No Words

There are no words to express the shock and horror of the tragedy in Connecticut, the incomprehensible insidious evil that snuffed out the lives of 20 children and six beautiful adults who taught and cared for them.  The slaughter of these precious innocents on top of a list of other horrors against children in this country and world-wide is impossible to endure.  So, there are no words, only tears, only prayers of comfort to the parents which so many loving people are offering them.

This morning, very early, I awoke to a vision of Jesus with arms outstretched, wearing his red tunic - as seen above - and I knew he had been there that day to receive their precious innocent souls into his most loving arms to be safely carried into paradise.  It was comforting to know that.  It was comforting to be reminded that he met them and carried them into the arms of our father.  They are safe, now.  The terrible loss is now that most unimaginable pain.

Yes, there is much for we as a  nation to do in the days ahead.  I would love to see "gaming" censored to eliminate the insane violence of it all. Yes, I would love to see stricter gun laws, but what are we to to about these random acts of madness, violence and killing?  While we must protect our children, I don't know if we can and that's the part that terrifies me the most.  

But, today, the darkness of these days is oppressive and while it does seem hopeless, we have to wake up - again and again, more and more until we are all awake - and stand as one on behalf of all that is good, loving, healing and whole.  

I offer my prayers and love to these dear childrens' parents and the family members of the six adults who were killed.  

Teary day

It's raining in Portland this morning. Almost in response to last night's terrible act of violence, today's dark overcast sky is filled with December's somber tears from heaven.  When a still unnamed gunman opened fire in a busy shopping mall yesterday, bustling with Christmas shoppers, he had already made a clear decision to be just another blind follower of this rapidly deteriorating culture of death rampant across our once lovely planet.

Any act of violence that violates the fundamental law of God that has asserted since antiquity, "Thou shalt not kill" is an act of utter powerlessness. This poor desperate man, so utterly empty of any light, of any power, revealed to us all on the grand stage of the local and national news what was already secretly buried in his heart - fear, anger, suppressed creative potential and a sense of utter powerlessness and hopelessness.  We don't need to know much else - what his childhood was like?  what drugs he may have been on, what happened in his job or lack thereof.  We know that his soul had been blemished terribly.  He, like the other two he killed, was a victim of his own impotence as a human being.  His frustration screams out in the blood he spilled.

We can't be reminded enough that we all have an awesome power within us and we exercise that power (or false belief in powerlessness) in every thought we think, action we take - smile or frown we offer externally.  I've often wondered if what we do shapes what we think or if what we think shapes what we do. But, I do know that we all have the power to be deciders of our fate and fortunes. If we can see that our lives reveal a low state of imagination and simply don't measure up to our highest hopes and dreams for our lives, then we are thinking wrongly.  

Even if we don't know how to change what's going on in our lives, we are never completely without resources.  Pray!  PRAY! and Pray some more!! Even if you don't believe, pray!  Even if you're a died in the wool blind atheist, pray!  Pray even for more faith and more will to pray. Pray as if your life depended on it, because your life does depend on it.  And, not only your life, but all our lives.

We are all connected on this great web that stretches across our globe and every thought you have affects every action you take and every action you take affects those around you - like the butterfly affect.

If you are troubled by the news and what's on your television, change your mind.  make a choice to be loving to a stranger.  Buy groceries for the local food pantry, put a dollar in the Salvation Army red pail outside the grocery store.  Every act of kindness, is a spot of light added to our fabric of light that also sweeps across the planet.  

Maybe we can't make North Korean stop its insane weapons machine, or stop the heinous civil war in Syria, or urge Israel and Palestine to find some kind of amicable solution to their sad relationship. Maybe we can't really do anything about the rape and violation of women in Africa, or the child slavery in India or the other corrupt and genocidal terrorism among Uganda's Lord's Resistance army or even about what is being produced in Hollywood that's affecting the minds and imaginations of our children and all people in the world, but we can choose - each and every one of us - to be and do goodness, be love and be truthful with ourselves and others in our lives. 

If we can take a determined stand to be part of the great wave of light and love, truth and goodness that is also sweeping the planet, our hearts will rise up and fill with the power of creative solutions to these problems.  we cannot be passive today or any other day.  We cannot just get up every morning, go to work like any other day and not take a stand either for or against being consciously aware and part of this great humanity. 

We all have the power to be light in this world. We are divine beings with the power of choice.  We can choose and we do choose.  Today choose to love your neighbor, support the poor, care about what's going on and expand your potential and your own personal power by choosing to be strong and be strong in the love that is buried deep within you.  Love yourself.  Love yourself enough to release all that awesome power within you to be a powerful warrior of light.

