Small Part - Big Mystery

A Cherokee or Ojibwa chief is said to have asked his young braves,

"Why do you spend your time in brooding?

Don't you know you are being driven by great winds across the sky?"

Don't you know you're part of a much bigger pattern?

But you're not in control of it,

any more than you would be of great winds.

You and I are a small part of a much bigger mystery.

(from today's R. Rohr meditation)

To submit to being taught
means accepting the wonder and largeness of truth
(the bubble of Love that holds us all) 
and our own smallness in relationship to it.
Eventually we must learn to hold the paradox of our finite self
held within the eternal and infinite (bubble of ) Love.
(past Rohr meditation)

"Plastics"

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Pool Time

 The story of "Adam's Towel"

Beautiful Little Bro

Photo by Sawyer

Better'n Disney World!

 "Angry Birds" and pizza

 at the

 Alamo

Last trip to the Dollar Tree...

 (sniff-sniff)

 Creating the

 famous "Drinking Hat"

 TA-DAH!

 Look, Emmy!

The PawPaw of all PawPaws!

 Another tooth out...

 Deep in thought...

Memorial Day

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"...or the highway"

On the practical (read "transformational") level, the Gospel message of Jesus and the Twelve-Step message of Bill Wilson are largely the same. The first foundational connection is that addiction can be a metaphor for what the biblical tradition called sin. It is quite helpful to see sin, like addiction, as a very destructive disease, instead of merely something that is culpable, punishable, and "makes God unhappy." If sin indeed makes God unhappy, it is because God loves us, desires nothing more than our happiness, and wills the healing of our disease. The Twelve Steps reconnect the essential ties between vulnerability, healing, and love.

 

More and more I'm convinced that when the great medieval spiritual teachers talked so much about attachment, they were really talking about addiction. We are all attached and addicted in some way. At the very least, we are addicted to our compulsive dualistic patterns of thinking, to our preferred self-image, and to the unworkable programs for happiness we first developed in childhood. In short, each of us is addicted to our way of thinking. This is perfectly obvious once we consider it, but we do not tend to think about the way we think!

~R. Rohr

Awakening

The transformational journey of death and resurrection
is the only real message.

It makes you indestructible.

The real life, God's life, is running through you and in you already.

But allowing it to flow freely doesn't come easily.

When you do, the spiritual journey really begins.

Up to that moment it is just religion.

Everything up to then is creating the container,

but you have not yet found the contents;

you are creating the wineskins, as Jesus says,

but you are not yet drinking the intoxicating wine.   

Gateway to Silence: 

From death to life     ~R. Rohr

Rohr's words make me wonder if, perhaps, 

we each get to choose

when we begin the "second half of life"--

the losing and leaving phase.

I suppose it could begin at any age.

I suppose it could be offered again and again.

I suppose we could choose to avoid it altogether.

It appears we each have different expiration dates,

and we are given divine clues that signal

(if we're paying attention)

the awakening

that comes through letting go and leaving.

Just wondering...

It's not about you...

If you can notice a thought, 

you know that thought isn't you.

You are not thoughts;
yet thoughts come to you
for love.

Do not be a slave to the mind,
yet do not fight the mind
or try to 'silence' it.

Instead, be its home, its sanctuary,
its lover, its protector.

Give it permission to sing.

And it will be your most loyal servant and friend.

- Jeff Foster

Once you know that your life is not about you, then you can also trust that your life is your message. This gives you an amazing confidence about your own small life--precisely because it is no longer a small life, it is no longer just yours, and it is not all in your head. Henceforth, you do not try to think yourself into a new way of living, but you first live in a new way, from a new vantage point--and your thinking changes by itself.

"I live no longer, not I," Paul shouted with his one daring life (Galatians 2:20). And this one-man show turned a Jewish sect into a worldwide religion. Paul allowed his small life to be used by the Great Life, and that is finally all that matters. Your life is not about you. It is about God and about allowing Life and Death to "be done unto me," which is Mary's prayer at the beginning of her journey and Jesus' prayer at the end of his.   ~R. Rohr

The Tiny Self

1) you are somehow the problem, 2) the answer is within you, and

3) you need help from a higher power.

