Archive for fear

Don’t Worry, Be Happy

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , , , , , on July 22, 2024 by thecrossingchicago

There are so many lenses that we carry and look through.  Our Western Christian lens is patriarchal, of course, and lends to anything that points to Lordship and Kingship and the dominance of God and Christ.  But if we take a deep breath and see through the fog of hegemonic ideology, we find a great depth of mindfulness in the teachings of Jesus.  

Seek ye first the kingdom of God was and still is for many (if not most) about attaining perfection in the eyes of God while propitiating “his” favor.  It was to establish a kingdom, and by so doing, push out all others who did not fit within the construct of said kingdom.  But what’s another way to see it?

Strive for the kingdom of God.  The kin-dom.  The beloved community.  Jesus spoke often about this potential reality where love, kindness, respect, and compassion were the way of life and being.  Seek this reality.  Live into it.  Do what is right in the essence of all that is in full awareness of our interconnectedness and this kin-dom will be made manifest.  What it becomes a reality, we will also be blessed.  Not only will we have everything that we need, but in order to create and live into such a reality, our mindset must change.  Metanoia.  Therefore, we won’t experience such great need and the trivial things will fall away leaving us with gratitude and awareness.

Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own.  As many wise teachers have said, “Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.”  We do not need to seek out nor hold on to things that may or may not happen.  We do not need to attach to things that have happened and compound their effect.  This is non-attachment.  Notice the events, take note of their effects, check in with ourselves and ask why it is having such an effect on us.  Do the inner work to discover the real cause of our pain.  Rarely is it because of the act itself.  

It doesn’t mean we simply don’t care or have no feelings.  We are not automatons and we aren’t called to be.  As in meditation when our minds wander, take note and watch the thought float by.  When the ego shows up and tells us we aren’t good enough or that someone else isn’t good enough just to make ourselves feel better when we really don’t feel that good, take note and watch it float on by.  

Yes, ego.  I see you.  I hear you.  I’m curious as to why you have shown up in this way.  

Yes, pain.  I see you.  I hear you.  I feel you.  I’m curious as to why you are attaching to this event and choosing to suffer because of it.

Lean into the discomfort and the dis-ease and the confusion.  That’s where the breakthrough is waiting to happen.  We usually shy away from these feelings and then become frustrated because we are constantly stuck in the same place.  Lean into the frustration, too.  

We have the tendency to be looking for what’s next and wondering where we are supposed to be.  Rarely do we sit and experience where we are and breathe in the fullness of the present moment.  Archimedes said the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.  But the reality is the shortest distance between two points is where you already are.

Be non-attached from the clothes, the food, the drink.  Practice gratitude and awareness.  Be fully present.  To do so, our eye, our inner eye, must be clean and focused so that it can see reality and not illusion.  Having a clouded or dirty inner eye leads us to be selfish, to subscribe to unhealthy ideologies, and to do things to get what we want at any cost to the end that we and those around us suffer.  We become prisoners of our own delusions.  After all, The same God through which God sees me is the eye through which I see God.

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Groping Around in the Dark

Posted in Encouragement, true self with tags , , , , , on March 30, 2019 by thecrossingchicago

In a world where being sure about everything is the way of life, embracing mystery can be incredibly difficult.  Unfortunately (or fortunately), there are many aspects of our life to be gleaned in those dark places, so we shouldn’t forsake them.

It’s easy to feel that life would be so much easier if we could just know everything clearly and be able to define every occurrence accurately without having to take time for interpretation.  If we could know ourselves without all of the soul-searching and contemplation, wouldn’t life be so much better?  I don’t think so.
Those walks in the dark where the ambiguity is the rule and not the exception, are transformative.  Barbara Brown Taylor said that “I have learned things in the dark that I could never have learned in the light, things that have saved my life over and over again, so that there is really only one logical conclusion.  I need darkness as much as I need light.”  Groping our way around in the darkness teaches us things about the world and ourselves that seeing them in the light never could.
During Lent, we learn to embrace the darkness so that we can appreciate the light.  That faint glimmer of sunshine that pierces through the gap between the stone and the cave wall is not a reassurance that we will be saved from the darkness, but rather a reminder that the darkness is good, too.  Light and dark need each other to exist.
When Thomas Merton was starting his writing career and making his early attempts at being a novelist, some of the beauty that would emerge from embracing the spiritual writing that he was best at shone through.  In this excerpt, Merton is having a conversation with a couple of Gestapo officers in London through the window of a bombed out house as he writes.  They ask him why he writes and he replies that it is so he can learn about the world and himself.  The officers then inquire as to whether it would just be faster to see things clearly from the beginning and that writing to figure things out would lead to many volumes of wasted paper and meaningless books.  Merton’s reply was:
No doubt.  But if I if it were all clear at once, I would not really understand it,
either.  Some things are too clear to be understood, and what you think 
is your understanding of them is only a kind of charm, a kind of incantation in your mind concerning that thing.  This is not understanding: it is something you remember.  So much for definitions!  We always have to go back and start from the beginning and make over all the definitions for ourselves again.
 
Even the things that can be seen clearly in the light aren’t always what they seem to be: scripture, the actions of another, our own lives, even.  It’s in the overcoming of the discomfort and the dis-ease of our own being that we finally start to reach out in the dark without fearing the monster that may lie waiting beyond our fingertips.  It’s in those moments when we really get to know the world as it really is.

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