In the long run, change is as much devotional as it is psychological. It is out of love that we ultimately reshape our lives. It is a matter of discipline, a word has the same root as the word disciple. In other words, “To what will we be devoted? What is it that we will love and serve?” ---Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow.
The news this week has not been great. Plane crashes, incompetence & lying being crowned, jobs being removed, the judicial system being undermined, and people deported. Lots and lots of grief and loss being purposely foisted on 330 million people with not much aim apparent toward a positive goal. I think a good reflection point is in the questions Francis Weller poses above.
One of this Sunday's texts in the Wilda Gafney Lectionary is found in Luke 7. It is the story of Jesus at Nain raising a child from the dead and putting them back in their mother's arms. Putting the metaphysical miraculous element aside, we can see behind the scenes with a larger lens the fact of the earth's "life cycle" at work. The completeness of life that we are granted only temporary & partial direct experience of is the flow from living through death. Like the moon, we only see the lighted side, never the dark backside.
Throughout life, we experience gain and loss, birth and death. Too often, we plunge ourselves into wallowing in our losses while the gains we experience seem fleeting. I say we do it to ourselves because, far too frequently, it's our brain's interpretation and in-built assumptions that anticipate, exacerbate, or extend our anxiety and misery. We are wired to expect "the worst" and thus kick start our worry and sense of loss before "it" even happens. How often has "it" not turned out as awful as we imagined? Do we make "it" worse by bottling it up and recycling it over and over in our heads? I have done that until I am sick of "it" and of myself for allowing it. Which I don't believe is where God wants any of us to live.
Humans have an extraordinary capacity to change things. We can look at glasses as half full or half empty. If we carry a belief in the unseen "hereafter" being a glorious improvement over life on earth, death loses a good measure of its pall. As Weller says above, change is devotional as much as psychological. How much devotional time - meditative time - do we spend imagining ourselves in positive spaces surrounded by joy, gratitude, hope, promise, peace, and love? Do we have the positive habit of looking for those virtues bubbling to the surface all around us, all the time? I call it taking time out from stress. Can we imagine (using the power of our brain) shifting ourselves into a Jesus-loving space where we can feel Jesus loving us and us loving like Jesus?
I believe there is a realm that is very near, just beyond our physical touch, that operates on the purely virtuous side of life. We are every bit as much spiritual beings as we are physical ones. The spiritual side breaks into our lives many times a day. Does it pass us by because we're too busy in our heads/lives to take notice? Do we look for it? It IS there. Reshape your life with Love. Take it as a New Year's challenge. Who/what will you be loving and directing Love toward?
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