Watching into Wholeness

What I say to you I say to all: "Watch." --Mark 13:37

When the realization of wholeness dawns, the last vestiges of fear, doubt, and separation dissolve. -- Deepak Chopra

Spirituality is an absent element in so many lives. Culturally, we have grown suspect of all religion, while simultaneously seeing a vast expansion of specialization and division that emphasizes physical and emotional dissociations. But Hildegard of Bingen taught that the unity of body and soul is where wholeness and health is found and separation creates illness.  Spiritual perspectives raise the bar of our awareness to the transcendence of beauty and nature.  More recent scientific investigations into health have found that people who spend time in nature, surrounding themselves in beauty, and practicing prayer and meditation experience stronger immunity, reduced stress, and better health.

To begin getting to know your spirit only requires one thing: awareness.  Life in the Western 21st century world is cram-packed full of doing from the moment one's eyes open until they close at night.  Stress is one of the most common ailments in our social order; fatigue is tied for that spot. Taking any amount of time, two minutes or more a day, just to experience quiet awareness of your breathing, of your being, or of your connections with things that fill you with joy or happiness will begin expanding meaning and your wholeness when done consistently.

Wholeness is the sum total of the universe.  You only lose connection by choosing not to be connected. This is what watching is -- maintaining a conscious awareness that everything you are going through is of smaller significance than the power brought by a divine kinship with Love, Perennial Wisdom, and Everlasting Blessing.

Prayer:
God of all waking, bestow on me, a seeker of deeper meaning, the gift of presence with the realm where peace, joy, and acceptance rule.   Amen.

Actionable Suggestions:

1. Do an internet or youtube search for guided meditations.  Try out ones that resonate with your personality, faith, and experience.  UCLA has a research program into meditation and they have meditations available on their website and phone apps.
2. While sitting quietly with a pen and paper try to quiet your mind.  Help your mind empty by writing down each word or phrase that disturbs the quiet.
3. Let a Bible fall open, close your eyes, and point to a spot on the page.  Read a couple verses.  What word or short phrase jumps out at you.  Spend time just saying that word or phrase over and over to yourself in silence for 2-5 minutes.

Being an Incarnation Partner

God is faithful, through whom you were called into the fellowship with God's son Jesus Christ our Lord.  -- 1 Corinthians 1:9 (NAS)

Fellowship is one of those words that many outside church circles don't hear.  To the modern ear it is archaic.  Archaic vernacular often disconnects us from the meaning, so how can we connect with the meaning?  In the original Greek text the word is (transliterated) koinonia.  According to Strong's Concordance, koinonia can also be translated as partnership.  God calls us into partnership with Jesus. This should be heard as a seriously proactive statement.

In much of Christian theology the heavy historic emphasis has been that God/Jesus does everything for us if we just submit to the "right way."  This "right way" tells us we are saved by a blood sacrifice, by the Holy acting to make the secular sacred (if we have crossed all the "authorities'" t's and dotted all their i's.) But instead if, in fact, we are present to and aware of our own connectedness to the Love of the universe, then we are primordially linked in a partnership with Incarnate Love that Jesus tangibly (and faithfully) lived out in the New Testament witness.  Through our present consciousness of Being within the reality of Love, we are in a partnership with all others of presence and awareness who make all existence sacred -- from the lowly electron to the interstellar galaxies, but in particular, our own swath of existence -- our own "front porch." We work in the partnership by sweeping our front porch with kindness, healing, beauty, and love for all who happen by. 

Prayer:
May the peace of all understanding lead you more deeply into the wisdom and love that supports the universe.  Amen.

Actionable Suggestions:

1. Pray where one focuses not on ego-driven wants and desires but on the magnificent love it would take to create a universe. Then concentrate on enfolding yourself and each of your loved ones and acquaintances into that transformative love.
2. What partnerships are you part of, or could join, to find encouragement and comradery in making a difference in your community supporting the environment, health, indigenous populations, the homeless, the disadvantaged, or expanding beauty?
3. Could your family or group you're part of build a little shelter to house a neighborhood book exchange or food pantry?  

The Incarnational Journey Begins Now

Besides this you know the time, that the hour has come for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed.  -- Romans 13:11 (ESVUK)

Time is.  Time is not will be, because we don't know for absolute certain what our future holds or that we won't meet our end in the next minute.  Time is not was, because that can never happen again and persists only as a memory (if at all!)  The present moment is all we have.  This is the root nature of Incarnation - it is now. It is the Divine Present if we are aware.

The irony of Advent is that it is a preparation time leading to Christmas, as though all earth is waiting for Incarnation.  The suggestion of preparation implies a future that we are a building toward rather than knowing that what we do, pray, and think now folds into and manifests the future.  Perhaps I should define incarnation.  Simply, it is the physical manifestation of Divine Love, which can be seen all around us if we simply pick up our awareness and look.  I think what is meant by "salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed" is that Emanuel (God with us) doesn't need to be hoped for or even expected.  Rather, Incarnation is unfolding moment by moment whether we include ourselves in it or not.  The moment of Incarnation consciously is that moment we see ourselves as an intricate part of the indwelling Love that holds the universe intact. Incarnation is the looping of all time into the present.  We eat, interact, love, worship -- and are saved -- all only in the present moment, in this time, in this hour.  We miss it only by choosing to step outside it and put ourselves - our needs, our desires, our self-pity, our self-centered importance -- anywhere but in God's flowing love and wholeness. It's always nearer than we believe!

Prayer:
O Love that wilt not let me go, I rest my weary soul in thee; I give thee back the life I owe, that in thine ocean depths its flow may richer, fuller be.*  Amen.

Actionable Suggestions

1. Be thoughtfully present for ways you can tangibly lift someone else's spirits today -  a smile, a kind word, a donation.
2. Send 3 Christmas cards addressed to a local nursing home addressed to "One Who Needs Their Spirits Raised."
3. Make up a few bags with some gloves, a hat, some protein bars, a bottle of water... and hand them out to homeless people at intersections.  (The Dollar Store may have other items you might discover as being helpful.)

Make Incarnation real today!

* United Methodist Hymnal, c. 1989; "O Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go."  Words by George Matheson, 1882.