Come, Lord Jesus, Come and Be Born in my Heart 2021

I feel new.

It’s really sort of weird and funny at eighty-four. But it feels delightful, like a wonderful blessing, though even a tad scary, since it’s a little like being in first grade again. I know the challenges to the new me will come and have to be responded to in new ways. But meanwhile, I am just dancing in my heart with happiness.

I feel more “whole” than I ever remember feeling.

Or course I still need taller people to reach high things. I still need stronger people to pull down heavy boxes. I still need my youngest, Tommy, to rescue me from the insanity of dealing with Infinity/Comcast. I still needed all five of my wonderful kids to replace my ancient computer. I’m blessed that my eldest, Chris lives near me and brings me meds when I’m sick and yummy food from his wife Molly. I still need Steve to come visit from Atlanta and listen to my life story, the good and the bad of it, and to write a list of simplified short cuts for me to use on the computer. (And sneakily pay for a new Microsoft Windows for me.) I still delight in my weekly Face Time call from my Mike and his Patrick in Cambodia. I am also grateful for daughter Julie’s wonderful notes affirming me and that she and Scott have invited me along on an eight day visit in Michigan with my great-grandchildren at Christmas. And I’m grateful to grandson Josh and his amazing Paula, who not only send me videos and photos of my three youngest great-grandchildren, but are including me in their Christmas. And thank God for granddaughter, Carmen, who checked out my tires and warned me that I needed four new ones right away. I still need my friend Rachel, who affirms me in writing, so when I lose my sense of well being, I can read and remember.
And I still need my friend Jenny who can laugh with me at our shared old lady humiliations. The list goes on and on.

But something inside me shifted and either I finally don’t feel so inadequate or I’ve simply accepted the hand I was dealt and can laugh at the recurring Three Stooges Act that I regularly play out. Whatever it is, my underlying fear of being inadequate for whatever life requires that has haunted me for most of my life, seems to have been put at bay, a least for now.

I think this is this year’s answer to my Advent prayer, “Come, Lord Jesus. Come and be born in my heart.” Another Christmas healing like my “Dirty Sock Under the Christmas Tree.” What a wonderful God we have. I highly recommend praying that prayer and then waiting and watching for the answer. Some years, I haven’t recognized it, but many years I have. Pray it. Wait for it. Watch for it.

I am praying for blessings for you who read this post during this season of celebration of God’s unconditional Love expressed in Jesus. Merry Christmas to you all.

Voting and Loving

Standing in the line to vote, I’d brought my rolling walker with a seat to use if standing long brought on pain. Three different poll workers kindly asked if I’d like to go to the front of the line. I said no, because I could sit down any time I needed to. They noticed the woman behind me with a bandaged foot and asked her the same. She also said no, there were chairs every six feet. She and I began to chat about the challenges of aging and life in general right now. She shared some difficulties, but then recounted with a light in her eyes how they had turned out to bring about some good changes in her life. I reacted with delight, recognizing grace and a faith we shared. We bonded there in a line, six feet apart, with masks. It was one of those blessed moments of connection. We parted reluctantly after voting and as I drove away I realized from other things that she had probably voted red, while I voted blue. But I also realized that she went back to her life reaching out in love to those familiar faces whom she understood and trusted, while I went back to reaching out to unfamiliar faces, with lives so different from mine. Both of us doing our best to help others and to share the faith that saw us through the hard times.

The problem with a political solution is that it doesn’t take into account that we are born with very different personalities. And though as we grow through stages of life, we can become stronger in undeveloped aspects of our personality, there’s a timing to the process that isn’t under our control.

I once wrote an article called Aliens in the Nest after recognizing how different I was from either of my parents and how different my five children were from one another and at least one of us, their parents.

It takes grace to love across these differences. It takes both time and grace to develop strengths in our weaknesses. What we can handle with the grace of faith now would not have been possible for us at an earlier stage of our personal spiritual development. God gives us grace for the moment.

We cannot force others to be where we are. I keep coming back to the importance of realizing with heart and mind that I and all others are loved completely at our worst, but are also still unfinished at our best. Legislating for others, no matter how strongly we feel and even if we ourselves would with grace be willing to sacrifice our own life for what we believe, doesn’t work. Our call is to help others find that love that frees us all to grow and risk and accept suffering and die knowing we were loved at each stage of our journey.

