Choose Joy

Choose joy. Choose it like a child chooses the shoe to put on the right foot, the crayon to paint a sky. Choose it at first consciously, effortfully, pressing against the weight of a world heavy with reasons for sorrow, restless with need for action. Feel the sorrow, take the action, but keep pressing the weight of joy against it all, until it becomes mindless, automated, like gravity pulling the stream down its course; until it becomes an inner law of nature. If Viktor Frankl can exclaim yes, to life, in spite of everything- and what an everything he lived through — then so can any one of us amid the rubble of our plans, so trifling by comparison. Joy is not a function of a life free of friction and frustration, but a function of focus — an inner elevation by the fulcrum of choice. So often, it is a matter of attending to what Hermann Hesse called, as the world was about to come unworlded by its first global war, the little joys; so often, those are the slender threads of which we weave the lifeline that saves us.
Delight in the age-salted man on the street corner waiting for the light to change, his age-salted dog beside him, each inclined toward the other with the angular subtlety of absolute devotion.
Delight in the little girl zooming past you on her little bicycle, this fierce emissary of the future, rainbow tassels waving from her handlebars and a hundred beaded braids spilling from her golden helmet.
Delight in the snail taking an afternoon to traverse the abyssal crack in the sidewalk for the sake of pasturing on a single blade of grass.
Delight in the tiny new leaf, so shy and so shamelessly lush, unfurling from the crooked stem of the parched geranium.
I think often of this verse from Jane Hirshfield’s splendid poem-
So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.
Yes, except we furnish both the grains and the scales. I alone can weigh the blue of my sky, you of yours.
~Maria Popova

From the Blog: Make Believe Boutique- the Post: around the bend

The Love of God

The Love of God is so incredibly different and beyond compare that it boggles our ability to believe in it enough to accept it. No matter how much we have been loved by family and friends, no matter how famous and wildly adored we may have been by the multitudes, nothing has ever been more than a barely glimpsed shadow of the Love of God.
We need nothing more than to accept the unconditional Love of God with our whole mind, experiencing it with an open heart until our spirit is so filled with it, that we can pass it on by simply letting it overflow.
We glimpse this Love when we consider that the creator of the universe chose to walk in our skin, experiencing the frustrating and fearful limits of being human. Even being born into crushing political oppression as part of a scorned minority, experiencing physical exhaustion and bodily pain, feeling the heartbreak of being abandoned and betrayed by his friends. Not only suffering public ridicule and torture, but even accepting the darkness of death to show us there is more, all because of Love.
The Love of God can free us to see ourselves exactly as we are, fragile and unfinished. To then accept our need for forgiveness without guilt, just a true sorrow that sets us free from fear and shame and gives us grace to grow. It begins to not only free us to forgive ourselves, but also others.
The Love of God can heal the insecurities that come from being tiny vulnerable humans in a huge unknown universe, insecurities that stunt our ability to love. The Love of God is the grace that uses our mustard seed of faith to begin freeing us to die to self and live again.
The Love of God fleshed out in Jesus is personal, unconditional, and eternal. The Love of God heals us and opens our hearts to joy. All else fails. There is nothing as powerful and eternal as the Love of God, the Love of God for you.
The Love of God frees us to say, “I am yours, God. Take my life and help me become the unique person you created me to be.”

At One with all that Glory

One night many years ago in a world cloaked in a comforter of snow, I walked alone to the crest of a hill. As I stood there lost in the perfect silence, the sky was bursting with stars I’d never seen. Suddenly, I felt my self shrinking into insignificance in that overwhelming spectacle of space. But softly, I melted into the universe no longer limited by my borders, at one with all that Glory.

There is No “Other.”

One midnight in pristine newly fallen snow, I walked alone into a field on a hill where billions of stars gave light to the night. The silence was so profound, I could feel it like a soft comforter around me. As I gazed into an endless sky of light, I felt myself shrinking, almost disappearing into the vastness of the universe. Then suddenly, my boundaries disappeared and I was one with it all. I was inseparable from every star, every person, creature and mysterious molecule in that vastness. And I could no longer see anyone or anything as “other.”

The Dark at the End of the Tunnel

Once upon a time  almost a half century ago,  my brother and I were driving back from a Charismatic  Spirituality Conference at Notre Dame University to my home in Tennessee. My wonderful loving husband was taking care of our five children and needed to catch a plane to an out of state job site that evening. Suddenly, we were totally blinded by a deluge like rain storm and had to pull over. As time raced by, I grew very worried about getting home on time, so we prayed for help with the problem. Almost immediately, the rain stopped and the sun came out. Thanking God, we continued on our way home. A little while later it clouded over and began to pour making it very difficult to see clearly enough to drive again. We began to pray once more and as we did, a pathway opened up in the clouds over us and in a strip down the highway ahead of us. Beginning to both laugh and sniffle a bit from amazement and joy, we continued on our way, now singing praise to God. After about fifteen minutes the torrential rains began again with the sky almost dark as night. We looked at the clock and then each other and began to pray for help again. This time the clouds did not go away, but a hole in them that let the sun shine through over our car and about one car length around our car. By this time we were laughing,crying, and praising and both of us literally experienced a vision of ourselves as part of a crowd of people standing around Jesus on a throne, all singing, “Holy, holy holy, is the lamb of God.”. Our joy was so great that both of us felt we might simply explode if we had any more joy. So we prayed for the Lord to not give us anymore joy. As the joy simply settled into peace, once again the rains came. We were on the outskirts of our home town in traffic, but we both felt we were now to trust that God would protect and guide us each small step of the way home even in the darkness. We also realized that we had no way of adequately measuring or comparing the joy each of us had experienced, but that it didn’t matter. If one of us had been stretched to the size of a thimble and the other to the size of a lake, we had both experienced being joy filled to our utmost capacity for joy.
I’m convinced this was a metaphor for the faith journey. And that the closer we get to “home,” the more we have to trust while gong forward in the darkness.
PS. We made it home in time for my husband to catch his plane.

The Last Season

The last season of life
is not meant for pleasure
but for letting go of everything
of getting freed for joy
letting go of delusions
of importance
of great success
even perfect love
letting go of illusions
about life’s purpose
and rewards
letting go of dreams
of angels close at hand
of reaching
the promised land
until all that’s left
is the present moment
and no matter how hard
it may seem
to forget self                                                                                                                                            and focus on others
not as an achievement
just a choice
accepting that love
is full of pain
no happy endings
promised
no jeweled crowns
or streets of gold
long awaited as
just rewards
for persevering
through suffering
all this lost for the bliss
of  finally seeing
The Glory of God –                                                                                                                                      perfect love.