It occurs to me…

Photo taken a few years back, patiently waiting in a folder for the accompanying text.

This beautiful prayer from Howard Thurman, Meditations of the Heart:

Brood over our spirits, Our Father,

Blow upon whatever dream Thou hast for us

That there may glow once again on our hearths

The light from Thy altar.

Pour out whatever our spirits need of shock, of lift, of release

That we may find strength for these days –

Courage and hope for tomorrow.

In confidence we rest in Thy sustaining grace

Which makes possible triumph in defeat, gain in loss, and love in hate.

We rejoice this day to say:

Our little lives, our big problems – these we place upon thy altar!

Photo taken a few years back at Cannon Beach, Oregon.

Take a slice of the past not fully understood

Muddle in an ephemeral dash of pungent now

Stir in an unknowable future

Shake erratically, yet with passion and vigor

Pour over the imagined, but seemingly real, rocks

Enjoy

DeMello effectively makes this point in one of the essays in Awareness. 

“Life only makes sense when you perceive it as a mystery.”  Anthony DeMello

This, he explains, is why we have such frustration in searching for “the meaning of life.”  Reality, as we experience it, each of us, does not fit a formula or an ideology.  As DeMello notes: “Every time you make sense out of reality, you bump into something that destroys the sense you made.”  So what do we do then?  Well, speaking from personal experience, the inclination is to get frustrated and either 1) stick with the old formula or ideology and consider the variants to be anomalous or misguided (i.e. the grumpy old fart syndrome, or worse); or 2) create a new formula or ideology – and then something else destroys that new sense I made of things.  The latter process is like the endless “Rinse-Lather-Repeat.” loop printed on a shampoo bottle.

Thus, this friendly amendment to DeMello’s quote: “Live CAN only make sense in the long run when you perceive it as a mystery.”  And it saves you a lot of shampoo.

Photo taken of a pecan tree in the yard doing its spring thing.

This thought filters through from Anthony DeMello’s One Minute Wisdom: We don’t need to put God in our lives so much as to recognize that he is already there.  I am reminded of the bumper sticker – “If you find yourself distant from God, guess who moved.”  Those sound a bit trite as I process them, but nonetheless true.  The word that comes to mind here is “juxtaposition,” which Webster’s defines as “the act or an instance of placing two or more things side by side, often to compare or contrast or to create an interesting effect.” Interesting, indeed!

I read this today from Howard Thurman: “Every person thinks that it is his peculiar destiny to have the ideal come true for him.”  It strikes me that this thinking is at the heart of all conflict, perhaps all troubles with the world.  That is, despite clear evidence that known inhabitants of this universe are not clairvoyant, and as John Andrew Holmes noted, that “the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others,” each of us envisions a “peculiar destiny “and thinks/acts toward that end.  It’s kind of easy to see how this might not end well absent some radical rethinking.  Which is perhaps where Ken Burns is headed based on this quote from a recent interview: “The thing I’ve learned is that there is no ‘them.’ It’s just us.”

Photo taken in Cedar Rapids, Iowa last fall.