Being light in the dark

It has been an extraordinary February thus far.  The country has been swept by the worst winter storms in recent memory and everywhere people prayed the Groundhog would see his shadow. Then the concern over terrorism at the Winter Olympics and the Beatles 50th on the Ed Sullivan Show stage and so much more. Our minds have certainly been on anything but being salt and light to our world.  I share with you, in the beautiful words of an extraordinarily wise man, Thaddeus, given last Sunday at St. Joseph University Parish, Buffalo, NY, where he is deacon. Thank you Thaddeus. You are always an inspiration!

This was certainly an extraordinary week. We had the triple header last Sunday: Solemn Feast of the Presentation of the Lord, Super Bowl, and Ground Hog Day. We also saw the end of Jay Leno on the Tonight Show and the Start of the Winter Olympics. 

How many watched the Super Bowl? How many thought it was the most exciting Super Bowl ever? That was pretty bad. I was going to make some jokes about the Denver Broncos, but I didn’t want to beat a dead “horse.” How many liked the National Anthem sung by opera star Rene Fleming? Last question, "How many have seen the play or musical movie of Les Miserables?" Several times at key points of the story, the hero, Jean Valjean sings "Who Am I"?

Jesus very clearly answers that question in today’s Gospel, "You are the Salt of the earth, you are the Light of the world." Now this is extremely important because most often Jesus is telling us who He is, "I am the bread of life, good shepherd, true vine, way, the truth and the life."

All of these symbolic identities invite us to use our minds to interpret what it might mean. Both salt and light serve to change the things around them. Nobody makes salt for dinner [at least I hope not]. We make chicken for dinner and when we put salt on the chicken it makes it taste better. So we enjoy the taste of the chicken and not just the salt. And even if it is thrown to be trampled upon, salt changes ice to melt it which is why we are facing shortages with this severe winter.

Light is like this also. We do not turn on the light to look at it
[unless you're a moth] but in order to see other things in the room or
perhaps read a book. It changes the darkness so that we can see what is around us.

It is because of light that a person can enter the Sistine Chapel and look up at the ceiling to see the magnificent masterpiece by
Michelangelo. There in a famous frame that we call the Creation of
Adam, we see God reaching out to humanity, fingers barely separated.

If you look closely at the cape behind God, you will see that it is
perfectly shaped like a cross section of the human brain! God is
handing over to humanity the great gift of intelligence - the capacity
to think - or as I like to call it, the Divine Mind.

That image from the Sistine Chapel is the foundation upon which the
Scriptures are built. From the very beginning, in the Book of Genesis, people have been faced with decisions to make. Some were good, others not. That started a 5000 year tradition that is embodied today by Pope Francis.

Moses told us how to treat the widow, the poor and the immigrant.
Isaiah echoes that saying, "share your bread, shelter the oppressed and comfort the homeless." And today Pope Francis calls us to serve the marginalized and to work for justice.

I started today by asking four questions. Not everyone raised their hand for each one because our brain sent yes or no signals to our hands. Even if you sat there and said that this is dumb and did not raise your hand at all, you used your mind to decide that.

There was an old saying that when you went to Church you should check your brains at the door. A faithful person was defined by the phrase "Pay, Pray and Obey." The emphasis was on rules over reason.

But Jesus says "You are the sale of the earth, you are the light of the world." We are called to use our minds to change the world around us. It starts with one on one personal relationships whether family, friend or person in the parking lot after Mass.

You can tell when you bring light to a person by the smile on their
face. I like the style of the priest who greeted people with long
faces in the confessional with the penance to make 10 people smile
that day. On average, a 4 year-old smiles 400 times a day while adults only 15. As Friedrich Nietzsche observed, "Christians so often do not reflect on their faces the joy that they have been redeemed." It starts on a one-to-one level.

And then it spreads as Isaiah gives us the bigger picture today, "You
shall cry for help and He will say, here I am; if you remove from your midst oppression ad malicious speech - if you bestow your bread on the hungry and satisfy the afflicted - then Light shall rise for you in Darkness."

