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Hungers of the Heart by Richard Watts
WHEN LOVE BREAKS THROUGH, WE ARE SUDDENLY ABLE TO ACCEPT OUR WEAKNESSES AND FAULTS WITHOUT COMING UNGLUED.
“Hungers of the Heart” by Richard Watts.
Watt quotes David James Duncan, who tells about his search that finally brought him to hollowing out a place in his heart about the size of a thimble. Duncan continues, “When I was twenty, in India one day, I turned to God with embarrassed sincerity and said, ‘ Would you care to fill this little thimble with anything?’ and instantaneously, -almost absurdly really, – an undeniable, unimaginable, indescribable lake of peace and love landed on my head in reply.”
Watts continues: “This experience that Christians call grace breaks into the anxiety, confusion and self-doubt that trouble us and frees us to journey along a path toward becoming a real self. ….It need not be as sudden or dramatic as Duncan’s. We need not be “born again;” we live in God’s grace simply by virtue of having been born. Whether for us a breakthrough comes as we look up to the stars, ponder the mysteries of DNA, find someone who loves us, help heal another’s hurt, take a risk for justice, (recognize our limits and helplessness, hit bottom, are forgiven by someone we have harmed* my additions) the experience of being accepted restores us to our real selves.
The paradox is this: that when love breaks through, we are suddenly able to accept our weakness and faults without coming unglued.
We come to accept that even our best impulses are tainted by self-interest, that we pretend to know more than we really know, and to “have it all together” when we really don’t. We begin to see that our strengths are really also our pitfalls: ambition that enables us to achieve can result in a stunted personal life with little time for love and friendship, the pride that allows us to walk in dignity may also keep us from acknowledging our mistakes; the charm that opens doors for us may lapse into shallowness on which we depend without seeking deepening, growth and newness; the intellect in which we trust may mask a denial of the emotions, which one day erupt in us in discomfiting force. (Our tendency to respond to life emotionally may help us understand and reach out to those who are suffering, but since emotions are short term, we may make our choices based on them with consequences that are destructive in the long run.* my addition )
The wonder of grace is that we are increasingly able to see ourselves as we really are without despair.”
And that is the first step to becoming free to grow and change in ways that give us more balanced, appropriate and grace-filled responses to life.
Smart or Intelligent? Moral or Ethical? Religious or Spiritual?
Due to a bad case of writer’s block, I am reblogging more old posts.
11:27am
Being smart and being intelligent are different in practice. Being smart is more about the present moment and the practical, being intelligent is about learning from the past, so humanity can live both free and humanely in the future.
Morals and ethics are different also. Morals are about not doing evil, while ethics are about not achieving reasonable goals evilly. Morals are immediate and personal. Ethics are long term and social.
Ethics question whether an end, particularly the goal of our personal happiness, justifies means that hurt people and that set precedents for corrupting society.
In trying to pass down values for a changing world, I want to challenge my descendants:
1. Morals: Don’t do it if you don’t want those you care about to read it on the front page or see it on U-tube.
2. Ethics: Don’t do it if everyone else also doing it will make…
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The Delicate Dance of the Balance and Harmony of Paradox
To me, this is the key to personal and universal healing, transformation, wholeness, and peace. This is where grace can take us if we let go of the prejudices, fears and idols of our ego.
“The dichotomies of imagination and rationalization, intuition and intellect, heart and mind, heaven and earth, feminine and masculine need to be viewed less as polarities than as partners in a delicate dance of balance and harmony. Only by embracing all parts of ourselves are we able to know the wholeness of the world and our inherent inseparability and interdependence with it.” Mini Farelly-Hansen
(Copied from the Blog: Make Believe Boutique)
Since We’ve Done Away with Sin and Hell, What’s the Point of Christmas?
To be honest, I don’t see sin the same way I used to and I’ve discovered that we make our own private hells on earth, when we refuse to grow past needing into loving.
A view currently popular is that a world suffering from some original ancient ancestors’ screwing up isn’t reasonable or just and that tiny babies come into the world innocent and lovable.
I agree with both.
BUT, all tiny babies come into the world Needy with a capital N. Ask any parent. And some are needier than others, through no fault of their own. It’s just how nature is.
And NEED is the opposite of love, in fact it prevents us from loving.
