Tag: spirituality

Texting Jesus

Rachel Henry3 Comments

One day the autocorrect on my phone decided I needed to get in touch with Jesus instead of my friend Jessica. Simple as that, “To: Jesus,” right there on the screen. What if I could text the Son of God? What would I say?

In all honesty, my first thought was to ask for stuff, maybe lots of stuff. After all, this is a direct connection to the Almighty, and listing our desires is the first form of prayer most of us are taught. Plus, you know, a new dining table would be nice.

But maybe I could do better; maybe we could have a deeper, more meaningful exchange. “Thank you” seemed like an appropriate choice. A little vague perhaps, but there are infinite options for what to say next and nothing opens up a connection like gratitude.

Then I wondered what Jesus would want to receive in a text. What would make his face light up with joy when his phone binged at him? And while we’re at it, what’s his ringtone?

I decided Jesus wouldn’t care what the words said—he’d just be glad that I got in touch. The Divine wants nothing more than to be intimate with us. It’s just waiting for us to wake up to its presence already permeating our lives and shoot off a quick “OMG!”

Jesus would love for us to be as constantly attuned and attentive to the movement of God in our lives as we are to our phones. Just imagine if we checked in with our connection to Spirit as often as we check our messages. I am always conscious of where my phone is. What if I were equally conscious of where my attention is and whether it is focused on growing in unity God?

If we were that tuned in, we might just get a text message from Jesus.

Note: The blog and I will be on vacation next week.

Free Redemption, With or Without Coupon

Rachel Henry2 Comments

I tend to think redemption requires a lot of effort on my part, but maybe it’s always already present, just waiting to be recognized.

When a sprained ankle ended my backpacking plans, I decided to take the vacation days anyway and hang out at home—my first ever staycation. To ensure the vacation aspect, I told myself no judgment was allowed on the basis of things done or not done. (Note that I didn’t eschew judgment altogether, God forbid.)

The gap between theory and practice was, not surprisingly, rather large. I chose to loop an internal video of returning to work and people asking, “So what did you do?” while I frantically attempted to create answers. After all, they didn’t get the “Terms of Judgment” memo, and clearly these people who genuinely like me will concentrate on finding fault above all else.

Then one day, I took a long drive up the Big Sur coastline with my friend Susan for no other purpose than beauty and joy taking form in nature, friendship, and food. It was a sun-tipped, ocean-clad drive along the cliffs, which put on their most dramatic show in that part of the world. We shared wonderful conversation, and though we had a destination—a restaurant—we relaxed into not having anywhere to be at any particular time.

During the trip I didn’t once think about tasks or the reporting of accomplishments, and when I got home, the whole scenario had lost its power to agitate me.

Redemption is as easy and accessible as enjoying a beautiful day. Redemption is not about suffering; it is about the transformation of suffering into joy. It is not earned; it is available. It is not coming; it is already taken care of.

I don’t know why sometimes we enter into it without effort and sometimes it appears elusive. Perhaps we can only recognize it when we stop trying to make it happen and accept it as gift.

Choosing the Depths

Rachel Henry2 Comments

As I was running late to work one day, my mind calculated and recalculated the fastest route, as if I could predict where the slow cars would be or when the traffic lights would turn. Not to mention that the time difference would, in reality, be negligible no matter which way I went.

An interior voice wanted to take a route that I was sure was not the fastest. The voice insisted, though, and off we went. About halfway to the freeway, a blue heron passed overhead. Its majestic, unhurried flight took with it all the melancholy and anxiety that had been gurgling around inside me.

I won’t claim with certainty that I was meant to go that way to meet the heron. Sometimes this is true and sometimes it’s not, and generally speaking, the world is more complex than we can account for. But I will say that the experience made it clear that I so often choose a course of action based on the wrong criteria.

Choosing to go the way in which we will encounter the beauty of our fellow creatures or lessen the suffering in the world is so much more important than making it to work one minute earlier.

