Mercy Ships

Mercy Ships delivers free, world-class health care services to the forgotten poor in developing nations. More than 1,500 crew members from around the globe serve annually. Each one volunteers his services to help fulfill the mission of Mercy Ships.

One outstanding crew member, Sebastian Uriarte, is serving as Third Officer on board the M/V Africa Mercy until August. His goal is to raise $5,000.00. I encourage you to support his courageous effort to step up to the call to help the poorest of the poor. You can go here to his donor page, or here if that link doesn't work: http://mercyships-us.donorpages.com/crewmates/SebastianUriarte/

Also, Sebastian will be updating us with reports from his Mercy Ship Africa mission. Stay tuned.

"We belong to each other"

My son, Matthew, shared this wonderful, sensitive, and wise Ted talk with me recently.  I share it with you.  It will awaken and touch you even more deeply.

Gardens of life

Written and dedicated to the memory of my father

Today, the world is so focused on traumatic news that terror has become the new normal. Our sense of dignity and divinity is only a dim memory. How do we deal with all that is happening and not lose our humanity?

As we respond to the rising tide of corruption and destruction that threaten our world everywhere on the planet, we must do that while still carrying within our hearts a lamp lit by beauty, left by heaven within us as a kind of fighter fuel. 

Our goals are to light the world, not be darkened by it. It seems to me the way to that is to hold on dearly to the beauty in our lives and not be overcome by the wickedness that stalks our world, shattering our souls and sanity with fear. All of us are blessed by a beauty we did not create but found ourselves born into. If we look for it, we will find it. It may be found in the sound of a loon calling on a damp, early spring morning on a Minnesota lake, or the innocent laughter of a child in the playground or of a couple strolling hand-in-hand along Lake Erie at sunset. For me, it is all of these and one even more endearing, drawn from the deep well of childhood itself. 

Wherever beauty is sleeping in your memory, it is whispering to you, beckoning you back to the beautiful, holy, human being you truly are. Where beauty is, peace, kindness, and goodness live alongside it deep within your heart. We have to remember it. We have to reach for it and free it to fly out into the world spreading its wings, courageously as it soars far into the dim light of our darkening skies. 

If we forget, the light will go out and if the last person forgets, then the light will go out forever.

On one particular morning a few years ago, I remembered a place of such beauty. On that morning, as I stood in line at the bank, the cable news network showed a raging fire engulfing the steeple of a beautiful old church in Baltimore as a crawler under the scene reported that rats were over-running a province in China and that’s all before the news of the war in Iraq came on. I turned away.

My heart was lingering in another place, another time, lost forever to this time and place and yet vibrantly stirring deep inside my memory. It was a place of such inexpressible beauty, it would always be the nearest physical example of heaven in this life. 

Maybe there were faeries, or angels, among those tall languid lilies and colorful Irises in the fragrant flower beds stretching throughout my grandmother’s garden. The entire place remained frozen in time, stilled by an invisible presence. An entire family with all its activities of living and working, growing up and moving away and even dying had all happened before leaving it for another generation to live in wonder about all who had lived there.

There was always a kind of mystery about the place. It reverberated with voices and laughter whispering in the silence. It was clearly like coming into a room after the party was over. To know that family, one could wander in and among the beautifully manicured gardens, a number of horse barns, an old tennis court and a swimming pool, dusty paths that must have borne them barefooted at play. My grandparents had died long before I was born, but the estate was there and perhaps the same old gardener whom my grandmother had instructed still tended her magnificent gardens.

Only silence remained where there had once been so much life. Yet, the gardens were not overgrown. They were perfect. The tall hedges, the huge rounded flowering bushes behind which I played with my dolls, the long beautiful, even dusty, paths to all kinds of mysterious hidden places with garden sheds and greenhouses rich with the humid floral scent of geraniums all enraptured my maternal grandfather who held my hand as we explored together.

I was born while we lived there. I spent my early childhood in this summer place of flowers and its timeless old mansion with rooms upon rooms and a steep staircase winding up to the bell tower. There were tiny hallways that led mysteriously into other parts of the old mansion. Naturally there were rooms we couldn’t enter, and the old original Victorian-era vintage furniture was still there. It seemed to me, as a young child, this was the most wondrous of places, a place that had always been there and would always be there.