Every master's lesson, every parable or spiritual riddle, every confounding question is intended to bring up the limitations of our own wisdom, our own power, our own tiny self. Compare that, if you will, to the Western educational approach of parroting answers, passing tests, and getting grades, which make us think we do know what is important and, therefore, we are important. Information is seen as power, as opposed to the beginner's mind, which wisdom deems absolutely necessary for enlightenment. Jesus called it "receiving the kingdom like a little child" (see Luke 18:17).

To submit to being taught means accepting the wonder and largeness of truth (the bubble of Love that holds us all) and our own smallness in relationship to it. Eventually we must learn to hold the paradox of our finite self held within the eternal and infinite (bubble of ) Love.

(Through initiation rites,) Sacred cultures could tell individuals they were not that important because they knew they were inherently and intrinsically very important. Secular cultures like ours keep telling individuals how special and wonderful they are--and they still don't believe it--and thus have to run faster and faster!    ~R. Rohr

Oh happy day!

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 Abilene girls come to visit...

 Pirate Pride Day

Award for "Most Cheerful"

Cracked

We do not handle suffering;

suffering handles us in deep and mysterious ways

that ironically become the very matrix of life.

Suffering--and sometimes awe--

has the most power to lead us into genuinely new experiences.

Once the killing of God becomes the redemption of the world,

then forevermore the very worst things have the power

to become the very best things.

The heart is normally opened through a necessary hole in the soul,

what I call a "sacred wound."

Our wound is the only way, it seems,

for us to get out of ourselves and for grace to get in.

As Leonard Cohen put it in his song, "Anthem,"

"There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in."

Our wounds are the only things humbling enough to break

our attachment to our false self

and make us yearn for

our True Self.

Followers of the Crucified One will pray for the grace to do what he did:

hold the pain until it transformed him into the Risen Christ.

If you do not transform your pain,

you will almost certainly transmit your pain to others

through anger, blame, projection, hatred, or scapegoating.

Gateway to Silence

From death to life

~R. Rohr

And these...

 Sweet Molly, Party Pooch

The Old Hood

Finally!

Proud Tooth-Loser

Tot-Time

 Look at that cute new do!

 Bathroom Chats...

Still "Bookies"...

We sang this in church today...

Still Love

...before you can let go of your ego, you first have to have one!

The ego has an important place and role;

it is simply not the whole story of who you are.

In the larger-than-life people I have met, I always find one common denominator: in some sense, they have all died before they died--and thus they are larger than death too! Please think about that.

At some point they were led to the edge of their private resources,

and that breakdown, which surely felt like dying,

led them into a larger life.

They went through a death of their various false selves

and came out on the other side knowing that

death could no longer hurt them.

They fell into the Big Love and the Big Freedom--

which many call

God.

Since rites of passage have fallen out of favor in our consumer cultures, many people don't learn how to move past their fear of diminishment, even when it stares them down or gently invites them. I think this lack of preparation for the "passover," our lack of training in grief work and letting go, and our failure to entrust ourselves to a bigger life, is the basis and core of our culture's spiritual crisis.

All great spirituality is about letting go.

Instead we have made it to be about taking in, attaining, performing, winning, and succeeding. True spirituality mirrors the paradox of life itself. It trains us in both detachment and attachment: detachment from the passing so we can attach to the substantial. But if we do not acquire good training in detachment, we may attach to the wrong things, especially our own self-image and its desire for security.

Initiation is one's initial training in an essential letting go,

in order to allow oneself to be reconstructed on a new foundation.

Reality is God's greatest ally.

Full Reality always relativizes us in a most essential way. Such an initiation into death, and therefore into life, rightly "saves" a person. Catholics call it the paschal mystery or the passion of the Christ.

The word passion (patior) means to "allow" or "suffer reality."

It is not a doing,

but a being done unto.

 (like grief)

Union with God,

union with what is--

that is to say, union with everything--

has always been the final goal of any initiatory experience.

One taste of the Real had to be given early in life

(the infant state of total Love)

to keep the initiate hungry, harmonious, and holy--

so he could never be satisfied with anything less than

what he once knew for sure!

(and is still for sure--
Love!)

~R. Rohr 

Likes!

 "ME"

"Zen"

Home

Cause & Effect

"Have you grown your full tall, Emmy?"

"Yes"

"How old are you?"

"68"

"I don't want you to get really old."

(Pause)

"Do you exercise?"

Loose!