it's all meaningful, it's all meaningless—it's all beautiful

healing trove

Forgiveness given and forgiveness received are always the pure work of uncreated grace. Such unearned and undeserved forgiveness is necessary to break down the quid pro quo world that I call meritocracy. Only when we experience undeserved love does this inward and outward flow begin to happen. Before that, we are dry, dead cisterns. Before that, we are into “religion” perhaps, but we don’t really have any dynamic notion of God or even our self.

‘If I speak, I tell a lie; but if I remain silent, I am a coward’.

I’m beginning to realize the start of all intimacy and true understanding is when you say what you really mean.

Remember the Reasons Why You Came Here - Robert Adams

The hard truth is that no one gets to be in community without effort.

When you know who you are, the optics of who you are becomes less important.

That’s not surprising, because forgiveness is probably the only human action that reveals three goodnesses simultaneously! When we forgive, we choose the goodness of others over their faults, we experience God’s goodness flowing through ourselves, and we also experience our own goodness in a way that surprises us. That is an awesome coming together of power, both human and divine.

You make it difficult because you think it’s difficult.

But grace is also contagious. An act of kindness inspires another act of kindness…. A single act of forgiveness can feel like it heals the world. Grace begets grace. Love rubs off on those who are loved….

The mystery of forgiveness is God’s ultimate entry into powerlessness. Look at the times when we have withheld forgiveness. It’s often our final attempt to hold a claim over the one we won’t forgive. It’s the way we finally hold onto power or seek the moral high ground over another person: “I will hold you in unforgiveness, and you’re going to know it just by my coldness, by my not looking over there, by my refusal to smile.” We do it subtly, to maintain our sense of superiority. Non-forgiveness is a form of power over another person, a way to manipulate, shame, control, and diminish them. God in Jesus refuses all such power.

Yet grace offers us another version of justice. Grace makes room … for justice that is restorative, and dedicated to healing the wounds of injustice. But the grace thing is hard work. It takes faith—because it dares us to believe that not only can victims be healed, but so can the victimizers. It is not always easy to believe that love is more powerful than hatred, life more powerful than death, and that people can be better than the worst thing they’ve done.

Only if you are thankful and you bless the position you're in, do you become a higher being, do you lift yourself up, and finally you find liberation. But it begins and ends with you. Never pray to God for release of your problems. Never pray to God to change your life, and to give you something better. This is wrong prayer. If you have to pray to God, pray to God to give you the strength and the wisdom and the courage that you need to be able to handle the situation that you're in. This is correct prayer.

When we feel judged, we hide our love away, we put up our walls, we resist. If your theory of change depends in any way on the idea that telling someone what is wrong with them will lead to them changing what is wrong with them, you will be sorely ineffective.

I recently learned that ambition doesn't need to only correlate with money, prestige, status (shocking, I know). Ambition is really just another way of saying that one has "an aspiration to be excellent". Excellent at anything. This can be excellence at work, professionally. It can be creative excellence. It can be excellence at being kind, generous, loving. Ambition just means that you want more from yourself than what you are now.

Make *active* effort to

See Christ in everyone
Become Christ for everyone
Connect with Christ in everyone

If you are confused about your feelings, or in denial about how the world works, or unable to read others, it will be harder to self-actualize. If you are too constrained by what you think is going on to notice what is actually going on—you will miss important data that would allow you to make better choices.

Being loved ourselves invites and enables us to love others. There is no schism between mysticism and activism.

I once saw God’s mercy as patient, benevolent tolerance, a kind of grudging forgiveness, but now mercy has become for me God’s very self-understanding, a loving allowing, a willing breaking of the rules by the One who made the rules—a wink and a smile, a firm and joyful taking of our hand while we clutch at our sins and gaze at God in desire and disbelief.

“Let me seek, then, \[the gift of silence and solitude\], where everything I touch is turned into prayer: where the sky is my prayer, the birds are my prayer, the wind in the trees is my prayer.”

\--

*Thomas Merton*

My false and private self is the one who wants to exist outside the reach of God’s will and God’s love—outside of reality and outside of life. And such a self cannot help but be an illusion.

*	Thank you.
*	I love you.
*	I forgive you.
*	Can you forgive me?

‘Whatever it is that knows our thoughts, feelings, sensations and perceptions is not itself a thought, feeling, sensation or perception. It is not itself an experience’. All experiences come and go, but whatever it is that is aware of them remains consistently present.

One way to notice that you are being taught the same lesson over and over is by writing. When you reflect often, you become aware of your patterns (if you are willing to notice them). You see that life keeps trying to teach you the same lesson and you are simply not absorbing it. It tries to teach you by showing you that the choice you’re repeatedly making will give you the same (unpleasant) experience until you make a different choice. It is—metaphorically speaking—writing the same lesson on the chalkboard of your personal classroom repeatedly and you just keep forgetting to take notes. And in the classroom that is your life, if you don’t write down what is on the chalkboard, it keeps appearing until you do.

We do not attain anything by our own holiness but by ten thousand surrenders to mercy. A lifetime of received forgiveness allows us to become mercy. Mercy becomes our energy, our meaning. Perhaps we are finally enlightened and free when we can both receive mercy and give it away—without payment or punishment.