At our baptism each one of us was given a candle lit from the Easter
candle to go out and conquer the darkness. The Letter of James recalls this ancient tradition of joining prayer with action. He writes, "If a brother or sister lacks food, shelter or clothing and you say to them, 'Go in peace I will pray for you' but you fail to give them what is needed for their body, what good is it? Faith by itself, without
works, is dead."

We are salt and light, we can use our prayers and our minds to change the world around us.

We cannot merely pray to God to end war, we must use our mind to
discover the path to peace within our heart and with our neighbor.

We cannot merely pray to God to root out prejudice, we must use our mind to see the goodness and diversity in all people.

We cannot merely pray to God to end starvation, we must use our mind to develop our resources to wisely feed the world.

We cannot merely pray to God to end human trafficking, we must use our mind to not let evil go unchecked and delude us into thinking that some lives are less valuable than others.

We cannot merely pray to God to end poverty, we must use our mind to clear away slums and give home to the despairing.

We cannot merely pray to God to end disease, we must use our mind to search out new cures and treatments for those who suffer.

Therefore, we pray to God for strength, determination and will power to use our Divine Mind to make the world a safer and better place.

When we were baptized we were called by name, not to get used to the dark but to shine as lights before others. On my First Communion I received a rosary with a glow in the dark crucifix. We should replace those glow in the dark statues with glow in the dark Christians. We have been given the Light to glow in the midst of darkness.

So to be salt and light means to live our lives in such a way that
others will use our salt and light to, "Taste and See the Goodness of the Lord."

Path to Happiness

Happiness is your right.  And, the path to your own customized version of happiness is right there inside you. You just have to follow your path as the mindful yogis say. This wonderful author and former chairman of psychology at the University of Chicago, who I've previously mentioned on Tiger Lilies, has some wise thoughts to share. 

Two faces of Wisdom

Her familiar face greets the world, shining the light of wisdom emerging from the subtle spiritual undercurrents of France soon after her bloody revolution for liberte. The meaning of her strong right arm lunging upward inviting the world's oppressed with her freedom light is obvious. She symbolizes the light of the world, a land of freedom for all, and a strong hopeful call to the world's oppressed. She is a beautiful brilliant beacon of hope - a message of wisdom the world has always desperately needed and now as much as ever. She is on the country's doorstep, the face we shine outward to the world. She is clearly the classical theological definition of wisdom - light, liberty and life itself.

At the other end of the continent, looming over a narrow street in Portland is an entirely different face of wisdom - Portlandia. Almost frightening at first, if only because of her steely hovering perch on an old badly deteriorating business building, she is crouching, pointing at whomever sees her while thrusting a trident outwardly in her left arm swung boldly behind her. She points to a darker, hidden inner watery realm, typically symbolized by the left hand. She is our subconscious, while Lady Liberty is our conscious. Both seek and require freedom.

As much as Lady liberty welcomes the world on the east coast of the U.S., the world's masses who struggle with worldly issues that have burdened and oppressed them, on the west coast Portlandia seems to call us out of our watery subconscious depths where the real enslavement is.  Her Neptunish stance, almost like a mermaid, calls us up from the depths of our inner enslavement.  She is reaching within as Liberty is reaching out.

How interesting that both these statues of wisdom, archetypally portrayed in the feminine persona, brace both shores of this land of freedom, a land of potential, still defining herself, still finding herself - first finding political and economic freedom and then finding inner spiritual, psychological freedom.

Both freedoms are wisdom's call. One is out there for all the world to see. The other is discovered on the way to a late evening meeting in an old building on a dark night. How appropriate. Wisdom shows up whenever we have eyes to see her and recognize her.

Courage and curiosity

Isn't it interesting that curiosity and courage seem to come together? It seems an innocent act of curiosity is a naturally spontaneous act of fearlessness. These are some seriously cool cats.