The Love of God 2022

The Love of God is so incredibly different and beyond compare that it challenges our ability 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. To accept the unconditional love of God with our whole mind, to experience it with an open heart until our spirit is so filled with it that we can just let it overflow to others is pure grace.
The Love of God can free us to see ourselves exactly as we are, fragile and unfinished and to 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 opens our hearts to joy.
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.” There is nothing as healing, powerful, and eternal as the love of God for you.

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.

What in the World is Christianity About for All Christians?

Christianity is about loving people more than loving to be right.
Christianity is about forgiveness for every one.
Christianity is about experiencing the love of God and passing it on.
Christianity is about learning how to love from the life and death of a Jew named Jesus.
Christianity is about the awesome God of the Universe being within each of us.
Christianity is about realizing that we are all imperfect earthen vessels, each unique, but all slightly cracked, so though we are filled with the Spirit of God, we leak.
Christianity is about knowing Jesus is Risen and is a well where we can go to refill.
Christianity is about realizing that the Spirit of God works in diverse ways in different people: like a geyser, like a gentle bubbling brook, or a silent underground river.
Christianity is about valuing the fruit of the Spirit- peace, joy, love – in whatever wrapping or label it comes.
Christianity is about translating the words “born again” into experiencing the unlimited love of God with both our mind and heart and being freed to respond “YES” to God even when the going gets rough.
Christianity is about Jesus showing us that this life is not all there is.
These are summed up in First Corinthians, Chapter 13.

Go Tell It On The Mountain

For the last fifty-three years Jesus Christ has been very alive to me. He’s a real person who is actively involved in my life. This relationship is a reality that can be known and experienced by everyone. Many times in small personal ways I’ve felt that incredible healing love, a love from the inside out. It’s a love for the whole me, a kind of love that no one, including myself, can have for me because none of us know the whole me. Often that love has been shown in ways that seem supernatural, beyond chance, or imagination. The experiences don’t give me a feeling of pride, because they gently make me aware of my need for healing, yet being tenderly loved even in my brokenness.
There are still dry periods with lows and a sense of estrangement. It’s not a permanent press glow that never wrinkles. It’s not a heavenly or earthly insurance policy against pain and suffering.
But it’s a love that continues to deepen even more from times of pain and confusion. It definitely is not a blanket permission to remain selfish. Yet that combination of being both known and loved allows me to acknowledge those areas where I remain childishly selfish and frees me to begin to let go of some of my crippling ego needs. And even though I still cling to many, they will go. God is not finished with me yet.
I want to share these experiences of love with others, but often don’t, because they are inseparable from the process of Jesus saving me from my neediness and inadequacies. They are part and parcel of Jesus freeing me from that part of me that sees myself as separate from others, in competition with others, or even against them. It’s the part of me that will try to prove to myself that I am worthwhile by hiding who I really am and spending my life gathering acorns of affirmation.
The price of that need for image is too high. To be free to share the Good News of that tender, no small print Love with its amazing grace, I need to be willing to share who I was, who I am, and who God created me to become. I need to write it. I’m a devout coward, so I may never let anyone else read it while I’m alive. But I need to write it.