The self is not something you can set out looking for; it reveals itself gradually through the choices you make.

Praying to Forgive   Brian McLaren identifies how prayers of petition help us to experience forgiveness:     Since being wounded or sinned against is a terribly common experience, I suspect we need to pay more attention to it. In fact, being wronged is directly linked in the Lord’s Prayer to the reality of doing wrong; we pray, “forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.”    Father Richard Rohr says it well: Pain that isn’t processed is passed on. Pain that isn’t transformed is transmitted. So we need to process our woundedness with God, and that processing begins by naming the pain and holding it … in God’s presence:   Betrayed. Insulted. Taken advantage of. Lied to. Forgotten. Used. Abused. Belittled. Passed over. Cheated. Mocked. Snubbed. Robbed. Vandalized. Misunderstood. Misinterpreted. Excluded. Disrespected. Ripped off. Confused. Misled.    It’s important not to rush this process. We need to feel our feelings, to let the pain actually catch up with us…. I’ve found that it takes less energy to feel and process my pain than it does to suppress it or run away from it. So, just as through confession we name our own wrongs and feel regret, through petition we name and feel the pain that results from the wrongs of others…. We translate our pain into requests:    Comfort. Encouragement. Reassurance. Companionship. Vindication. Appreciation. Boundaries. Acknowledgement.    It’s important to note that we are not naming what we need the person who wronged us to do for us. If we focus on what we wish the antagonist would do to make us feel better, we unintentionally arm the antagonist with still more power to hurt us. Instead, in this naming, we are turning from the antagonist to God, focusing on what we need God to do for us. We’re opening our soul to receive healing from God’s ever present, ever generous Spirit.

There’s something within you that knows what to do. There is a power greater than you that knows how to take care of you without your help. All you’ve got to do is to surrender to it. Surrender your thoughts, your mind, your ego, to the current that knows the way. It will take care of you. It will take better care of you than you can ever imagine.

Within the body you are wearing, now inside the bones and beating in the heart, lives the one you have been searching for so long.  But you must stop running away and shake hands, the meeting doesn’t happen without your presence . . . your participation.  The same one waiting for you there is moving in the trees, glistening on the water, growing in the grasses and lurking in the shadows you create.  You have nowhere to go. The marriage happened long ago. Behold your mate.  by Robert K. Hall

Rupert then invites us to consider the possibility that, when in the waking state, what appears to us as our environment – what we call ‘matter’ – is in fact a dream state for universal consciousness. The universe as we know it is in reality how (in religious language) the mind of God appears to us from our limited and localised perspective. The universe as we know it therefore results from the intersection of two segments of reality: the universal and the individual.  Consciousness, he says, gives birth to existence within itself in the form of the subject–object relationship. Manifestation occurs as consciousness contracts into an apparently separate subject of experience. In doing so, it loses touch with its innate peace and joy. It sacrifices itself for the sake of creation just as a mother sacrifices herself to bring forth her child. This is why we all long for peace and happiness above all else. To be returned to our origin, our natural state.

We are told that we choose whose world we want to live in. We’ll choose wealth or God. We’ll choose violence or God. We’ll choose nationalism or God. We’ll choose racial hierarchy or God. Each case is an example of a different and incompatible operational system. One of those systems, if we live by it, binds us in endless struggle and violence that leads to our own destruction, as well as the destruction of others….   We are asked to choose which world we want to live in—a world of retributive justice or a world of forgiveness.

Many of us pray the words of Jesus daily, with the Our Father. Midway through the prayer we say, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive those who are in debt to us.”…   We glibly pray this at every Eucharist and often in our personal prayers. Yet, it calls on us without any glibness. All of us know intimately how hard it is to forgive someone who has deeply offended and hurt us…. It is difficult to let go of the past and be present now to the other person and to all that it triggered in us….   It is hard for us to let go of bitterness that seems to rise up in our throats over time like bile—even after we have said the words of forgiveness to ourselves, and to others. We struggle to forgive the same person over and over again. Our broken hearts crack again and again…. But forgiveness is God’s greatest gift to all of us, setting us free to live as the beloved children of God. Forgiveness, more than any other act, perhaps, makes us like God.

Life is a classroom! Look up. It is trying to teach you. Every moment is a moment of divine opportunity and ecstasy waiting to be tapped into.

The way you change a person is by getting through not to their head or their will but to their heart.

Mercy is a way to describe the mystery of forgiveness. More than a description of something God does now and then, it is who God is. According to Jesus, “Mercy is what pleases me, not sacrifice” (Matthew 9:13, 12:7). The word is hesed in Hebrew, and it means steadfast, enduring, unbreakable love. Sometimes the word is translated as “lovingkindness” or “covenant love.” God has made a covenant with all of creation (see Genesis 9:8–17) and will never break the divine side of the covenant. It’s only broken from our side. God’s love is steadfast. It is written in the divine image within us. It’s given; it sits there. We are the ones who clutch at our sins and beat ourselves instead of surrendering to divine mercy. That refusal to be forgiven is a form of pride. It says, “I’m better than mercy. I’m only going to accept it when I’m worthy and can preserve my so-called self-esteem.” Only the humble person, the little one, can live in and after mercy.