The Light in the Woods

3/8/10 Insights from Study              I love the Bible parables that remind us that when we have everything there is to have, we don’t need to strive or begrudge. And we do have everything we need, plus much more, when we embrace the loving presence of God in our lives. All it takes to believe in our blessings is to be willing to recognize that it’s only faulty perception blinding us to what we have been provided.

We are stubborn though; it’s hard to believe that what our senses tell us is true is true only in a dream; not in Reality itself. The world seems so concrete to us – it must be real. But the real world is beyond Earth, beyond senses, beyond human intelligence and perception. No wonder it’s hard to believe.

But it’s to our great advantage to believe, because with belief comes intuitive perception whereby we appreciate God’s desire for us to have the best of everything. Only then can we be content; to aspire to spiritual peace. Most of us wait until we die, and so waste our time here on things that don’t matter in Reality. Mystics die to the world on purpose, recognizing the love of God we all receive; recognizing it in such a way as to experience a little bit of heaven here and now without the wait.

In the parable of the Prodigal Son, the father tried to explain to the good brother that all the family has belongs to the good brother anyway; the bad brother can’t take away anything of value and so is not to be hated out of jealousy.

In the parable of the Vineyard Workers, the owner tried to explain that wages are wages; having once agreed to what will be accepted as payment, there is no need for any worker to begrudge what another one gets.

So often we think of life as a race — all this does is make sure we push others out of our way. So often we expect fairness out of all of life’s workings – God does not countenance fairness in His dealings with us because we cannot understand and cannot therefore judge His plan. Life is not an all-or-nothing proposition. Life isn’t a popularity contest or a system of rewards we can count on. Life doesn’t run smoothly on greed — not the greed of the “haves” and not the greed of the “have-nots” for what the “haves” have. A smooth life consists in something much greater than what we traditionally hold dear. When we strive for what will really satisfy us, we find that we look to accept the love of God that reaches out to us constantly. In this endeavor, nothing aspired to on the lower plane can approach, and the favors of the Holy Spirit we wouldn’t think of trading away.

If we take our individuality seriously and place our emphasis on a personal relationship with God, we are more apt to accept His work done in His way. There are so many little things that will not bother us in the least when we dedicate all we have to God’s plan for us. And we have a better relationship with others when we are not always trying to outdistance them on the path to fully appreciating God’s love.

2/28/10 Inspirations                  Meditation, contemplation, scripture study, litany and liturgy – all processes done to remove the world from our thoughts long enough to bring the Creator to the forefront are things good for peace of mind. But to acquire pure inner peace that lasts because it becomes the nature of our spirit, this is the ultimate comfort state.

We begin by ascribing all that is to God. We see Him as a loving God, ever merciful and ever forgiving. Only this kind of God makes us worthy of this kind of love. Then we acknowledge that if we give over our lives to God first and foremost, we will not only honor Him but gain for ourselves knowledge and grace through a new perception of His ongoing gifts to mankind. We will see too the nature of God’s reality – the kingdom to which we were born and still wait for our faulty, worldly perception to catch up to.

We live assured of pure joy, and we catch glimpses of this waiting reality. Through God’s loving attention we get heightened sensory input triggered by seeing the things around us in a fresh, God-toward way. The more attuned we are to things that are important to God, the more willing we are to receive these gifts from Him, and the more adept we are at appreciating them.

This, finally, is how we maintain a constant inner peace – by armoring ourselves against worldly strife with our focus on the bliss of reality that’s being covered up by worldly influences. When we recognize the joy of God, we immerse our spirits in Him to the point where we can exist happily even within the stress of our daily lives. This is inner peace, available to all.

2/19/10 Spiritual Presentations        

For quite a while now I haven’t believed heaven to consist of anything other than pure joy. To me this means that nothing of our earthly lives is needed to complete our heavenly lives – friends, relatives, pets, or places that we loved on Earth. Even if you discount that the presence of acquaintances must cause disruption as well as joy, just as they did on Earth, it still seems that they would not be necessary and therefore would be redundant.

