It’s been nearly a month since our marriage was officially dissolved yet the heartbreak remains.
Gilbert O’Sullivan’s Alone Again (Naturally) is an old song but still captures how I’m feeling today.
Oh well, thank God for writing, for writers, and for all our fellow travelers on this crazy journey called life.
Another Brit offering comfort today is Jane Austen. In her book Mansfield Park, she reminds us that sometimes we are our own best companion.
Cheers.
The Center for Action and Contemplation puts the spotlight on our shadow this week and today’s thought-provoking article comes from author and spiritual director, Ruth Haley Barton. She does a wonderful job of capturing the fear of exposure when she says:
“We thought we had kept it fairly well hidden. We thought we could manage it or at least keep its destructive nature fairly private, but now here it is—out there for all to see—and it is wreaking havoc on our attempts to accomplish something good.”
Check out the full article below and at cac.org/daily-meditations/surprised-by-our-shadow/
For more information about the author, check out her website at http://www.ruthhaleybarton.com
Below is today’s message from the Center for Action and Contemplation. In it, Richard Rohr explains how we miss the message if we focus on religion versus the natural life cycle of … life.
Hope you enjoy a couple of highlights from Richard Rohr’s Easter message:
Monday, April 21, 2025
We got into trouble when we made the person and the message of Jesus into a formal religion, whereby we had an object of worship; then we had to have a priesthood, formal rules and rituals. I’m not saying we should throw those things out, but once we emphasize cult and moral code, we have a religion. When we emphasize experience, unitive experience, we have the world Jesus is moving around in. Once we made Jesus into a form of religion, we projected the whole message onto him alone. He died, he suffered, he rose from the dead, he ascended and returned to God. We thought that by celebrating these wonderful feasts like Easter that this somehow meant that we were members of the club. …………
Easter is the great feast of the triumph of universal grace, the triumph of universal salvation, not just the salvation of the body of Jesus. What we’re talking about creates a people of hope, and a culture of hope that doesn’t slip into cynicism and despair. Easter is saying, we don’t need to go there. Love is going to win. Life is going to win. Grace is going to win. Hallelujah!
There’s a new Tricycle article titled Education and Work that call outs the false messages we receive from both educations systems and corporate bureaucracy. Here are a few of the very provocative points made:
Check out the full article at the link provided below. I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts on this assessments of modern-day society.
I am amazed at how much pain is being inflicted by the new U.S. president and his administration team. I am astounded that so many Americans want this pain to occur. Fortunately, there are others who are looking for ways to counteract this pain and stop the cruelty we see.
Lynn J. Kelly, offers some gentle advice on how to we might respond to these trying times. Below is a quote, and a link, to her full message. I think you will find this very helpful today and, in the days, to come.
“Once we have accepted the overwhelming dukkha that is the news of our world, what can we do? We can acknowledge that we are close to powerless to alleviate all the suffering that we see around us. However, we can each find a way to dedicate some of our energy to a healing activity. …
Whatever we care about most will use our energy to best effect. We don’t have to feel helpless if we understand what we are doing and why. It is important to support both our mindfulness (internal) and something outside of ourselves that we care about (external).”
http://www.amazon.com/Grief-People-Sloane-Crosley
“A best book of 2024 “, GRIEF IS FOR PEOPLE by Sloane Crosley is the fourth book and author selected for memoir analysis. It’s a heart-wrenching memoir that addresses the theft of family jewelry AND even more devastating, loss of a best friend to suicide.
Here are a few quick observations:
Unlike the three books previously reviewed, Crosley’s book offers a poignant, gallows humor, tale of two emotional losses in 2019 which were further exacerbated by the pandemic that hit the world and her NYC lifestyle.
While all our worlds were severely disrupted by Covid 19, Crosley’s, foggy upside-down, world began some six months earlier and still defines her life five years later. Perhaps time does heal but not nearly as fast as we would hope. This book is definitely worth reading now and in the future.
More successful memoirs will be reviewed in the weeks to come.
Wearing my heart on my sleeve, I’ve become a human porcupine, the pain too intense to hide ….
Tibetan-American poet and writer, Lekey Leidecker, helps us recognize the anxiety we now experience. Provocative phrases such as those below are from her recent Tricycle article, Some Things Are Felt Through the Body:
Check out this heartfelt article at tricycle.org/article/lekey-leidecker-body/
My first father-in-law taught me how to fly fish. He never used the quote, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” He did, however, patiently offer suggestions and examples of how to do something if I was really interested in learning. No pressure, no expectations, just answering questions and role-modeling techniques. Maybe he was communicating nonverbally, “Come follow me, or don’t, it’s your choice.”
Two articles crossed my path today. Perhaps they will be as provocative for you as they were for me.
They are:
“Maimonides, a renowned philosopher and scholar, once wisely said, ‘Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.’ This timeless quote encapsulates the profound notion that providing immediate help to someone may alleviate their immediate needs but teaching them the skills to become self-sufficient will empower them for a lifetime.” http://www.socratic-method.com/quote-meanings-and-interpretations/maimonides-give-a-man-a-fish-and-you-feed-him-for-a-day-teach-a-man-to-fish-and-you-feed-him-for-a-lifetime
“When one is deluded, one thinks teachers take you, but when one has awakened, one realizes that one crosses over by oneself.” tricycle.org/article/nelson-foster-chan-buddhism/
Today is 9/11. I remember how close I was to the World Trade Center twenty-three years ago. I remember how the call for revenge disturbed our already violence-soaked culture.