We can’t experience the transforming joy of Christmas, until we recognize our neediness.
Note: needing to please others or even getting pleasure from doing for others is not always love. It can actually be a destructive enabling out of our own neediness.
At one point in my life, I recognized that I was a bottomless pit of needs and wants. And I felt totally unable to truly love- anyone, even parents, husband, children. I was like Snoopy, I loved humanity. It was people I couldn’t accept.
The paradox is this: unless we know, with mind, heart, and soul, that we are loved unconditionally, we cannot grow from needing to loving. But that requires recognizing and admitting with mind, heart, and soul that we are needy, not loving.
At the point when I recognized that I was too needy to love, I also recognized that there was not enough love in this imperfect world of imperfect people to free me . Fortunately for me, that is what Christmas is about.
Perfect Love for all of us came as a baby with human needs and offered us a Love that can set us free.
And that is the transforming joy of Christmas: Saving unconditional love that sets us free and gives us illustrated instructions on how to grow from need to love.
Joy to the world, for Love has come. Let us rejoice and open our hearts to receive it.
Come, Lord Jesus, free us to love.
The Dialogue between Faith and Reason
Part One
Faith untempered by reason quickly becomes superstition. Reason that is unwilling to take the risk of faith becomes hubris.
The challenge of the spiritual life is maintaining an ongoing dialogue between faith and reason that stretches and refines both.
The historical paradox of Jesus being divine, yet fully human, does not require an either/or solution. We can focus on one aspect to better understand it, but if we emphasize one to the detriment of the other, we lose the meaning, purpose, and power of the mystery.
One of the most amazing and freeing aspects of the humanity of Jesus, as illustrated by the stories in the Scriptures, is that he grew in wisdom and holiness. He, like us, was until the moment of his death in a process of growth in understanding of his mission, in his understanding of the nature of love, and in the faith and courage to accept death .
Even more surprising was that often the people who guided and challenged him in this process were women, women with no religious or political credibility, even gentile women, and women considered unclean.
Recognizing the humility of the human Jesus can free us to both face our own incompleteness and to believe in our potential for growth.
And risking the leap of faith to accept Jesus as the expression of the unconditional love of the creator of all that exists for us personally is the saving grace that can carry us through the doorway of death.
God is love and Jesus is the human expression of that perfect love. Jesus is the Word of God to us.
Our own difficulty in grasping the paradox of the divinity and the humanity of Jesus, is simply just that, our difficulty, because of where we are in our own growth process. Sometimes our leap of faith is like putting something we don’t understand into an open file labeled Possibility and then living with an openness to the Spirit of God speaking, guiding, challenging, calling, teaching through the everyday events and people in our lives and then empowering us through Her quiet voice within.
(to be continued at a later date)
What Is My Bliss?
One of the hardest things about life is discovering that it is NOT about being happy. Happiness is a by-product of the life long process of becoming the person that we were created to be. Ultimately, that involves becoming wise and loving.
Along the way we acquire knowledge and skills in order to survive, though obviously surviving is not the end purpose in life. We all die eventually.
Important parts of the process are recognizing that knowledge is not wisdom and need is not love.
Financial success and even accomplishment are not a necessary part of the process for everyone and most definitely not a substitute for becoming wise and loving for anyone.
Some of us just accept whatever we were taught by family and our particular era and culture. Others rebel against these in total. Both responses leave us trapped in a time warp and defeat the larger goal of helping humanity also become wiser and more loving.
Political opinions, philosophies, religious beliefs, if left unchallenged by questioning or other viewpoints, generally get carried to extremes to the point of becoming not only ridiculous, but destructive.
Truth is paradoxical. Our limited human perception leads us to half truths or warped truths. Our human tendency to delude ourselves that we see the whole truth and nothing but the truth pushes us into polarizing and alienating conflicts. And we never develop our ability to truly listen and to stretch our world views to encompass much needed balance.
Wisdom and love are inextricably linked. What often passes for love is destructive to both the giver and the receiver. Wise-love discriminates between needs and wants and respects the needs of all.
“What is my bliss?” is not the same question as “What makes me happy?” Rather it asks, “What are the ways I personally can best grow in wisdom and love?”
Laughter: Carbonated Grace 