It’s my intuition that only God’s presence is necessary for complete joy. But there is something endearing about the possibility of being greeted by loved ones as we approach heaven. After all, the fear of death makes us cling to the thought that we will be helped into the transition by people we know and trust. Yet it doesn’t ring true to me, as the concept of “God is All” is so ingrained in my mysticism, and wishing for something else in heaven seems sacrilegious.

I guess there would be no harm, though, in speculating about these wondrous things, much in the way we review what we would do with a million dollars if we won the lottery. I think it’s human nature, since we don’t know for sure about something that’s inevitable, to make up what we would like to be true just as an exercise.

Tonight as we were ice fishing we were discussing how the people in the stories we tell all seem to have passed on. I mentioned that I’m old enough that I think I know more deceased people than living ones. This got me to thinking that the moment of death must not be too hard to handle, since so many have done it. From there I began to reflect on how people might envision their entry into heaven.

There standing on the huge expanse of lake, the enormity of God’s work came to mind. As wondrous as it is here, how awesome it must be in heaven, where we get the full effect of God. I began to play with thoughts of what I’d like to witness as I pass over, even though it’s my theology that the presence of God will comprise my ecstasy and that alone will be enough for me. I went from being able to eat whatever I want without fullness or guilt to having unlimited opportunity to spend my own time however I want. I thought of the things on Earth I didn’t like and gave some thought to how it would feel to not have to worry about them.  I envisioned a lack of responsibility; the freedom to have my head in the clouds instead of on worldly considerations.

At the end of this exercise I looked out onto the lake and was struck by something I don’t remember ever having noticed before. I never realized how beautiful the smell of warm snow is when the sun starts to go down and the cold starts to bring all the senses into sharpness. It’s like a prayer, a gift, and a comfort from God that all is well because He wills it to be. When we see how God presents beautiful things like the smell of snow to us here on Earth, we can be comforted that He really does want only good for us and is capable of providing it in His mercy – now and on into eternity.

2/14/10 Insights from Prayer         I’m convinced that if more of us understood the beauty of a divine relationship the world could start to heal. I can’t imagine being scared of a one-on-one relationship with the Creator, but apparently many of us are. We tend to be more comfortable in groups – groups of like race, religion, gender, causes, economic class, location, interests. All these things are fine to consider, but they make us dependent, and dependent on the wrong things.

Sometimes our groupings hold us back from the one thing that can easily bring us joy – a relationship with our Creator. We often look to a group to help us gain this very thing, and often go away disappointed. A union with God is not a group activity. It is much too special to be anything but an individual commitment. That’s because each of us is specially-made and, in the eyes of God, uniquely loved.

If you really think this over, it’s quite an awesome arrangement. We each have the power of God at our disposal, just for the asking. We are worthy of the asking, for not only are we God’s children, but God is extremely involved in our welfare. He likes for us to put our dependence on Him, because He knows He’s all for our good.

This is intentionally simplified; there are many other considerations. But the point here is that we would be so much happier if we let God do for us what He would like to do. It’s so simple if we start thinking interiorly – that is, with our willing reception of supernatural grace. We often don’t realize how much we desire God; how lost we feel and how homesick we are. Only when we give our selves over to Him do we then realize what we’ve been given and how much better things are when these graces are fully appreciated.

Let’s not substitute something less for the best we already have. Let’s turn to the divine instead of our human groupings to realize our potential joy. God is available to you every second you live. Your relationship with Him is up to you – something you will know how to seek out because your desire for it is always within you. Stand alone and turn inside yourself to experience the ecstasy of God.

1/31/10 Reflections          I’ve been thinking a lot about the children’s ward lately — about how it tested my faith in God’s mercy plan, and how it returned me to my faith tenfold over the years through the deep peace of supernatural insight.

While visiting my brother, who was bedridden with multiple sclerosis and in a nursing home, it was necessary for my other brother and I to go to the office on some business. The home was doing some renovations, which made us have to detour through the children’s ward to get to the office. As we were admitted we were told walk straight through, not to interact, and to make as little as noise as possible so as to not disturb the children.