Black and white photos of my father’s family garnished the bookcases. Some were of a woman with curly dark hair whose resemblance I see every day in my youngest daughter’s face. One was her wedding photo. Others were memoirs of a triumphant tennis match won by my father, then an athletic, handsome young man. There were others of him on a horse having won an equestrian event. Later, my father would come clean on his disdain for horseback riding. He’d fallen once, and while quite badly hurt, was reprimanded harshly to get back on the horse and ride. He never rode after that. 

Other photos were of three lovely, sun-kissed children clustered for the photographer on a stone wall on the property. They were my father, aunt, and uncle. My beautiful grandmother lovingly holding a baby in a long white christening gown was another photo among them. Occasionally there were photos of a stern-looking man in a wheelchair. They are all from a time so long gone that even now as I recall my own young summers there, tears come fast to remind me of a time so deeply personal. They are so beautiful but are so far away. Yet, on a deeply intuitive level, I knew that to find the strength to live in this time, I needed to remember where I came from, and reconnect with my earliest memories steeped in the essence of that time and place. 

Even then, we lived in the shadow of another time. My parents and my sisters and I lived in the gardener’s house, which was a tiny picturesque cape-cod style house attached to the main greenhouse. I remember old fans in the room my sisters and I took our afternoon naps, and straw matting for flooring. I remember the old desk with a mirror over it as you first stepped in the little house and a square table in the middle of the room at which we ate our meals. I can see my grandfather writing a postcard at that desk. I remember my purple-flowered cotton bathing suit with a little skirt attached to it. I remember having to wait, along with my sister who was only a year younger than me until our baby sister woke from her nap so we could go swimming. 

The place was a magical place, full of everything to awaken a child’s imagination. The silence that stretched almost hauntingly across the beautiful place must have absorbed and dissipated whatever sadness might have been there before us. 

Whatever pain the man in the wheelchair might have endured, or the loss experienced by the beautiful dark-haired woman when her two babies died, were long forgotten, left to slip into the abyss of time. All that remained were memories of sunny days, florid treasures of what is now a most sacred precious beauty. Their hearts and minds were cured by that beauty. They had to have been. They must have gone there to hold each other and heal from life’s tumultuous times. There are always tumultuous times. There always were. There has never been a time when men didn’t start wars, cruelly torture and kill each other and leave babies to starve.

For that family then, two world wars, a great depression, hard times where my grandfather worked, the deaths of their own two infants all must have weighed heavily on their hearts and minds. They needed a place of beauty in which they could restore and renew their broken hearts and weary minds. So, they created one, a place that would remain, long after they had gone, to comfort, heal and speak to today’s hurting world, a world so broken that it doesn’t even realize how desperately it needs to come home to a place of silence, peace and vibrant flower gardens and graceful ponds and fountains and roadside stone walls, a place where sweet kisses in the sparkling moonlight are commonplace, a place where cruelty is nonexistent and kindness is everywhere.

How could they have endured their lives without that place? How does one live in a world rent open by bombs, poverty, hatred and war without beauty? Beauty is the cornerstone of civilization. It is the place into which we allow God to breathe new hope and life into our lives. Beauty is cultivated by the Spirit, and left for us as gifts from heaven to remind us where we’re going and from where we came. If we forget beauty, if we fail to be healed and uplifted by the experience of beauty, if we have become so hardened, so numb to the sublime healing essence of beauty, then we are lost. The dreary darkness of death has taken over and snuffed out of our souls any light from heaven.

Recently, something inside me has longed to return to that place. Today’s tumultuous times, wars and too many horrors to mention, has overrun our collective consciousness. 

We have come to accept the unacceptable, seeing the terrors of the day as common fare and forgetting this nightmare, this darkened world, is not where we should live. While I truly believe we need to be sensitive and responsive to the suffering among us, our hearts are hungry for a much more beautiful, sacred, and profoundly deep experience. We have all, despite our childhoods and even difficult life experiences, experienced beauty.  Life is full of it, if we look for it.  For me, it was a profoundly sacred kind of beauty that filled my childhood with an experience that has informed my life with fragrance and color and peace ever since.