Today is 9/11. I am grateful for the wisdom highlights shared by Shane Claiborne, Karl Barth and Melissa Florer-Bixler below.
May we act in peace today for the benefit of all sentient beings.
Violence is contagious. Violence begets violence.… Pick up the sword and die by the sword. You kill us and we’ll kill you. There is a contagion of violence in the world; it’s spreading like a disease.
But grace is also contagious. An act of kindness inspires another act of kindness…. A single act of forgiveness can feel like it heals the world.
Grace makes room … for justice that is restorative and dedicated to healing the wounds of injustice. But the grace thing is hard work. It takes faith—because it dares us to believe that not only can victims be healed, but so can the victimizers.
We are told that we choose whose world we want to live in. We’ll choose wealth or God. We’ll choose violence or God. We’ll choose nationalism or God. We’ll choose racial hierarchy or God. Each case is an example of a different and incompatible operational system. One of those systems, if we live by it, binds us in endless struggle and violence that leads to our own destruction, as well as the destruction of others….
Karl Barth, reflecting on forgiveness, writes, “Living by forgiveness is never by any means passivity, but Christian living in full activity.” Barth writes that, when we finally come before God, we will not be asked to give an account of our piety or morality. Instead, we will be asked, “Did you live by grace, or did you set up gods for yourself and perhaps want to become one yourself?” [2]
References:
[1] Shane Claiborne, Executing Grace: How the Death Penalty Killed Jesus and Why It’s Killing Us (San Francisco, CA: HarperOne, 2016), 5, 7.
[2] Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, trans. G. T. Thomson (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949), 152.
[3] Melissa Florer-Bixler, How to Have an Enemy: Righteous Anger and the Work of Peace (Harrisonburg, VA: Herald Press, 2021), 73, 75–76.
I have experienced three major disorders in my life, to-date. With each I have gone on to experience three reorders. I know, I know, I should have learned the whole lesson the first time, right?
Unfortunately, some of us, especially me, are slow learners. We need to learn life lessons the harder way, it seems.
Fortunately, Richard Rohr and the Center for Action and Contemplation have some helpful advice to offer. Below is today’s daily meditation.
May we all learn (or relearn?) a life lesson today.
Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations – from the Center for Action and Contemplation
Order, Disorder, Reorder
Richard Rohr shares his paradigm for the transformative process of spiritual maturity:
It seems quite clear that we grow spiritually by passing beyond some perfect Order, through an often painful and seemingly unnecessary Disorder to an enlightened Reorder or “resurrection.” This is the “pattern that connects” and solidifies our relationship with everything around us.
ORDER: At this first stage, if we are granted it (and not all are), we feel innocent and safe. Everything is basically good. It is our “first naïveté.” Those who try to stay in this first satisfying explanation of “how things should be” tend to refuse and avoid any confusion, conflict, inconsistencies, or suffering. Disorder or change is always to be avoided, the ego believes, so let’s just hunker down and pretend that my status quo is entirely good, should be good for everybody, and is always “true” and even the only truth.
DISORDER: At some point in our lives, we will be deeply disappointed by what we were originally taught, by where our choices have led us, or by the seemingly random tragedies that take place in all our lives. There will be a death, a disease, a disruption to our normal way of thinking or being in the world. It is necessary if any real growth is to occur.
This is the Disorder stage, or what we call from the Adam and Eve story the “fall.” Some people try to return to the original Order and do not accept reality, which prevents them from further growth. Others, especially today, seem to have given up and decided that “there is no universal order,” or at least no order to which they will submit. That’s the postmodern stance, which distrusts all grand narratives, including often any notions of reason, a common human nature, social progress, universal human norms, absolute truth, and objective reality. Permanent residence in this stage tends to make people rather negative and cynical, usually angry, and quite opinionated and dogmatic as they search for some solid ground. [1]
REORDER: Only in the final Reorder stage can darkness and light coexist, can paradox be okay. We are finally at home in the only world that ever existed. This is true and contemplative knowing. Here death is a part of life, and failure is a part of victory. Opposites collide and unite, and everything belongs. [2]
At the Reorder stage, we come to that true inner authority where I know something, and the only nature of the knowing is that it is okay because God is in every moment no matter what happens. Nothing needs to be excluded. I can live and work with all of it because apparently God can. For some unbelievable reason, contrary to logic and common sense, everything belongs. [3]
Read this meditation on cac.org.
[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope for, and Believe (New York: Convergent, 2019, 2021), 247–249. See also “Disorder: Stage Two of a Three-Part Journey,” Daily Meditations, August 16, 2020.
[2] Adapted from Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer (New York: Crossroad, 1999, 2003), 159.
[3] Adapted from Richard Rohr, How Do We Get Everything to Belong? (Albuquerque, NM: Center for Action and Contemplation, 2005).
Life Matters 