What I saw in the children’s ward is almost beyond description. There were small misshapen bodies in all sorts of contortions; blank expressions on faces that didn’t look like humanity so much as things closeted away until no longer needing care. Their beds or wheelchairs lined both sides of the hallway — as we walked the gauntlet of unspeakable aberrations, in the midst of what the coldest-hearted human would call insufferable, there wasn’t any noise; just the silence of tolerated existence.

When we finally got through the opposite doorway, I told my brother this was a real test of my faith, which depends on the love of God for all His creation. It did one thing, though – it caused me to keep coming back to reflect on what little I know of God’s reasoning, and how I can only believe that what He does He does for our good. Then slowly the lesson of the children’s ward was taught to me within my spirit, and has given me a deeper, more peaceful intuition of the working of God’s love than I think I could have ever had without the experience.

I see now that we cannot care for each other properly. No matter how dire the circumstances and how tirelessly we work for our fellow human beings, we cannot give them what they truly need. Only God can do that. The most dedicated nurse on the children’s ward can only comfort the bodies of the children, and help them remain emotionally neutral.

Their bodies may be decimated, but who knows what they’re seeing inside? Only God can offer that comfort, and somehow I’ve come away with complete assurance that He does. Behind those distorted shells, could the children be experiencing the golden glowing joy of God’s perfect love as do those who have already passed on into His kingdom? If real meaning only exists in another world where God is the only god and our spirits gather Him fully and ecstatically, could those that are physically dependent and mentally unencumbered with worldly priorities be blessed with heavenly bliss here on Earth and unable to tell of it?

In fact, I’ve come into the knowledge that those children are experiencing the beauty of God the way God meant humans to experience Him — how we all would if our minds and bodies were disabled and given over solely to God’s care. In this condition of having nothing else, we enjoy the one thing we do have, unconditionally and without fail — the love of God.

Mystics are able to see the logic of their detachment from the world and negations of self-interest. To them the loss of selfhood is not debilitation so much as essential to experiencing something much better and closer to God’s desires. And those who study the Bible know well the scriptural plea for decreasing so they may increase, giving up all they have and following, taking no scrip for the journey, becoming like little children, the last being first, choosing the good part, letting them deny themselves, taking up the cross, losing their life for God’s sake, having their treasure in heaven, being poor in spirit, crying in the wilderness, the stone the builders rejected, casting in all they had, taking the lowest seat at the feast, seeking the kingdom of God, and entering at the narrow gate.

God should like us to be what we were at creation, before free-will and the sin and suffering that comes from it. For truth, that’s the state He has planned for us to return to in glory. Now, in the world, the independence we asked for has become a thing of strife. The only way to alleviate it is to allow ourselves to become totally dependent on God again so we may look upon His kingdom with joy and hope.

In the children’s ward this has been done for them and they live in the perfect presence of God without effort. Only those who give too much credence to the world and how we perceive it will miss completely what I missed momentarily – that the only thing that matters is the love of God, and whatever state we are in that we can perceive this love the most is the best state to be in. In the measure that we can’t assimilate this, we suffer from our lack of perception. That, then, is true and needless suffering.

I’m not suggesting that those who take care of the residents of the children’s ward don’t provide a heroic service – the need for care of these children’s bodies and emotions is enormous, and I hope for the caregivers’ sake that part of their compensation is the feeling of being blessed to be near these special temples of God’s love. But I am confident that God makes up for suffering by opening up the spirit to supernatural consolation. And this, being the better part, is what God encourages for all of us by our offering of our very selves to Him — a disabling of the ego so as to make His love our spiritual sustenance.

Mystic vision is not apparitions caught by our human senses. Mystic vision is the ability to see things as God sees them; a gift given because we want it badly and allow it freely. Through mystic vision we are able to “know properly” — not the things of this world but the reality of this world as seen from a higher plane. This is a comfort not only to the residents of the children’s ward, but to anyone who can learn exactly what it is they are experiencing. What we can know of God comes down to one necessary specific – that when we seek God we see Him, because that’s what we were made for. And when we see Him we know at once that no matter who we are, or how we look, or what we have or don’t have, without His love we would be nothing and with His love we are everything.

