can experience the Healing Touch of Love

      Who uses the season of winter to prime us

      For promises found in a new identity paint job

Like the trees and bushes that let go of this year’s growth

   We also see the gift in letting go

Underneath the supposed dead earth new life prepares

   To explode in the spring time

      With possibilities never dreamed of

So in the stillness of the season

   Let us feel the warmth of the Healing Touch of Love

      As we let go of yesterday in preparation for tomorrow

Dear Spiritual Companions,

In my quiet time this morning the thought came to me from God, “Your problem is you doubt.”  There was no criticism in the comment, just a statement about my approach to life.  I believe that humans are the same.  What is different between us is the level of doubting we embrace.  Everyone has a certain amount of it, but each of us deals with it in our own unique way.  This letter is written for those who have  a question about the way their life is unfolding.  Behind every doubt, I believe, is an unfulfilled expectation.  One of the greatest examples of this was the Christ meeting the Disciples after His Resurrection.  Thomas was not present at this first encounter and when told of the Christ being alive he said, “I will not believe unless I can touch the holes in  his hands and feet and side.”  The Christ appears again with Thomas being present and He asks him to put his hands in the holes in his hands, feel and side.  Then the Christ says those famous words, “You believed because you saw and touched.  How much greater it will be for those who do not see and yet believe!”  This was not a criticism of Thomas, but rather a statement of what life is like when we face our doubts and notice the expectations behind them.  Who could blame Thomas for doubting someone coming back to life?  It simply is not a part of our expectations.

God has blessed me in endless ways throughout my life.  For some reason when an issue of money or some other part of life that is a hot button for me arises I often doubt.  Just because God has helped me through these problems before doesn’t mean it will happen again this time.  That is how my mind works and I would say a mind that is disengaged from my heart.  To me the heart is the center of our spiritual reality.  So often we are in our heads and thinking too much.  We are rational beings trying to make sense of the mystery we call life.  I have discovered that to be blessed over and over again by God is a mystery, especially if I haven’t done anything to earn this Grace!  It is only in our hearts where we see taking life as it comes as the only reality that matters.  There was a benediction I always used when I served communion.  The one line that struck me was - “Live in God abundantly, pray continuously and give thanks no matter what happens for my God’s Grace nothing can utterly defeat you!”  Our doubts slide away when we live according to those words.  Our expectations begin to fall away also.

Let’s take a closer look at those words.  First live in God abundantly.  What does it mean to live in abundance?  To me it means having enough of what we need.  We live in a time when there never seems to be enough.  We have turned our abundance into a time of scarcity and it drives us to drink, use drugs, get lost in the addiction of sports, force our way on others in different countries and cultures, claim other’s natural resources as belonging to us.  If we dared to look at our supposed scarcity we might see how unrealistic it is.  By looking at our needs as being outside of us we give our inner power away.  If we look at our needs as being within us then abundance is a reality.  In this moment we have enough to eat, air to breathe, money, friends and inner peace.  If we look further than this moment we will get into trouble because then our inner expectations of not having enough raises its head.  Many spiritual groups tell us that the most important discipline is the one where learn how to we stay in this moment.  I peek at the buisiness section in our daily paper and am amazed at how one day the economy is recovering and the next day it is not.  My personal economy is fine and I would guess most of you reading this would say the same.  Doubts can arise when we read bad news, but they can also arise when we read good news because we know it could be different tomorrow.  This moment is fine, but the next one could be bad so why do we choose to leave this one?  To pray continuously is the way to live in this moment and not let our minds wonder into supposed problems that may never happen.

Now we come to the part about giving thanks no matter what happens.  That is a challenge especially when things are not going well or the way we expect them to.  It is a challenge to trust in a God who brings life out of death, abundance out of scarcity and seeing how our adventure of life always working out in spite of death and unmet expectations.  I believe by asking some challenging questions we might discover some answers in our heart.  Why do we choose to not be happy?  Why are we waiting for the other shoe to drop?  Why do we think God has created a world or lifetime for us that is harmful?  Why did Thomas not believe in Jesus’ resurrection?  I encourage us to ponder those questions.  By finding out where they may lead us we may discover a way to live this life in a peaceful abundant way no matter what is happening in the outer world.  This is true because nothing can utterly defeat us!  By living with this knowledge we might discover others we encounter being puzzled by our behavior in spite of having problems, illness or financial questions.  They might ask us “What’s going on?”  We now can show them the way to a life of believing in spite of having doubts from time to time.  We might reveal how many expectations we have given up along the way to live freely which can help them to do the same.  If enough of us did this our leaders in our churches and government could believe health care for everyone is a just and right action to take.  They could see how sending more troops to Afghanistan is a continuation of scarcity thinking.  Who knows working for inner peace might actually be the way rather than forcing peace through warfare?  After all it is true that nothing can utterly defeat us!

