On Saying Yes

       

Students of spirituality will certainly come across the idea called the Law of Mind, often called by other names, such as the Law of Cause and Effect, the Law of Giving and Receiving, the Law of Reciprocity, or just simply the phrase: As ye sow, so shall ye reap. This comes up because of the way Infinite Mind appears to work when dealing with creation. Our belief is that the mind we use is the Mind of God. As far as we are concerned, God always is saying yes to us, for the Law does not contradict itself and does not care whether we are wise or woeful in the way we think. Essentially it must return to us the results of what we are thinking. It’s as if the Law is saying: You want it; you got it.

Misery begets more misery...

How does this work? In a word or two, we can say that if we are miserable, misery begets more misery; happiness produces more happiness; violence create more violence, and this is taking place whether we know what we are doing or not. We understand that the Law is no respecter of persons. Ernest Holmes, the spiritual philosopher, said that we cannot gather roses from thistles.

Setting a new landmark in place...

So what, you say? Well, this gives new meaning to the popular phrase: Change your thinking; change your life. Things can be different; we can think in new ways, and especially can we view ourselves in new ways, perhaps as Wayne Dyer says, as spiritual beings living a human life. We are coming up on a brand, new year, which can be simply the turning of a calendar page to another day or setting a new landmark in place.

Are we hopeful, self approving....

Let’s look at what we are giving the Law of Mind to say yes to. Are we hopeful, self approving, willing to cast our thoughts in more creative directions so that life holds a positive yes? Or is it cynicism and self laceration as usual, setting the stage for more of the same old same old.

It always says yes...

Mind is not influenced by whether we are young or old, big or small, just starting out or have gone many miles along the way. It always says yes. Let us make it work for us more than ever!

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On Doing More Than You Think You Can

I am convinced that we are far more durable than we think we are. All we have to do is remember some of those tough times we pushed through to know that we are made of pretty good stuff. Recently a PBS special presented a several-episode piece on the lives of the Rooevelts…Theodore, Franklin and Eleanor, which I watched eagerly because Franklin and Eleanor were very present in my life during my growing-up years. To a kid it felt like Franklin Roosevelt was President of the United States forever. Whatever one may think of them or their politics, there is no denying that they pushed through some unbelievable hurdles to become the people they were, especially a disabled Franklin and an unloved and unlovely Eleanor.

What is it that moves us......

What is it that moves us through events into outcomes that give us depth and breadth? What can it be but the spiritual raw material we possess, coupled with the desire to come to resolution, whether it is happy or otherwise? Desire, I think, is the key. Desires keeps us hanging in there when at times we seem to be treading water, or maybe even losing ground. And sometimes hanging in there is all that is available to us during some stretches…and we may know in advance that some resolutions will not bring happiness, only the logical outcome of something we began in good faith. Truly we cannot always direct the way in which the road will turn.

I would not have refused the gifts...

The simple truth is that we have a deep, spiritual core within us that, if we wish, keeps us moving. Some of the facts along the way may not be pretty, but the experiences add dimensions we might never have imagined. Certainly I would never have wished some of the hard places on myself if I had seen them coming, but by the same token, I would not have refused the gifts they brought.

At this Christmas Season, let's celebrate the depth of our spirituality as well as all the gifts that come to us from every direction.

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On The Bridge of San Luis Rey

     

Recently I thought about a small treasure of a book, Thornton Wilder’s sleeping American classic, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, written in 1927. Over a 50-year period I have probably read this three times and always find myself immersed in Wilder’s antique language as he describes the lives of people on an important journey. In brief…the book was set in Lima, Peru on July 20, 1714 and involved a rope bridge on the highroad  between Lima and Cuzco, a bridge used every day by hundreds of people. Without warning, the bridge collapsed and sent five people who happened to be on the bridge at that time crashing to their deaths…an erratic, rich old woman and her maid-child, a twin whose brother had recently died, a middle-aged man of many talents and a child he was going to tutor. Watching this was a Franciscan missionary named Brother Juniper who immediately jumped to the existential conundrum… "Why did this happen to those five?” Did they somehow have an unseen “divine appointment?” He set out to examine their lives to find this connection, only to discover after much research that he could not, and in fact was burned at the stake for his supposed heretical writings, a spillover from the Spanish Inquisition.