1/19/10 Inspirations             The more I experience God the more I would need to know in order to do Him justice. I can’t explain the unexplainable, yet this is exactly what a believer is expected to do. This is a world where all you have to do is show skepticism and you appear to have wisdom. But those who have wisdom of Reality — that is, a world more attuned to the Creator than to what He has created – tend to remain silent and waiting.

The first thing you learn when you become truly enlightened is that there is a God and He is in control. You may object to feeling like a pawn in a chess game, but if you do you’re reacting with your ego whereas God is dealing with your spirit. To be spiritual is to be fully free; to accept God’s control so that you may exercise your free will from within the condition that truly responds to human free will — God’s desire to show love and be loved.

This cosmic consciousness is the key to true joy and deep peace. To a humanist happiness for all is a noble cause; to a mystic it is an inheritance from God. It takes acknowledgment of divine control to attain real peace; it will not come about through human desire for it to be so. But our free will can be used to accept recognition of God as Creator and to guide our actions toward working from within God’s master plan.

This master plan cannot be known except generally – the specifics are left to the mind of God, which we cannot probe deeply enough for now. But this is how creation works best; with enough mystery to encourage our participation in God’s plan, and enough knowledge to accept the wisdom of its Creator without question.

As each individual is blessed with mystic perception the fire spreads even more quickly. One day all will grow to abandon ego and embrace spirit – at this point the world can end at last, and we may all awaken into true life of perfect joy in the full presence of God.

1/17/10 Insights from Prayer               If you often start to question what you think you believe of life, that’s not a cause of despair but of celebration. For at least a few moments you have lifted your eyes from the inane preoccupation of whatever feeds your ego, and placed them squarely upon a place where they might at last truly see.

When you ponder what you think of God and His works, you could test your beliefs this way: Think of all the alternate possibilities in life and see if what you believe of God can hold true when looked at from a wholly different perspective.

Alien lifeforms, other universes, altered mind-states, past lives, lost worlds – if your idea of God can exist steadfast no matter how creation can be envisioned, then truly He is the master planner.

I don’t know what this means; I’m just writing down what was given to me.

1/13/10 Reflections          I was busy with my own concerns when this earthquake hit – by the time I knew of it many were already dead. It’s been on my mind all day, but as I go about doing what I do, it occurs to me many more are in the process of dying. And many are trapped and know that soon they will die. Then there are those who are healthy but grieving, and those who don’t even know if they should be grieving.

It seems like this country has been poor forever; I have felt compassion for these people for as long as I’ve been aware of world affairs. As a freshman at university I remember my Historical Geography teacher asking each of us where in the world we might like to go. When it was my turn I said I wanted to go to Haiti and help the people there. My teacher smiled and asked if I knew anything about Voodoo. I said not too much, but I could speak some French – meaning I might be able to empathize that way. Some kid in the class sneeringly said “Jeez, she thinks Voodoo is a language!”

Those days were full of intimations that God was directing me toward something even though I wasn’t very friendly with God at the time. These days I live for loving God and there still is this feeling of being designed to help somehow, but it seems for missionary work I would be a liability now that I’m too old and everything hurts. Back when I was young and could have gone, I didn’t take the hint. Now I get it, but I’m over the hill. Still, I wish I could go and be of service to a people who are not only economically destitute, but have been footballs in a deadly political game for so long. And victims of disaster after disaster.

It’s easy for me to say, here in my comfort and safety, but I have to pray that Haiti’s latest disaster is the one that turns things around for those poor people. They are deserving of a miracle, and my other prayer is that this brings them closer to God, not further away. Only God can bring that miracle about. But I hope there are many compassionate donors of time and money who can pave the way and work with Him.

1/7/09 Insights from Study         More than one of today’s devotionals touches upon an attribute of mine that puzzles me. I often need God’s assurance on something that has been in the back of my mind for as long as I can remember. I hate to say it out loud because it sounds like a delusion of grandeur, even though no feeling of pride actually comes with it at all. But I have felt since I was a child that I have a special mission for God and I have been waiting rather obliviously for His “go-ahead”.