Leadership follows its own heart song

As you listen to the song in your heart, the whisper in the back of your head and that subtle sense of direction in your intuition, you may find yourself headed away from the herd.   

You were born to be a leader. You were born with the whole universe of wisdom, intelligence, power right there inside you. You don't need to go looking for it from anyone else or anywhere else.  It's right there inside you. It came with your programming, like the software on your computer. It's your natural birthright.  

You are awesome, brilliant and wise and your destiny is waiting for your acknowledgement. Only you can give life to your destiny, your future leadership.  And, certainly, if there's one thing the world needs desperately today is some solid, confident and wise leadership.

Perhaps your soul is timid and reticent about following its own inner nudging.  Maybe it's afraid of where wisdom would lead it, what challenges it might have to face, what friends it may offend, what job it might lose. 

It's so much easier to just be a follower, rather than a leader.  Leaders have to be comfortable with unpopularity, rejection, ridicule, ostracization, even abuse, poverty and loneliness. Leadership demands that you listen to your own inner self, believe in what you hear and have the courage to follow your inner guidance regardless of what others may think.

While prophets and wisemen come to mind immediately, there are those less notable persons who sit up in trees for weeks or months protesting cutting down an indigenous forest, for example.  Or there's the person who won't eat meat - for reasons stemming from loving the animals to dietary concerns - or those who are willing to share why they won't eat meat at a meeting, or why they won't drink alcohol or smoke pot or take a high paying job at a corporation that utilizes cheap workers in the third and fourth world.

In the scriptures, we hear the instruction "to shout from the housetops what you hear in secret." But, do we?  Why don't we?

When you can answer that question, you're on the path to your destiny and the world will be all the richer when you take over the helm to your life as a leader.  

So, what are you waiting for? What is holding you back?  What are you afraid of? Real leadership demands a healthy self-determination and the courage reflective of your commitment to your own heart over the fear in the pit of your stomach. 

Which is worse, in those dark hours before dawn when you pace the floors of your home, living with the nagging awareness that you are not living the life you always dreamed of and that life isn't one of wealth or power or prestige, or the discomfort and challenge of stepping out into the unknown when you step off the treadmill of your life of comfort and conformity?  

Maybe you know your life was always supposed to be something else, entirely different.  Maybe not.  But, if you're reading this and something inside you is kind of nudging you, kicking you more likely, to make a powerful life change, then maybe you are a born leader and the world needs you to have the courage to be who you really are.

Meanwhile, don't think that nagging is going to go away.  It won't if you have a destiny to be a real leader.  It will wait until you're ready, when you've finally realized that only your own wisdom is the best path for you and there will be no peace in your heart until you put on your boots, pick up your sword and start down the road, whistling your own inner song.  

We're waiting for you.

Breathtaking

Happy Valley as viewed from Mount Scott, Oregon 

Photo by Thomas Boyd of The Oregonian

Just had to share this view of Oregon. This area has been spared the ice, blizzards and deep freeze so much of the country has been experiencing. There's just enough fog to give this beautiful area a mystical airiness. The view from these mountains is just breathtaking.

Chrysalis creates beauty out of chaos

Creativity is a mysterious process of organizing diversity into a coherent whole. It is a magical way of making sense out of chaos, weaving together threds from seemingly random sources, to produce something unique and even beautiful as it follows some kind of recognizable pattern. 

All of matter is constructed in patterns, some more complicated than others, but it's all comprised of delicate patterns, lacy overlays of life, folding together in a perfect visual rhythm of movement. In fact, it only appears to be static, still, when in reality on some other dimensional level, it is actually all in motion, continuing the on-going process of creating. 