I spend a lot of time on the innumerable daily equivalents of that one minute. They come in so many sizes and flavors—which task to do first, which type of olive oil to buy, what the right answer is. Their very quantity makes them seem important when actually they’re distracting.

To make choices that are worthy of us, we need questions that will take us to the depths of our lives where we long to be—is it loving? Is it kind? Does it bring joy to me and others?

We need to remember that we are these depths and that we are here to keep falling more deeply into them.

Have Fun, Lots of It

Rachel Henry2 Comments

I love birthdays because they remind us to have fun. For my forty-fourth, I decided to celebrate with four different activities.

The most well-attended was puppet making in the park. To pull this off, it helps to have a mom who makes puppets and has a studio full of colorful supplies, from yarn to fabric to sequins. Awakening people’s liveliness takes little more than setting the plastic bins full of crafty goodness on a picnic table and inviting everyone to begin.

No one hesitated. No one claimed she wasn’t creative. Everyone simply picked up a paper bag or a toilet paper roll and began to construct a being that had never existed before. We had dogs and cats, a mythical rainbow animal and a magician, even a fellow who could raise his bushy purple eyebrows.

When it came time to leave, every guest said, “That was so much fun.”

Our culture often limits fun, both in importance and variety. As adults, we’re told that our responsibilities take priority over our play time and that only a few forms of play are acceptable, some of them more harmful than enjoyable.

But fun is a powerful force. It awakens our souls. It puts us in touch with God’s creativity flowing through us, and so it connects us to our selves, to our divinity.

We are the result of God having a great time. The Big Bang did not arise from a sense of obligation. When divinity decided to have a party about fourteen billion years ago and see what this existence thing was all about, a great outpouring of love and joy set this universe in motion.

That outpouring hasn’t stopped. We are the current manifestation of the divine party that has always been and will always be. Let’s have some fun.

A Joyful Yes, an Ecstatic Yes

Rachel Henry2 Comments

We have no idea what we’re doing in this life. On the one hand. On the other hand, we are deeply connected to this unfolding, called to play a role in creation’s coming into being, intimately integrated into the existence in which we find ourselves.

Every dawn we greet a moment in time that has never existed before. We appear to be doing the same things we did yesterday, but what folly if we expect one day to be like the next. From the large to the small, everything is different. One day our body functions perfectly, or we think it does, and the next the flu keeps us in bed all day. Overnight, a country goes to war. Every second our solar system, our galaxy is traveling to a new location in the universe.

That we are part of the great improvisation is cause for great joy. I’ve heard that the way to be successful in improvisational comedy is to always say yes to whatever your fellow comedians have just come up with. The yes we are called to is an embrace of the miracle of our own existence, an ecstatic yes.

Beatrice Bruteau says that ecstatic love is loving someone in such a way that you love what they love in the way that they love it, not because they love it. You enter into their reality so profoundly that you join in their outflowing love.

I have a friend who loves buckeye trees. I never thought much about buckeye trees before knowing this friend, but now I’m always happy to meet one of them and notice with affection the curve of their leaves, the profusion of their flowers, and of course the smooth nuttiness of the buckeye.

Bruteau goes on to say that the universe is God’s ecstasy, is God’s outflowing love. To fully embrace the miracle of our own existence is necessarily to embrace the miracle of all existence.  To give an ecstatic yes to the infinite Love being poured out as our lives, as Jim Finley would call it, is to wake up to the intimacy and joy in which we belong to all creation.

Free of any need to contain the infinite in our limited understanding, we can learn what it means to be alive.

 

 

Listening to the News in Spring

Rachel Henry4 Comments

Spring broke through all my inattentiveness with a riot of color this week. The poppies and lupine trumpeted orange and purple, a row of plum trees displayed their delicate pink, and a tall, loose-limbed tree reminded the world, this is yellow. At the same time, the news was playing on the radio.

It’s difficult to reconcile the beauty of a spring day with war, racism, climate change, corruption—all of the hurt we humans in our woundedness do to each other and to the Earth. I often want it to be one way or the other, but we are not one way or the other. Life is not one way or the other.