I don’t usually dwell on this, trying to figure out intellectually what I know can only come to me inspirationally, but it is ever there in quiet expectation. Whatever it is I am to do, I must not be ready for it as yet. I feel like I’m actively being prepared but there’s no clue as to the progress in what I’m being prepared for. It’s as if God hides my purpose so I don’t waste my effort in bumbling attempts to gear myself toward the work.

This call for patience isn’t a cause of anxiety – in fact this unknowing brings me a certain calm because I know the answer will come surely and supernaturally. All responsibility lies in the hands of the Creator, who not only treats me with love but is also very good at setting right things into place. But I’m sixty years old – sometimes I can’t help but wonder if I could have somehow missed the ship. Yet if that were so, why would I have this feeling of preparation?

Anyway, today’s theme seems to be that I will not be going anywhere on my mission; that I will be sought out right where I am. That makes sense in two ways. First is that as the years go by my odd distaste for leaving home for any reason gets stronger and more apparent. Second, I live in a place steeped in spirituality, where the presence of God can call to a person mystically, forcefully, and somewhat continuously. Today I read reminders that this narrow path I take is that way for a reason. Maybe as I record what comes to me in God’s presence I am already affecting His plans in ways I don’t even recognize. I may die tomorrow and find my mission is already done. Stay home and love God – easy for me and what I’d choose to do anyway. God hasn’t matched my job to my temperament; He’s given me the mission and matched me with the temperament I need to accomplish it.

1/5/10 Insights from Study            Yes, God created evil, but to Him it isn’t evil. We have come to see it so, but to God all of His creation is goodness. We are not God, and we see things through human perspective; not divine. We wouldn’t think of calling medicine evil because of its bitter taste, but when it comes to God we expect Him to arbitrate justice without pointing out sin. We expect God to extend His mercy without our having to concede we were wrong. We want His peace without admitting we brought about the conflict. We blame God for what we see as evil, but want Him to overlook consequences of sin, which is something of our own making. How is it we can choose to turn our backs on God, then turn around and blame Him for not preventing us from making a mess of things?

Earthquakes are not evil — they are a natural part of Earth’s regeneration process. When one swallows a car with your loved ones in it, an earthquake appears quite evil to you. But the earthquake did not sin against you, and God is not evil for not having prevented the deaths. If a hungry bear attacks your child, it isn’t because it is evil, nor is God remiss in creating the bear’s need to feed.

Only human beings can perceive God’s created things as evil, because only human beings can create sin out of good and accrue the consequences of their actions. It isn’t that evil is doled out to us as punishment in proportion to our sins so much as it’s that we are simply seeing life as a condition of imperfection. We “know” things as evil because we are used to ordering matters to our own specifications, and often they don’t co-operate.

We insist on exercising our free will and God allows that even when we harm ourselves by it. Unless we are mystics, we would not be willing to give up our free wills, even when we know we often use them with harmful results. Unless we are spiritually enlightened, we are unaware of all the cases where God has in fact intervened to save us. We are just as unaware of this as we are unaware of His reasons for permitting us to witness evil. Opportunity, correction, guidance, education, conversion, grace – all good things can appear to us as evil when directed by God’s hand, because we do not understand divine intellect. We cannot assimilate the intensity of God’s love for us and the steps He takes because of this love.

This is why mystics are always encouraging a person’s abandonment of will. It’s saying this: “I’m not divine and can only haltingly absorb divine reasoning. But if I make a point of accepting God’s will as good, no matter whether it seems to me to be loving or evil, I will certainly be at peace knowing my way won’t be wrong. If I unite my desires to God’s, even if I don’t understand them, I’m confident that I’m doing God’s will and showing Him love. And if I do this sincerely, humbly, and obediently, I will be shown by insight what I need to know, and be given the means to do what I need to do. When I am in sync with God all decisions are God’s, even the ones He has subjected to my free will.”

In this desire for union with God we’ll not only have assurance of following the path our Creator means for us to follow, but also we will have a more proper perception of the worldly, temporary nature of suffering and evil.