We tend to think of life as being motion, observable results constantly producing, giving, growing, but sometimes it's not.  There are those times when everything seems to come to a sudden stop. You will have been going along at full tilt, and then one day you wake up and you don't want to get out of bed.  Nothing is wrong, except that you just can't seem to get going. Suddenly, you find yourself in an empty void and it is precisely in that void, that silence, that immovable non-action, invisibility, that life is doing its best work. Life is gestating.  It is a powerful and integral process of creation and clearly evident in every aspect of life - from the butterflies to continental shifts, weather patterns and spiritual awakening out of dark nights of the soul, to entire civilizations undergoing a stagnation before awakening into a renaissance.  It is the resurrection of life after death.  It is the New Jerusalem after the Apocalypse.  It is grandiose as much as it is microscopic.  It is life, the mysterious mother invisibly at work creating more life.

It is always there and yet we human beings who love to control everything - from when we go to work to what we eat - can not stand any kind of static, non-doing, non-action in our lives.  We can't stand what we can't control and we cannot control life's process of creating. We cannot control God who is still the source of all creating. 

While you were out there actively engaged in working, doing, preparing for the holidays, everything that's exciting and alive for you, you weren't aware that your inner self was taking in information all around you at exactly that same speed and even on deeper levels, processing it all, attempting to create from all that you were being exposed to. Finally, as if in a single command from the internal spiritual conductor, your system screams, "Stop." 

Suddenly, you find yourself completely and totally blown away from too much incoming data that your mind literally shuts down. When the mind is shut down nothing can get in. 

One day we wake up only to find ourselves in a kind of cocoon.  While we may not be aware of this, it is a natural creative time of gestating something new, either while or immediately after an active time.  It may be likened to the calm after a storm. It is a time when we digest all the data, energy and information we've taken in over a period of time, all combined with a seemingly inexhaustable amout of motivation, and even vision, until the inner life processor needs to stop the in-coming data to create the next step from which you will step into the next level of life.  

It almost seems this dormant time feels wrong. It feels completely unproductive, even lazy, keeping us all holed up inside our warm homes.  Meanwhile, as this week, an arctic blast, has taken our country by storm, leaving us no alternative but to slow down and stay in, even hibernate.  

As most of the country is steeped in an arctic deep freeze, some areas are covered in snow, others ice and other areas, completely holed up due to below zero temperstures, I can imagine most of us are dealing with that frustrating state of non-doing. 

It is no surprise that after the high activity level of the holidays, the country churning after a deep recession, the closing down of our government this fall, the Middle East wars, and the rapidly changing times in general, that we as a nation would almost need a deep freeze to get us to chill out. 

It's all good.  It is mother nature's way of creating out of chaos.  As an individual butterfly crawls out of its cocoon after a period of time, a beautiful new creature, so will we.  Individually, we're all growing and as a nation (and as a world) we are growing as well.  We only seem disparaging, even teetering on global destruction, teasing ourselves into a state of terror.  But, we are not doing anything unusual.  We are gestating a new awesome creation. When you look back at old television newscasts, from even the 1960s, it's just amazing to me how far we've come.  We'd like to think fondly on the 'good old days," but they weren't good.  They were packed with falseness, in a million ways.  while we are so far from perfect it isn't funny, we are closer to it than we've ever been.  Yes, the world is in a precarious state, but there are whole sections of the world breaking into newfound states of enlightenment, minimalistic and environmentally sustainable living, more compassion for animals, children, women, minorities, cross-cultural equitable lifestyles, an overarching call to support the dignity of all of life, from whales to mitochondria.

After this global tempest passes, we will awaken one day to find that we are on the brink of a new age, a beautiful new world. In Shakespeare's classic that inspires at times like this, there is the reminder that after "all torment, trouble, " there is "wonder, amazement" as "some heavenly power guide(s) us out of this fearful country." And, "though the seas threaten, they are merciful." (The Tempest, scene 5)

It is the eternal process of creation that builds a crucible as a chrysalis and silently waits while the magical mother brings forth new life.  It takes courage to surrender our need to control, relinquish our anxiety and unbelief, and allow creation to happen.  It's all good, even if we can't control it and its outcome isn't certain. Life is happening despite us and even that is all good.