Ragamuffins All Are We

Loving the books my friend Tracy loaned me for getting through this isolation. The author Brennan Manning in his book, The Ragamuffin Gospel, says what it seems to me is crucial to experiencing the Good News. “Repentance is not what we do to earn forgiveness; it is what we do because we have been forgiven.”
A year ago, a friend of mine from church dragged a homeless person to my apartment to talk to me. He knew him from years ago as kids and later when the man had his own successful contracting company. Now he was in an advanced stage of alcoholism and literally living on the streets. As we talked, it became clear that as a soldier in the war with North Vietnam he had done things that he could not forgive himself for and did not believe God would forgive. We both tried to convince him that he was already forgiven, all he needed to do was accept it, be freed to begin over by the grace of that amazing love, and let God show him how to get on with his life.
He talked some about being Catholic, so I could understand why he felt that way since I was Catholic for most of sixty years. But even when I tried to tell him that the church had changed since Vatican II and even Catholics were understanding that all fall short of the glory of God, but Jesus died for our sins. If Jesus’ death didn’t redeem us, what was the point of it? The veteran couldn’t hear us. It was heart breaking. And he went on self destructing and finally succeeded.
I think we all sometimes forget that we were already forgiven before we even sinned, so we carry burdens of guilt over things we can’t undo. We see God as a Judge keeping count of our sins and we struggle under a debt we feel we owe, instead of letting the grace of that love continue to heal us and free us to change.
My very kind and loving husband, Julian, felt that way and couldn’t understand the freedom and joy I had from accepting that Jesus died so that by recognizing and accepting that incredible love and forgiveness, we would be freed to grow more loving. Forgiveness is the heart of love and God’s love cannot be earned. We are his beloved children. Period. Once we experience that love, it is so glorious that we want to let it fill us, heal us, free us, direct us, and empower us to somehow share it with others. It’s a taste of heaven. When I was more or less a “second hand Christian” having been brought up in the church, I definitely didn’t want to go to hell, but I could never imagine anything I’d want to do for eternity in heaven either, not even the things that gave me pleasure or made me happy. But once I experienced that mind blowing joy of being both known and loved totally and tenderly by a God who is Love, I knew I would be fine with an eternity of the joy of that Love. My Julian was not a verbal person. He thought mostly in images and related best to logical concrete things. One day Julian was driving to work and decided to test some of the things I said. So, he prayed as he was driving, “God, Eileen says you’ll talk to us if we listen. So okay, I’m listening.” As he thought these words, a flashing light and siren started behind him. And a trooper pulled him over for speeding. When the trooper went back to his car to check on Julian’s credentials and fill out the ticket, Julian was thinking sarcastically, “I can’t wait to tell Eileen about how God spoke to me!!” Then the trooper came to the window again and said, “Mr. Norman, while I’ve been working on giving you this ticket, every car that went by here was speeding, most of them more than you were. So, I’m going to tear up this ticket. You be more careful now.” And he literally tore up the ticket. When Julian got to work and called me to tell me this, all I could think of was, Romans 3:23… “since ALL have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a GIFT through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus,” What a perfect image! Thanks to Jesus, we know that God tears up our ticket.

Suffering, the Door to Grace

The most important thing I have learned in the fifty-two years since I experienced the unconditional Love of God through Jesus.                                                                                      Every miracle I’ve experienced came as a response to suffering. Every healing insight I’ve had came out of suffering.  Every experience of forgiveness came out of suffering. Every increase in strength came out of suffering. Every increase in faith came out of suffering. Every freedom to love more came out of suffering. Every recognition of the power of Grace came out of suffering. No matter how much I resist this truth emotionally, I cannot deny its reality. Jesus certainly fleshes this out. I glimpsed this truth many many years ago as seen in this poem I wrote in my early forties. Even now, accepting it doesn’t take the pain out of the process, though it does seem to shorten it.
Spring
I hunger to be born again,
to take my hurts and failures
and mulch them into new beginnings,
to turn them into fertile fields
of understanding and compassion.
To experience again the greening out
of the frozen landscapes in my life
and gain a rich new Spring perspective
that builds on leaves and logs of yesteryear
to bring forth the ripe good fruit of love.

God, Jesus, and Buddha

“If we are willing to give up hope that insecurity and pain can be exterminated, then we can have the courage to relax with the groundlessness of our situation.” I have experienced this, so I believe it. It’s from a book called “When Things Fall Apart” by Pema Chodron, a Buddhist nun.
But she also says, ” Without GIVING UP HOPE–that there’s someWHERE better to be, that there’s someONE better to be, we will never relax with where we are or who we are.” I struggle with this some, but I think it’s another paradox. When I have realized that some of my failures to love come out of insecurity about who I am, it starts a process that after a gap of time frees me to accept the imperfect me , which then helps me to become more loving of other imperfect people.
I believe that my courage to do this this comes through having accepted the unconditional Love of God expressed in Jesus with both my heart and intellect, so I can face, forgive, and love both my imperfect self and others’. I explore my experiences of discomfort through journaling and sometimes dreams and pray for awareness and grace to grow more loving. But there’s always a gap where I have to accept living with awareness of that unloving part of myself before I finally recognize that I have been healed and freed in that particular area. And as nice as that is, knowing that more encounters with unpleasant realities will have to happen again, pretty much prevents pride in my part of the process. Once again, one of my strongest beliefs from years of experiencing this is: I am loved unconditionally at my worst and I am still unfinished at my best. But with the grace of being fully known and loved, I will be able to continue growing, though some times much more slowly than others.
This life is a journey along a path filled with uncomfortable challenges all along the way. And the love of God is the grace we need to carry us through. But also, some of the insights of the Buddhists are helpful tools in recognizing and accepting the hard parts of this life long process. And with healing through the grace of the Love of God expressed in Jesus, we can continue becoming new and a little more free to love each time.

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.”