Some time when the river is ice ask me mistakes I have made. Ask me whether what I have done is my life. Others have come in their slow way into my thought, and some have tried to help or to hurt: ask me what difference their strongest love or hate has made.
I will listen to what you say. You and I can turn and look at the silent river and wait. We know the current is there, hidden; and there are comings and goings from miles away that hold the stillness exactly before us. What the river says, that is what I say.
Authentic freedom and love will not be captured by attachment. Therefore, the journey homeward does not lead toward new, more sophisticated addictions. If it is truly homeward, it leads toward liberation from addiction altogether. Obviously, it is a lifelong process… There is a strange sadness in this growing freedom. Our souls may have been scarred […]
This is my commandment, you must love one another. – Jesus of Nazareth
My religion is kindness, only kindness. – The Dalai Lama
And the servants of the Most Merciful are those who walk upon the earth easily, and when the ignorant address them [harshly], they say [words of] peace. – The Quran
…anyone who is struggling with depression, addiction; anyone who may be giving up, suicidal or self-harming.
I know you. I think I know what you are going through. I’ve been there.
Nine years ago on December 22, 2016, a cold, icy day, with freezing rain pouring down, I pulled into my garage thinking it would be a good time for me to die there. I was so turned around and struggling to recover from addictions, the darkness of the winter solstice seemed to have found a home within me.
After what felt like hours, I realized that my plan was selfish and would only serve to hurt the people–family, friends–who had been caring for me, carrying me until I could get back on my feet. I reached out to people, wise friends and family, who gave me good orderly direction. They told me to listen to the professionals who, without hesitation, were there to guide me.
I spent Christmas and several days after in a mental hospital, a place where I found rest and a sense of peace that I hadn’t felt for several years. I’m not saying that the path was easy, far from it. But I was on a different path in a different direction.
Kenosis is a theological term. In short, it means that we empty our own will and become entirely receptive to God’s will for us. The God that I came to know and hear was not a Catholic or Christian God, not Allah, not Yahweh, not Buddha but an internal light that shone on my place in the unified field of existence.
Over time I learned to listen to the wisdom of others who had lived through similar experiences, no longer trying to control the direction of my life.
So today I bless you and pray you can make the turn to life, the life you are meant to live.
If you are interested in a completely anonymous chat, please contact me.
My world in December 2016:
My world today
On this day when the earth begins to turn towards the light, I wish you peace and all good things.
Richard Rohr – Great love has the potential to open the heart space and then the mind space. Great suffering has the potential to open the mind space and then the heart space. Eventually both spaces need to be opened, and for such people, non-dual thinking can be the easiest.
People who have never loved or never suffered will normally try to control everything with an either-or attitude or all-or-nothing thinking. This closed system is all they are prepared for. The mentality that divides the world into “deserving and undeserving” has not yet experienced the absolute gratuity of grace or the undeserved character of mercy. This lack of in-depth God-experience leaves all of us judgmental, demanding, unforgiving, and weak in empathy and sympathy. Such people will remain inside the prison of “meritocracy,” where all has to be deserved. They are still counting when in reality God and grace exist outside of all accounting. Remember, however, to be patient with such people, even if you are the target of their judgment, because on some level, that is how they treat themselves as well.
Non-dual people will see things in their wholeness and call forth the same unity in others simply by being who they are. Wholeness (head, heart, and body all present, positive, and accounted for!) can see and call forth wholeness in others. This is why it is so pleasant to be around whole and holy people.
Dualistic or divided people, however, live in a split and fragmented world. They cannot accept or forgive certain parts of themselves. They cannot accept that God objectively dwells within them, as it states in so many places in Scripture, including 1 Corinthians 3:16-17. This lack of forgiveness takes the forms of a tortured mind, a closed heart, or an inability to live calmly and proudly inside ones own body. The fragmented mind sees parts, not wholes, in itself and others, and invariably it creates antagonism, reaction, fear, and resistance—“push-back” from other people—who themselves are longing for wholeness and holiness.
It is not complicated to lead the spiritual life. But it is difficult. We are blind and subject to a thousand illusions. We must expect to be making mistakes almost all the time. We must be content to fall repeatedly and to begin again to try to deny ourselves, for the love of God.
It is when we are angry at our own If that is all our self-denial amounts to, our mistakes will never help us. that we tend most of all to deny ourselves for love of ourselves. We want to shake off the hateful thing that has humbled us. In our rush to escape the humiliation of our own mistakes, we run head first into the opposite error, seeking comfort and compensation. And so we spend our lives running back and forth from one attachment to another.
If that is all our self-denial amounts to, our mistakes will never help us.
The thing to do when you have made a mistake is not to give up doing what you were doing and start something altogether new, but to start over again with the thing you began badly and try, for the love of God, to do it well.
– Thomas Merton, from The Sign of Jonas
Edge of Atlantic 