The way of the light warrior

Pure ecstasy.  Soaring free, skybound, alive, untethered, carried aloft by the expansiveness of all that is - all that is real - immersed in the gentle essence of the great spirit of freedom and love.  In this pure state of essence, your eternally young spirit experiences itself as awesomeness and unbounded joy.

But, today, on earth, heavy drug usage is common, sadly seducing users into an attitude of apathy while hopelessly stagnating many - young and old - everywhere except in war torn countries.  It seems that those who seek to experience a sense of freedom, expansiveness and a kind of other-worldliness turn to drugs for that experience, rather than untether themselves from all that weighs down their beautiful spirits, and explore the true path to that experience.

Sometimes when we talk about the spiritual life, we describe it in lofty terms of flight and light and expansiveness and joy, love and peace. When we hear a call to enter that realm - that inner realm - it can be almost frustrating if we don't understand how.  It's one thing to hear the call but it's useless if we don't understand the practicality of how to do it.

Imagine your spirit is a feather - a beautiful white feather of a seagull.  It floats up and drifts wherever the wind sends it, soaring up and away.  In a way, the spirit is like that feather. It is very light and it's that lightness that is joyous.  We are by nature joyous, loving, gentle, strong, peaceful and incredibly creative and wonderfully relational.  Yet, our lives have burdened us so heavily, for so long that we don't even realize how to fly anymore.

So, who wouldn't want to be as free as a bird, soaring above all the heaviness of our world here?  The single one thing that weighs our spirits down the most is criticism, condemnation and a sense of isolation and separateness from each other.  Usually that pattern of criticism and judgment stems from childhood. We are taught to be self critical and we teach our children to be self critical, measuring ourselves against the peer group, the dominant culture or our traditional culture.

Our nagging worry that we're not good enough weighs us down tremendously. It becomes almost habitual and serves as an unconscious force that sabotages all our joy and peace.The negative opinions of the status quo police also weighs us down.  This conspiracy to imprison all our souls to this "consensual matrix" is as old as the human race and is founded on fear. The source of that fear has many faces. Some might say the fear of God is a primary source. Yet, the truth is just the opposite.  God has always - through prophets and wise people - called us to be free. God isn't fear. Fear isn't creative, nourishing, uplifting, expansive or life-giving.  Fear is stiflying, reductionist, smothering, controlling and diminishing. 

God is Love.  God is who is calling us to lighten up, lose the fear and have the courage to be true to your own heart, let go of all that anchors you, holds you down, reduces your self esteem and clips your spiritual wings. You may want to do some personal inventory and release all the fear that's holding you down, tethering you to this dark age.  We may even be afraid to let go of our fear.  We may find it is so habitual and so deeply intrenched that letting it go is a major feat of mindfulness. You can pray for help and the effort will be won.

There's an ancient line that has been repeated on pyramid walls and ancient papyrus that says, "As above so below."  That beautiful phrase can be interpreted many ways.  But, it suggests that our  outer lives are a reflection of what is going on inside our minds.  If our lives are full of judgment and condemnation, poverty and pain, that is a fairly good reflection of what's going on in our minds.  If your life is calm, free of drama, full of joy and love and peace, creative, your mind is also. 

This may be why St. Francis of Assisi welcomed "Lady Poverty" because the simplicity of our singular love of God, each other and ourselves would result in a diminished need to consume quantities of goods.  Maybe this is why the great mystics and saints fasted.  In emptying themselves, their spirits gained altitude and soared into ecstatic states.

It is letting go of all our fears, all or anxieties, all our self doubt, our perfectionisms, our greed and jealousy, that allows us to slip out of the handcuffs of fear and soar. By letting go of all those negative attitudes that result in conflict, that threaten our free imagination and our sense of personal love of self and others, we can experience joyful surrender and awaken to the awareness that all we need is God and love of each other.  True freedom is in that beautiful, bright new awareness that nothing can separate us from each other in love if we are free of all the stuff that had imprisoned our souls.

Maybe the best place to start is to look at what frightens us the most and listen to what's going on in our lives.  What does it say about what's going on inside you? The outer world is only a mirror of our inner kingdom. We can't clean up the exterior without first cleaning us the interior. 

For each of us, this may be the beginning of a journey that has no end.  As we lighten our loads, we will always find more and more inside us that limits our creative freedom and our awesome abundant power to move mountains and cure lepers. It is a process of lifting the veils that obscure the light within. A true warrior of light will be willing to face his or her own inner fears and begin the journey of  on-going spiritual evolution. It is the only way to real life and ecstatic joy.

