Seeing…

Spirituality is about seeing. It’s not about earning or achieving. It’s about relationship rather than results or requirements.

Once you see correctly, the rest follows.  Mary Oliver, the poet, puts it so well. It is like “seeing through a veil, secretly, joyfully clearly!”

You don’t need to push the river, because you are in it. The life is lived within us, and we learn how to say yes to that life.

If we exist on a level where we can see how “everything belongs,” we can trust the flow and trust the life, The Life so large and deep and spacious that it even includes its opposite, death.

Richard Rohr, adapted from Everything Belongs, pp. 33-34

Our minds are always active. We analyze, reflect, daydream, or dream. There is not a moment during the day or night when we are not thinking. You might say our thinking is “unceasing.” Sometimes we wish that we could stop thinking for a while; that would save us from many worries, guilt feelings, and fears. Our ability to think is our greatest gift, but it is also the source of our greatest pain. Do we have to become victims of our unceasing thoughts? No, we can convert our unceasing thinking into unceasing prayer by making our inner monologue into a continuing dialogue with our God, who is the source of all love.

Let’s break out of our isolation and realize that Someone who dwells in the centre of our beings wants to listen with love to all that occupies and preoccupies our minds.

from Henri J.M. Nouwen’s Bread for the Journey.

Being at various kinds of crossroads at the moment, I’m going off to Hilfield for a few days—back next week. If you’ve a moment spare, please do pray that my eyes will be opened to the depth of the grace and mercy of Christ, and that God’s will for the next stage of my life will become clear, and strong in my heart: that I will have the courage to step in faith into all that he has prepared for me. (Ephesians 2:21)