Never give up

Here's a lovely example of contemplative living---awakening to the Voice of God speaking through the most ordinary events. Mary shows how remaining attentive to what comes, even through a little child, can be revelation and an awareness to all of life as sacred.  Mary writes:

. . . As I write this, I realize that I’ll never give up, as my darling girl so emphatically advised me. But the thing that I won’t give up on is me. I’ll never give up on me, no matter what might happen in my world and along the journey that comprises my life. Although there will be things I never complete, things I might falter on, things that might cause me to fall---and OH, trust me, there will be those things---the core that binds me here, strong to the universe, is one which will never let go of its grip. So long as I have a warm, pulsing hand to clasp. So long as I have an eye to the smoldering, triumphant sun.

Love that last sentence: "So long as I have an eye to the smoldering, triumphant sun."

The true you

It’s obvious now that you can’t think your way to God, and shouldn’t try. But that doesn’t mean thinking isn’t important. There’s plenty of good you can and should do with your mind, but spiritually, your mind’s always secondary. At some point your ideas, even feelings, must give way to a direct experience of God that is beyond both of them. What a gift of grace this is! If knowing God depended on the quality of your thoughts, then you’d have to be brilliant to taste what you long to taste. If knowing God depended on your emotions, you can see immediately what kind of trouble you’d be in. When it comes right down to it, thoughts and emotions can carry you a good distance along the path (they can also send you on one wild goose chase after another), but they cannot carry you the whole way. Only love can carry you into the dark, mind-numbing cloud of God’s presence (Mark 10.7). Your thinking, even at its best and brightest, is eclipsed by the dazzling mystery of God who can ultimately only be known through your heart.

Your heart is the true you, the deeper you, the you undivided from God by sin.

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NEW! Retweeting and Facebook sharing

A few of you have asked me to give you some social networking tools. So . . . I've added new buttons off to the right that will help you share content from my site with others.  Just click on the retweet button to sent out to your Twitter audience; do the same to share stuff with your friends on Facebook. If you're finding help, inspiration, and guidance in these pages, involve your circle of relationships and social networks and help awaken spiritual life across the globe.

Thanks,

Chris

Hold them a safe distance from your heart

Your thoughts may still screech and chatter like monkeys in a cage, and they’ll be quite annoying. But you don’t have to mind them. In fact, you’re on the path to freedom; you’re learning how to hold them a safe distance from your heart. This won’t happen over night. But with practice you’ll be amazed at how different life is when you no longer let your thought-monkeys take hold of you and pull you into their little cage. To advance much farther in this, you’ll need to learn what’s called “the prayer of the heart,” interior or contemplative prayer, and I’ve promised to teach this to you . . . but later. All that’s important at this point is for you to know that you are not your thoughts, that you needn’t be a victim to them or the emotions wrapped up in them, and that you can learn to hold them a safe distance from your heart.

Over time you’ll learn to drawn them down into your heart where Christ is. In prayer, your thoughts and emotions will be both healed and heeled. The monkeys in the cage of your mind will actually learn to sit down and rest peacefully.

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Why thinking's over-rated

Thinking is over-rated. Frankly, thinking’s much of the reason you’re so eager for spiritual help. You want to taste something of God that thinking’s not been able to cook up. But you don’t know how to find that something except by thinking. You’re not alone. Hundreds of years ago, a French philosopher named Descartes said, “I think therefore I am.” Most of us since him have pretty much lived that way—our thoughts defining who we think we are. But Descartes made a grave error in his thinking and messed us all up as a result. And if you can follow what I tell you here, you’ll have the key to unlock what poet William Blake so memorably called the “mind-forg’d manacles” that hold so many of us prisoner. Here’s what Descartes missed: the fact that you can think a thought means that you are therefore not that thought. You are someone higher, deeper, truer than the thought you’ve thought. So we can correct Descartes and say, “I think, therefore I am not my thoughts.” The I who I really am is not the thoughts I think. Your thoughts—and emotions too, the anxiety or fear that hounds you—are merely expressions of yourself, they’re not yourself itself. And if they’re expressions, then you don’t need to follow them wherever they try to lead you, you don’t need to do whatever they want you to do, you don’t have to believe whatever they tell you to believe. Instead, you can watch them, examine them, and then decide what the true you will do with them.

For more meditations on the Daily Guide/Rule of Life, click on the blog category, “Daily Guide/Rule of Life”

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