Not of this world

As spiritual beings having a physical experience, we are like angels in human bodies.  But, unlike the angels, we too often forget who we really are. 

Spiritual masters since ancient times have described our dense third dimensional world as the lowest level a divine spirit can descend.  As divine spirits in material bodies, we are truly strangers in a strange land while on Earth.  In our truest state, we are beautiful light beings of incredible power, radiance and love encapsulated in these earth bodies. We are powerful beyond our limited minds have ever allowed us to imagine. Here, we are imprisoned in narrow limited imaginations about who we are and what we are capable of becoming.

Since our senses are so strong, and our spirits so light, our spiritual intuitive guidance is often drowned out. Consequently, we have to be reminded of this fundamental truth of who we are. When we can remember who we are, we are able to listen more intentionally and activate our miracle-making ability within our souls.

Today, many have forgotten who they really are and are completely immersed in the planet's dark confusion, caught up in the power plays and the violent, fatal attraction of the control/victimization power plays that engulf life on Earth.  More than ever, we have to remember and remain mindful of who we really are. 

We need to walk through Earth's smoky battlefields and remember who we really are. We can choose to be here and yet not let what is going on around us dissuade our peace, nor lure us into the tempestuous storms that have taken the entire planet hostage.  We can walk in the light, be at peace, emitting the most beautiful holy light of heaven that radiates into and through us out into the world, regardless of what is going on outside us, around us or to us. We can do this if we can look for heaven within ourselves and focus with a renewed commitment to this consciousness and attention to what is beautiful, radiant and loving.

This is not easy.  It is the hardest thing anyone with any sensitivity, any heart, can do.  But, to survive, we must do this. 

The following are just a few thoughts shared by those wise ones who were once also in dark challenging times.

Jesus tells us in The Gospel of Thomas not to do what we hate and to "Be Passerbys."  He also reminds us often that, "You are in the world, but not of the world."

And, one of the most beautiful writings on this is from the Bhagavad Gita:

"When your mind has overcome the confusion of duality, you will attain the state of holy indifference to things you hear and things you have heard. When you are umoved by confusion of ideas and your mind is competely united in deep samadhi,* you will attain the state of perfect yoga."


*Samadhi is full communion with the divine in a state of perfect peace and detachment from all that is going on around us.  The Christian definition might be "the kingdom within."

The Promised Land

Joining our voices with angels and archangels 

and all the company of Heaven

Beloved children of Patriarch Abraham, whose very seed has filled this beautiful earth, you who were once called out of the wilderness, out of that place called Ur, who once gathered in tents to hear our One God's call, now hear again to what the spirit is saying to all of us.

Our God, the One whose being is all being, whose self is the all in the all, who is both creator and lover of us all, who made us for communion with each other and himself, is asking us to listen again to His ancient call to us.  He made us as vessels into which His great wisdom and spirit would flow to continue His great on-going, ever-living, ever-new creation. He, by whom we sing ourselves into being, is inviting us again onto the journey to that long ago Promised Land.

We were first called out of the wilderness, out of the vast desert of unknowing, to gather as one people. At that first calling, we were gathered into one great communion, but that union was broken by fratricide and jealousy which caused us to fall into slavery.  For 500 years, we staggered under the heavy burden of slavery until another was sent to guide us out of slavery, back into the desert and on the way toward a Promised Land.

We grew in wisdom over those two generations in the desert, listening again to words which would inform and form our hearts and minds for the next leg of our journey. Finally, we were ready. Together, as a nation of people, we crossed the River Jordan. Once a sacred river, yet now a terrible divide, we crossed over with the hope we were entering a land "flowing with milk and honey," rather than the place of terror it is today, with bullets and bombs shattering throughout this once holy land. We didn't understand that it was always meant to be a mythic journey and the beautiful River Jordan, a symbol of the river of life, was a place of new birth into wholeness and union, not a great dividing line.

Later, after several thousand years of on-going fighting in the name of our One God, we sought and were led to another promised land, again a place of hope and promise of freedom from oppression. Yet, soon after stepping onto that new soil we again found ourselves fighting over many issues, religious and political, under the banner of "One nation under God," again slaughtering those who lived there in order to found a place of peace and prosperity.

But, the Promised Land is not a country, a parcel of real estate. Rather, it is a magnificent kingdom within us. It is a place of peace, compassion, hope manifested in radiant technicolor out into our collective life together.  Unless we understand this ancient truth, now, we will always be people seeking and never finding.

While Abraham led us out of the wilderness and Moses led us back into the wilderness and on the way into the promised land, it was Jesus who led us on the way to the real promised land and taught us how to enter it. This is a real and authentic inner spiritual realm of perfection, a realm of light and love and hope and ever-living creation, energy, power and joy. It is all that is real.