That beautiful place I experienced briefly as a child marked the end of an era which I was fortunate to have experienced. I had the rare gift of peeking in on a generation before my time, a stolen glimpse of a past that contained a jewel of such beauty, it would sweeten even the dullest days of my future life. Never again would I ever experience such beauty and such rich silence as I did as a child roaming around my grandparents Canadian home.

As a child, that place, memorialized iconically by life-sized

sculptures of two little girls playing in the large fountain in the front garden of the house, reminded me of those times when my sister and I played among them, often slipping into the cool water of the algae-covered fountain. It contained an exciting essence of wonderment that formed my early consciousness that still whispers to me. Some things are timeless and as essential to the soul as water is to the body. 

I hope you, as I, will allow the beauty in your heart to transform you and make you more human, so you can transform the world and make it more divine.

(Originally written in July 2007)

The way, the truth, the life

Looking back, behind me, I could see the Cross, glowing golden in the setting sun, radiant from this side of it.  On the other side, I could still see the others who knelt and wept at the foot of that enormous, rough-hewn, dark wooden bloodstained Roman cross, used for capital punishment. 

He was so much more than any of us thought.  He was a good man in every meaning of the word good. He was a rare man of courage and heart, possessed by a passion for the truth, and he would not be silenced.  The price he paid for his courage and passion was his life.  Yet, he knew and might even have smiled at the thought that the sting to the Romans would be that their plan to silence him would backfire, and backfire badly. Not even death would silence him, and that incredible courage has stood the test of time. 

I wondered why they were still there.  I thought they would see the path he left, lighted by his Truth that opened the door to eternity for us. Didn't they see it? Didn't they understand? And, why is it they are not also on that path, following his light, into an infinite rainbow of truth spiraling around, above and beneath us? 

"What trapped them there?" I wondered.  I wanted to run back and tell them, gather them together and lead them beyond the cross that stood darkly in front of them.

Slowly, I turned around.  I had to go back and tell them.  I couldn't let them just stay there, kneeling and weeping forever. I saw dark clouds of an approaching storm on the eastern horizon. "Quickly," I thought as I hurried back down the path. He had said it all.  I wondered why they didn't understand.  

As I emerged from behind the cross, some of them looked up at me with surprise through their tears.  Who did they expect to see?  He wasn't there and he wasn't going to return the way they thought.  He was operating on an entirely new dimension of ultimate reality. My compassion for them was all I had and I hoped that would be enough. I understood so well what brought them here and what they needed to understand to move on.

Some of the children ran to me, as their mothers chased after them. I sat down on the dry, hard ground.  The children asked me where I'd been and why I was there.

I asked them to get their parents because there was something they needed to hear.

The women and men slowly, one by one, came near and sat down.

I asked them, "What is your greatest fear?"

One man shouted "death," another shouted "rejection." On and on they all started calling out their fears.  They lived in so much fear that those fears had become familiar to them. No therapist was needed to help them get in touch with their feelings.

"So, what is rejection?"  I asked back.

"It says you're not good enough, you're not wanted, you're cast away.  It means ultimately that you are wrong, bad and should be left to die," the old man said.

"So, there are two thoughts here, and one of them is a lie," I said, adding, "and that lie makes the other a lie, also."

"Here's the truth. You are all worthy. You are all loved - so much more than you yourselves can love.  Your feelings of rejection are real feelings, but falsely based. You all feel rejected by your countrymen, your government, and all those who hold the purse strings to your livelihood," I said.

"But, it’s a lie that you are rejected, or deserve to be rejected," I continued. "It's a terrible, terrible, evil lie that you need to stop believing right now."

"This good man who died here a couple days ago was rejected simply because he spoke a truth that no one wanted to hear.  They were all in denial about the truth and wanted to kill anyone who challenged the illusion they lived under.  You have followed his truth and because of that are also being rejected and you feel that rejection bitterly - right down to your swollen and bruised knees you've been on for three days."

"But, here's the whole point and you will languish here until you get this. There is no rejection and there is no death. Our father who considers us all his sons and daughters, as was that man who died here, loves you completely without any pre-existing conditions and never will ever reject you. 

"Those who use rejection to abuse and control are the ones who are powerless really, and in their lack are preying on you.  It's called projection and it's an unconscious behavior. They belittle you to control you so they will feel powerful. They are projecting their weakness onto you - only, again they don't know it. They wouldn't need to do that if they already felt powerful.  Real power looks a lot like humility.