Sudden, exotic circumstances...

Many of us like to make something of sudden, exotic circumstances. Whether it is the unfortunates on the Bridge or a plane that crashes with all lives lost, we are busy trying to second guess the Infinite. We love to bedevil ourselves with questions that have unknowable answers until we, like Brother Juniper, must come to the admission that we can’t reason out everything, that there are not always tidy conclusions to our internal seekings. To the western mind it can be deeply unsatisfying to have to stop wrestling with some questions of being and simply let them play out as we live our lives.

How much we become capable of loving...

Perhaps it does not matter how much we try to crawl inside the Mind of God or how many mistakes we may make. What matters more is how we come to know ourselves and how much we become capable of loving. One of Wilder’s characters, an Abbess, said it well: “All, all of us have failed…but do you know that in love---I scarcely dare say it---but in love our very mistakes don’t seem to be able to last long.”

Let this coming Christmas be our bridge...

And finally…”there is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.” We could let this coming Christmas be a bridge.

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On Room at the Feeder

A wise person once said that hummingbirds have the personality of junkyard dogs, and he was right. We have two feeders in our front yard, which we keep filled and tended, but you would think we are the enemy. If we should happen to go out into the front of the house while the little blighters are trying to feed, they think nothing of buzzing around our heads so that we will hurry away.

Tiny warriors guard their turf...

It is interesting to me that there would be plenty of hummer food available, and yet the tiny warriors guard their turf and run off each other as if there was barely a drop left…with one notable exception. Our main feeder has a long, cylindrical reservoir with four perches around it, enough that four birds could feed at once…if they would ever allow it! Well, one cold and rainy day, they did. It was very wet and gloomy, and as I looked out the window, I saw that all four perches were being used by hungry hummers peacefully feeding and one fluttering nearby waiting for a turn! None of them bothered to trouble one other.

Did the milk of bird kindness overtake them...

What was that about? Were they just hungry enough not to spend the effort running off the others? Did the milk of bird kindness overtake them as they became aware that there was plenty for all? Certainly I didn’t know, and I don’t always know why humans who withhold from one another can have times when they become unusually generous. And maybe I should not care.

Extend our spiritual love around...

We are entering one of the sacred seasons of the year, and whether we are thinking about room at the feeder or room at the inn, could we not think to extend our spiritual love around perhaps a bit more uncharacteristically this year? It is not so much that we spread money around---although we certainly could---as much as we spill out the spiritual love we have in abundance. There is always plenty of that to spread around.

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On Telling a new Story

I have waited a few days to comment after the Ferguson, Mo., decision was made in the hope that full-on alienation might not take over the streets of many cities. It did. I hoped that clear voices and many prayers might make their way to the forefront of the media perspective. They didn’t. Instead I found a now-familiar cynicism (which I promised I would never indulge in. I Iost.) rise in me , along with a deep sadness that our answer to Rodney King’s plaintive question: Can’t we all just get along?...would still be no.

Unfortunately the Ferguson situation is the latest in a variety of scenarios that can arrive anywhere at any time. This time it is black-white-police in nature, but it can show up as any contrived configuration because I think we are still unwilling to give up the old stories that go back to a tribal mentality, years of compressed thinking bound into a collective mind set. We know them…Black people are (insert story): White people are (insert story); Cops are (insert story); Latinos are (insert story): Women are (insert story)…and they are endless and leap up when triggered into tribal response.

We needed the stories for self and mutual discovery. We needed to hear facts we did not know. What we forgot was that facts are not truths and that the generalizations we made from them are not true…and never were! There are many, many people, often quietly living their lives, who have risen out of the stories and see themselves as part of a living Whole. At times like Ferguson, their voices are not wanted. They don’t fit the mob mentality.

I believe the stories were needed; they enlightened, but now they trap us in limited beliefs. If we cannot step out of them and create a new song, we will carry a bleeding, unhealed place in us wherever we go, a rage-full place just waiting to be triggered into action.

It is more than blackness or whiteness or any other “ness” that keeps us unhealed. It is our unrelenting attachment to tribal thinking, to old stories that can never bring us into a new place. It is time and past time for the creation of a new story, one that is centered in more spiritual truth, one that recognizes the sacredness of all humanity in a world that needs our love so much.