To reconcile is not to choose one thing over another nor to consider one true and the other false, one more important and the other less so. Instead we must see and hold both, recognize the truth of suffering and of love.

This is the good news, the presence of love in the midst of suffering, not separate from it. We don’t know how to tell this story in our newscasts. We hear only of killing, cruelty, and destruction in certain areas of the world. We do not hear at the same time that people in that country are laughing, falling in love, marveling at a skill they learned for the first time.

Richard Rohr recommends saying, “Yes, and.” Yes, the rich oppress the poor and think it’s justified. Yes, in the town where each of us lives, today, a girl will be the victim of incest and a person of color will be discriminated against.

And love is the nature of existence. Love is the energy that moves the electrons comprising us in their orbits and continually gives itself away to make our universe anew every microsecond. Love is at the core of all of us in our most generous, most joyful, most selfish, and most destructive moments.

Here’s a poem from William Stafford about how to recognize this reality and what happens when we do.

Grace Abounding
by William Stafford

Air crowds into my cell so considerately
that the jailer forgets this kind of gift
and thinks I’m alone. Such unnoticed largesse
smuggled by day floods over me,
or here come grass, turns in the road,
a branch or stone significantly strewn
where it wouldn’t need to be.

Such times abide for a pilgrim, who all through
a story or a life may live in grace, that blind
benevolent side of even the fiercest world,
and might – even in oppression or neglect –
not care if it’s friend or enemy, caught up
in a dance where no one feels need or fear.

I’m saved in this big world by unforeseen
friends, or times when only a glance
from a passenger beside me, or just the tired
branch of a willow inclining toward earth,
may teach me how to join earth and sky.

 

Open to All

Rachel Henry2 Comments

Let’s start with the poem this week because it is breathtaking:

Eagle Poem
By Joy Harjo

To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can’t see, can’t hear;
Can’t know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren’t always sound but other
Circles of motion.
Like eagle that Sunday morning
Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty.

The hills in this corner of California are covered with wild mustard just now, a striking yellow flower that grows tall. An eagle searching for prey amid the mustard sees colors we will never know and cannot even imagine, including those in the ultraviolet range.

Hills covered in yellow wild mustard flowers.
Wild mustard in bloom in Shoreline Park, Rancho Palos Verdes, California. Photo by carlfbagge on Flicker. Shared under Creative Commons License CC BY-SA 2.0.

Every plant, animal, person, or rock we meet contains a world, a mystery that we can no more comprehend than we can see what eagle sees. If we are to live as prayer in this world, we must “open [our] whole [selves]” to these mysteries, including our own.

The haiku poet Basho wrote, “Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine, or to the bamboo if you want to learn about the bamboo.” That is, open your body, mind, heart, and spirit to that encounter with pine or bamboo. Or with the earth beneath your feet or the person in the cubicle next to you. Let the other’s mystery speak. Encounter a reality rather than projecting one outward.

When we can let go of our selves, of the set of beliefs and perceptions with which we order the world, we come to understand that all creation is “one whole voice that is [us].” Then we can “Breathe in, knowing we are made of/ All this.”

We are physically composed of the sunlight and rain we ate for dinner last night in the form of plants and animals. Our emotional reservoirs are filled with love from family, friends, pets. Our spirits share one fabric, one ground with everything on this Earth and in this universe. We are made of all this.

And so “we must take the utmost care/ And kindness in all things.”

We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty.

 

Bigger than Us

Rachel Henry2 Comments

Sometimes a phrase or an idea sticks with us for years though we don’t know what it means. Then one day an experience trips the switch of comprehension, as if the concept had been pulling us toward its fulfillment all along.

Richard Rohr says that when we get a college education, we feel entitled to understand everything but that there’s a more generous viewpoint from which we can interact with creation. For me, this was one of those un-realize-able ideas until a couple of weeks ago.

As I was staring out over the ocean from my garden at New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur, the world got a lot bigger all at once. Between one breath and the next, existence became a reality that is rather than a thing to understand.

