Love One Another (1/30/15)

“Love one another.
Just as I have loved you,
you are to love on another.”
-John 13:34 – The Mandate of Jesus

I cried when I first read the following – something to ponder in our hearts

“My death needs to be counted in the number of transgender people who commit suicide this year. I want someone to look at that number and say, ‘That’s fucked up.’ Fix society. Please.”
-Written by Leelah Alcorn, 17 years old, a transgender teen, from an online suicide note. She was in despair over rejection by her Christian parents and others.

Here are some thoughtful words on prayer and meditation from Marv and Nancy Hiles: All The Days Of My Life: A Yearbook of Found Sentences for the Human Journey:

“We need to sit still, let our emptiness remain empty, and wait patiently. If we fill the foreground with busy questions, reasons, or proposed actions, we will miss God who is the silent, yet ever present horizon on the world. Let us stay in our chairs as long as we dare, breathing gently until the rhythm takes over. Let us risk inaction, become receptive, give our thoughts to the blank wall, let our layers be peeled back, accept our dreams as true even if we must wait and wait, trusting all human life is part of an intricate unfolding of the One Reality.”

Pope Francis said it well: “Who am I to judge?”

I hope you will listen to the following music – it is good for prayer and reflection

“On the wooden board outside of the meditation hall in Zen monasteries, there is a four-line inscription. The last line is “Don’t waste your life.” Our lives are made of days and hours, and each hour is precious. Have we wasted our hours and our days? Are we wasting our lives? These are important questions.”
-Taken from Being Peace by Thich Nhat Hanh

Please love everyone unconditionally including yourself.

We are all sparks of the Divine flame
Blessed Be
Compassionate Be
Boldly Be

What Is Real – 11/29

“Spiritual training is not meant to make us feel good,
but to make us real.”
-Marv and Nancy Hiles

Do you remember these words from The Velveteen Rabbit:

“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you. Then you become Real.”

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” Rabbit asked, “or bit by bit?”

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out, and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

“I suppose you are Real?” said the Rabbit. And then he wished he had not said it, for he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive. But the Skin Horse only smiled.

“Is there anything I can do to make myself enlightened?”
“As little as you can do to make the sun rise in the morning.”
“Then of what use are the spiritual exercises you prescribe?”
“To make sure you are not asleep when the sun begins to rise.”
-Zen Master to His Disciple

With you in awakening.

Ken Wilber “Witness” + Special Music

I have been reflecting on some words of Ken Wilber for quite some time now. Yesterday, I attempted to share them with folks at a Zen meditation group and then again with Quaker friends at lunch and again in a phone call with friends of over 30 years who live in California. Today, I pass them on to you for your prayer and reflection.

“When you are the witness of feelings, you are not bound by feelings. In place of your contracted self there is simply a vast sense of openness and release. As an object, you are bound; as the witness you are free.”
-Ken Wilber

Music for your witness and freedom – your morning prayer and reflection. Allow the music to flow in, through, around you – opening deep inner spaces.

“[Flying over Southern Oregon] It is one thing to understand and play with an idea intellectually. It is another to be grasped by it existentially. Theorizing only goes so far at thirty thousand feet in unstable air. After we came out of the turbulence, I returned to my reading. However, this time the rabbi’s words about not looking for God “up there, because we are all inside God,” were written not in my head but in the tissues of my body, having been reinforced by the rhythmically plunging plane.”
-From All the Days of My Life by Marv and Nancy Hiles

With you in awakening to God’s Presence all around, about and within us.

We are all sparks of the Divine flame
Blessed Be
Boldly Be
Compassionate Be

“Being With the Dying” – Roshi Joan Halifax

“The eternal God is your dwelling place, and underneath are the everlasting arms.” [Deut. 33:27]

This Soul Nugget is different. It seeks to deal quite sensitively with a subject that confronts everyone of us. In the words of the Very Rev. Alan Jones, “We are all future dead people.” Taking note of this, how then shall we live?

At the Spiritual Directors International gathering earlier this year, we got to hear from Roshi Joan Halifax and we visited her Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico where my wife and I had a great time with one of the young residents. We had the meditation room to ourselves for almost an hour. The conference below was filmed at the Zen Center.

If you are thinking of turning away from this and forgetting it, I urge you to reconsider. I think you will appreciate and learn much from the video. Please open yourself to the insights that will come to you here. I am aware that some of you are even now in the midst of this process. But then, we all are future dead people. Let us find the courage to be present to it all. As I am writing this now, I have received an email from my cousin stating that my Uncle is in the hospital in Kansas City on a ventilator. They are running tests for brain reactions. My Uncle served on a submarine in World War II and has always embraced each moment of life since as a pure gift.

This may be interest to some: “Caring for Dying” Trailer

Every breath is a gift of life. Every moment of life is a holy moment. Life is a sacrament. Let us not squander a moment of the sacrament of life.

With you in awakening to the mystery of God’s Presence in life and in death, here, now, always and forever.

Peace be with you

We are all sparks of the Divine flame
Blessed Be
Boldly Be
Compassionate Be