What do you feel in your heart about these ideas?

Gary

My mind is my own

   Then why do I let others direct my thoughts

I can be so sure of what I think

   A negative thought or event comes along

      Suddenly what I thought was true no longer is

My mind is a fickle thing

   It is sometimes directed by others

      When I am the only one who knows what is right for me

Maybe that is the problem

   I am not always sure if I am right

      Which opens the door to others or events telling me what to think

Maybe the adventure of the mind

   Is not found in being right or wrong

      But trusting that life is found in testing my thoughts

If that is true then

   It doesn’t matter whether I am right

      Now others won’t feed on my doubts

   It doesn’t matter whether I am wrong

      Now others can’t feed on my need to never make a mistake

In fact what was right in my mind yesterday doesn’t fit today

   I have grown in my understanding of life

So nothing stays the same

   Especially in our mind

Which leads me back to me being in charge of my thoughts 

   To let anyone else be in charge

      Only causes inner pain

Dear Spiritual Companions,

I wonder as I wander out under the stars, how did I get to where I am today?  If I go a bit further I wonder how the world got into its present shape?  The defining word that jumps out at me is Perspective.  Our lives and the world we live in depends upon the perspective we bring to what is happening in our corner of it.   Did you ever think how strange it is that two people can encounter the very same thing and feel totally different?  Two children grow up in the same family and their only difference is their age, yet they are unique in their perspective of the world and how to live in it.  Who we are and what happens to us is truly based on how we see things.

If you accept this premise on Perspective we can look into how this could unfold in the living of our lives.  If I am having a problem with someone who views life differently then me and tries to impose their thoughts on me I have a standard comment, “At least I don’t have to live in their heads.”  This has enabled me to keep my perspective positive towards anyone who is different from me.  By acknowledging my not having to think the way someone else does, I don’t have to be defensive about someone else’s viewpoint.  In fact, if they do not impose their thoughts on me, I might think about what they believe in and see if it might have validity for me.  Accepting another as they are works so much better than trying to tear them down because I don’t agree with their perspective.  By doing this I can now honestly look at what is happening inside me whenever I become anxious at what another person says is the truth.  By acknowledging my uneasiness I have discovered I may be insecure about my own truth or concerned how another will feel about me if  I disagree with them.  Now it is time to ask myself Why?  Once we begin to get the answer to that then we might discover our best teachers are the ones we disagree with or who have a different perspective then our own.

If I don’t demand that others think or feel the way I do I may have opened the door to a larger understanding of life.  What do we lose by not allowing for a perspective different than our own?  We may miss out on discovering how our own thinking may be wrong for us.  Wait a minute that is a big cost to think we are wrong.  My question is Why?  So I am mistaken, so what?  Isn’t it better to find out I may be harming myself with my own thinking than to continue to live in ignorance?  We can only answer yes if we dare to say it is alright to acknowledge we are not perfect.  That is the catch isn’t it.  If we dare to say there is a different way of seeing things we might just be accepting the obvious – we are wrong so therefore we are not perfect!  Now instead of defending the undefendable, a mistaken perspective, we might have a chance to grow.  Think of how many things we thought were true as children – Santa, a Santa god, parents who were always right.  It might have been painful to see how we wrong, but that acceptance encouraged us to grow up and become an adult and claim our own truth. 

Perspective is not meant to be a once and for all thing.  No, our view of our self or our world is meant to be an ever changing gift found in our maturing and learning from our life experiences.  I hope to never have all the answers.  What would be the fun of existence if we didn’t have anything new to learn?  We might as well fold up our tent and call it a life.  I endorse an ever changing perspective.  I find my mistakes have often been my best teachers.  I do not necessarily enjoy them, but I have found them extremely helpful.  The best dividend for me is I no longer have to demand that others think the way I do.  It is alright for them to have their own perspective and for me to have my own.  If they have difficulty with that my perspective tells me whose problem that is.  I find inner peace to me much more present for me which is my ultimate payoff.

What is your perspective on these spiritual thoughts?

Peace

Gary