Suddenly, the world didn’t owe me anything, not even an explanation. It was free to be itself, and I was free to enter into some deeper communion with its vastness.

When I’m attached to understanding everything, those things that I can’t explain have to be rejected because that’s the way the mind works. Paradoxically in letting go of the need to understand, I felt a deeper comprehension than I had before, “comprehension” in the sense of “being in touch with the nature or meaning of, taking in or embracing.”

This shift in perception is not a dive into willful ignorance. It does not mean denying or rejecting the rational mind. Rather, it’s a wider, richer way of experiencing a cosmos that our minds cannot contain. The Infinite is at play in our souls and at the heart of all creation, and joining that dance will yield a joy and peace that “surpass all understanding.”

Grace and God’s love, never content to leave us where we are, will continually reveal what’s been there all along, will usher us into new, deeper, and more expansive relationship with what is.

The Simplicity of Reverence

Rachel Henry2 Comments

Upon arriving at New Camaldoli Hermitage for my annual retreat, my way of moving in the world changes. While unpacking, I ease open the drawer of the little dresser and gently place my clothes inside. At home, I have probably never paid that kind of attention to my dresser or my clothes.

Being at New Camaldoli reminds me to be reverent. Suddenly everything matters—how the door closes, how I set my cup down. Though in daily life I spend a lot of time worrying about whether I’m doing it right, whatever “it” happens to be, staying at the hermitage invites me instead to move through the day with loving attention and gratitude for the gift of the fork, the bed, the moment in time.

The dictionary defines reverence as “a feeling or attitude of deep respect tinged with awe.” That might seem like a stretch for a fork, but the silverware is part of an awe-inspiring whole: the natural beauty of Big Sur; the silence and solitude; the monks who hold the space, invite visitors, and provide everything each retreatant needs and nothing more. Without the fork, the whole is incomplete, not to mention how helpful it is with eating.

The atmosphere and substance of our lives is no different from those of a weekend retreat, though we often forget. We are in this sacred place—this Earth, this universe—comprising and encountering a holy and whole existence within this sacred flow of time. What if we approached our lives mainly with reverence rather than a desire to succeed and impress accompanied by the fear that we would do neither?

David Whyte describes this way of living in the poem “Fire in the Earth”:

And we know, when Moses was told,
in the way he was told,
“Take off your shoes!” He grew pale from that simple

reminder of fire in the dusty earth.
He never recovered
his complicated way of loving again….

Every step he took
from there was carefully placed.

Everything he said mattered….

If everything is sacred, we no longer need to spend our energy separating the worthy from the unworthy, the important from the unimportant. We could be, like Moses in the poem, “free to love in the same way/ he felt the fire licking at his heels loved him.”

Allow the Moment

Rachel Henry2 Comments

Every now and then, it would be a good idea for me to listen to myself. I often repeat Jim Finley’s description of our lives as “infinite love infinitely giving itself away as every breath and heartbeat,” but I rarely pause to experience this contraction of the ventricles right now, this surge of oxygen into the air sacs as infinite love.

Every day I find a thousand reasons not to walk around in complete awe of that reality. How have I convinced myself that passing concerns, whatever they may be, are more real than the miracle of existence?

I had some help, of course. Our culture teaches us to buy more stuff instead of being blown away by the gift of our lives. It urges us to have everything figured out and be right rather than discover what each moment is teaching us.

I don’t mean a lesson about what we’ve been doing wrong or how we need to improve; I mean an entry way into ever deeper love. We have to let our lives do the teaching, though. We can only bring what we already know and the limited world that we can imagine. If we continually look within our own narrow vision for the horizons the universe is offering, we’ll miss seeing anything new.

There is so much that we cannot imagine, so much that’s eager to reveal itself to us. We need to allow our gaze to be directed. If we can let the moment open for us, like an iris unfurling, rather than wrapping it tightly within our own ideas, the genuine newness of all that is will enter our minds and hearts.

Infinite love by its very nature must always be giving itself away, must always be and be making new. If we can allow it to open us up, we will discover ourselves.