I have enjoyed some wonderful opportunities to hear the delightful Edwene Gaines, consistent prosperity presenter and great adherent of a life of commitment and purpose. I remember a delicious occasion when she charmed an audience by saying that we all have letters after our names. Whether we have B.A. Degrees, M.A. Degrees…or none of these…we all carry the invisible letters, M. S. U….Makes Stuff Up! Of course we all laughed, but we got the point as well. In other words we are not only busy living our lives, we are also inventing them! We tell stories on a regular basis, sometimes about others, but more often about ourselves. Not only do we shape the ways in which we want to be perceived, we can also have a very poor perception of ourselves to begin with, and this does not bode well for a spiritual being trying to inhabit a healthy, human life. How can a person be confident or at ease with himself if he thinks he is broken at the start? We may not be living so firmly under St. Augustine’s doctrine of original sin any more, but somehow many people have come to see themselves as unworthy.
Most damaging of stories...
In my mind a sense of unworthiness is one of the biggest and most damaging of stories anyone could ever make up about him or herself. Sometimes we have help, if not through church canon, then certainly through the misguided messages we get from people with authority over us…parents sometimes, teachers, bosses, people we think know more than we do…people who cannot know us because they are not who we are.
No one and nothing is left out...
If the belief in Universal Integrity and Wholeness means anything, it must mean that nothing and no one is left out of the pristineness of the Creative Process…and this means us. If somewhere along the way we have whipped ourselves over some phony flaw, we need some good healing, and we need it now. Let no more time be spent dribbling away our precious spiritual gifts through self-invented short circuiting.
No more M. S. U...
Talk it away; pray it away; let it become the no-thing it always was. No more M. S. U.!
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