They were arrogant and unaware of their weak, empty, fearful hearts and circumstances, which is why they killed him. They thought his teaching would usurp what little power they really had. They were unconscious of their own motives and need, which is why he forgave them.

"When that understanding sinks deeply into your soul, it will change your life completely. Then, you will rise with him into the light that leads you on the path to the ultimate truth which is eternal life and joy."

"What do you mean there's no rejection," a young mother asked.

"It means that it's an irrational emotion you have been taught, forced into your subconscious like brainwashing which has oppressed you so you would be malleable by those who seek to control you and take your power, your money, and your life.  It is what burdens you day and night, takes your life from you, and leaves you impoverished - financially, spiritually, and physically. It's what 'they' use to control you,"  I said, watching her as she looked away and down.

"I get that," she said, slowly smiling, looking down at her little dark curly head son in her lap.

"That's it, exactly."

"So, his message is that God doesn't judge, condemn, or ever reject, that God's love is beyond anything we can understand and is the ultimate power. This cross on this side is a symbol of that fear, rejection, and death. But, when you see it for what it represents, which is a warped manipulation by the controlling power brokers, it can't control you anymore," I said.

"What you're saying is we have become slaves to them out of the fear of rejection which is a fear of death really?" the woman asked.

"Yes, exactly, but now that you know this you will be aware and it can't control you anymore. You may still have to work for them, but in your mind, you will be free. And, that's the beginning of a beautiful new life. There's such a huge difference in this. You can laugh at their efforts to control you through rejection now that you understand their tactics - their game. Then, you will become more aware and empowered," I said, 

"And that's just the beginning. Once you take back your mind, reclaim your power, you will grow into the powerful, free, enlightened children of our Father. That's what he taught and wanted for us and died teaching."

"So, now - all of you - do you see this?  Do you understand that this cross on which He died, is a symbol forever of the dark powers' attempt to subject, control, and reject you?"  I added. 

"Now you can choose to be aware of their game and stay in ownership of your own sense of value, and can just step over their rejection, and live in freedom and in power, controlling your own minds and destiny?"

"And, once you realize this, you need to move on beyond this tired old cross into the light of the freedom this understanding and awareness brings you. Then, an exciting and life-giving new empowerment will envelop you; free you, eliciting so much joy. It will open the path to enlightenment, wisdom, and eternal life. And, when you are on that path, that way, you will see him again.  That is for sure.

"It's simple really. Do you see this? "

"Yes, I get that,” a wise old man said, standing up, and glancing around at the others who were nodding thoughtfully.

"We all need to move into that new awareness, that bright new consciousness, which is a kind of enlightened, truth-imbued space, and live where there is no death and no rejection," I added. 

"I see what you mean," the old man added, rubbing his eyes from the dust of the day."If there is no death and if we are all loved with an unfathomable love, and never rejected or judged, then those who judge and marginalize us are afraid of our power, then they are liars, thieves - the criminals? I can see how both rejection and death are fallacies. They are the tools used by those master criminals to whom we've been chained with fear, kept weak, limited, under control - all in the dark." 

"Yes. Exactly! It's simple to understand. Now, the work is unlatching your thoughts, minds and emotions from the habit of being controlled and marginalized by them," I said, standing up and brushing the dirt off my jeans. 

"Just remember it is those who abuse, reject and try to kill you who are weak. Why else would they bother?  What is it from you that they want? They think you have something they need and so they sneak up on you and attempt to steal it. So, ask yourselves, what do you have they want? You have love and spirit, joy and freedom. Do they?"

A rich pause followed my words. I waited hoping they would receive his message, which I had once struggled to understand. They slowly began talking to each other. Soon, an energy began to pulse through the large group. 

A young boy started to play the flute, sending its sweet sound drifting through the increasingly more animated group.  I heard singing as I slipped unnoticed back behind the cross. 

Didn't He say He played the flute for us and we didn't dance? Today, we dance.

The path ahead seemed brighter than before. Thankfully, I listened to my heart. I knew I wouldn't be alone on this path much longer. Soon, everyone would be on the way, also.

I smiled into the radiant amber sunset. What a glorious, awesome thing this all is - this life - this real life.