It was always supposed to be a spiritual journey, but back then our young spiritual eyes and ears were closed.  We could not hear nor see what the Spirit was saying to us through Abraham or Moses and sadly not even through Jesus who was killed for this message.

In fact, Jesus' own baptism in the River Jordan is a powerful iconic image of this message:  the sacred river of life, which this river symbolizes, unifies all people as Jesus' own message calls for - the love of neighbor - even enemy - as we love God. To Jesus, the river of life calls us all together: Jew and Palestinian - all people - because all people are made in God's image, all people have within them the kingdom - the universe within, the universal mind -  which is visibly within them.  Clearly, this ancient and sacred River Jordan was never meant to serve as a boundary, a dividing line separating brother peoples.

Jesus said, "The Kingdom of God is within you."  It is not a place out there somewhere on our Earth.  It is beyond the river of this world, beyond the River Jordan.  It is in us - it is the whole universe with us and that entire universe is for all time, all dimensions, all that is, and it is within our minds and hearts.

Love is the key that gently opens the door into that inner kingdom, that very real Promised Land. It is in that soft place of your heart which has the strength and courage of an entire army, more power than an arsenal of weapons. To love your enemy, to hold the dying man in your arms who was killed by your own weapon, and weep at the sad realization of ages, of the madness accumulated into that one moment, is the kind of courage that opens that door.

Today, we can understand what God was saying to us all those years ago. We are Jews, we are Christians, we are Muslims, we are the people of the land and people of the heart, we are all chosen because all human beings are chosen. We have all been called to participate in this great adventure and listen to the Spirit and join our voices together to lift up this great creation and experience this great encounter. 

We can join our voices today with the angels and archangels and all the company of heaven circling that great tree of life that rises up out of the Garden of Eden, watered by the river of life. We can do this.  I know we can.

The Fugitive's Eyes

Ancient olive trees in the Garden of Gethsemane

... more on The Middle East: A New Design:

"I agree about getting them all to sit down together to work out a plan.  Some of the most promising work along those lines has been groups of bereaved parents of children lost to a conflict coming together with love  and empathy. The core of all that I do that I most prize is bringing people together so they can and have to look into each others eyes.  They touch and are touched that way without hesitation or  shame.  And wounds can start to heal and divides can be crossed.  It brings to mind one of my favorite pieces of Henry Nouwen: Looking into the Fugitive's Eyes." 
                                                       - James O. Whitlock

Looking into the Fugitive's Eyes

One day a young fugitive, trying to hide himself from the enemy, entered a small village. The people were kind to him and offered him a place to stay. But when the soldiers who sought the fugitive asked where he was hiding, everyone became very fearful. The soldiers threatened to burn the village and kill every man in it unless the young man were handed over to them before dawn. The people went to the minister and asked him what to do. The minister, torn between handing over the boy to the enemy or having his people killed, withdrew to his room and read his Bible, hoping to find an answer before dawn. After many hours, in the early morning his eyes fell on these words: "It is better that one man dies than that the whole people be lost."

Then the minister closed the Bible, called the soldiers and told them where the boy was hidden. And after the soldiers led the fugitive away to be killed, there was a feast in the village because the minister had saved the lives of the people. But the minister did not celebrate. Overcome with a deep sadness, he remained in his room. That night an angel came to him, and asked, "What have you done?" He said: "I handed over the fugitive to the enemy." Then the angel said: "But don't you know that you have handed over the Messiah?" "How could I know?" the minister replied anxiously. Then the angel said: "If, instead of reading your Bible, you had visited this young man just once and looked into his' eyes, you would have known."

  

From the introduction to Chapter II of:

The Wounded Healer

By Henri J. M. Nouwen

*above photo:  http://asterisk.apod.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=17985&p=114448&hilit=olive

Soulful Presence

Bethlehem, Palestine

Photograph and article by James O. Whitlock

This ancient olive tree in Palestine has seen a lot. It speaks of strong hope and faith, of tenacity and persistence, of enduring
struggle and acceptance, and of an indomitable will to survive and live as fully as possible regardless of circumstances. 

I met this tree on one of my lunchtime walks, near the new checkpoint terminal on the Hebron Road from Bethlehem
to Jerusalem and not far from Caritas Baby Hospital where I spent so much time that year. The Israeli security fence is immediately behind it and the Har Homa settlement is on the hilltop in the background. I felt a soulful presence in this tree and had no doubt at all that it has wept equally for all the disputants in the tragic conflict that surrounds it.

Presented to Riverside-Salem UCC, February 17, 2008