Soar above the winds of war

Soar above the windswept night, into the light of love, into the shelter beyond the storm, where peace flows like a river and you are held in heaven's gentle arms forever.

Today's world is explosive.  The Middle East is waking up after sleeping through more dictators than even South America can boast of as the rest of the world watches breathlessly. Most likely every government in the world is praying its people are going to bed well fed tonight so tomorrow will be business as usual.  

Meanwhile everyone knows the economy isn't stable - in the U.S. or anywhere - and even if people everywhere do stand up or die for their right to self determination and self-government, the stage is set for some humble pie-eating years ahead for all of us. 

So, what do you do when the world is stirring insanely around you?  


Personally, I would find that place of love within to which I would surrender completely, like falling through a mile-high cloud.  I would let the love of God flood my interior world so completely that it would flow out into my life and embrace all who come near me.  

While, politically, yes, I believe in power to the people with all my being. I also believe in first receiving the power of God and then allowing the power of God move through me out into the world.  It seems to me that the only difference between a person on the street protesting and the man in the palace cowering, is that one has power and the other doesn't.  Would the one who doesn't act any differently in the future if he had that power he is seeking?  Unless he is surrendered to God, who is the One Power of the universe, he is just as vulnerable to the temptation to abuse power as those petty dictators like Egyptian President Mubarak.  

Humankind has always hungered for power and has always sought it where it is not.  If we listen to that still soft voice whispering within our hearts, calling us to its infinite reservoir of love and draw in that love, which is the only real power there is, we will find the power we seek.  It isn't in a palace or in an oil well, or on Wall Street or in your stock portfolio.  It is right here, inside you.  It is the calm behind the storm.  It is the stillness before the sound of gun shots ringing through the square.  It is in the peace that comes when you surrender to God's love, within you, and it will change your life and all of our lives, forever.

My spiritual quest began when I was 13 on a stormy Saturday night during Lent when somehow, in some incomprehensible way, the pure love of Christ outshone the chaos in my home, changing my life forever.  


While the household was spinning around me, I was there, but not there, and somehow remained completely untouched by the chaos that night. I know I often wanted to escape but the only escape was to go within, not in some soul-splitting way, but in a quiet reflective intentional way. From as far back as I can remember and throughout my life, there had always been this soft feeling in my heart that remained untouched by some of the brutality and chaos that stormed around me.  At times, when my turbulent childhood  felt threatening, somehow that soft quiet lovely place within me seemed to reach around my heart and hold me - sometimes all through the night as I sobbed away the fear that frightened me so badly then.  


That night was a cornerstone moment for me. Even today, as the Bahrain are in the streets seeking their freedom from tyranny and abusive power and Egypt is celebrating its victory marches of a week ago, and Wisconsin is stirring over a proposed anti-union bill, the March winds of Buffalo from that night still calm my frightened soul.  That long ago night, the winds off Lake Erie had been beating against the windows in our old drafty house all evening, almost like the approaching drums of war.  I realized then, as I know now and have always known since, that no matter what happens around me, it cannot and will not ever change the love I feel from our God within me.  


I didn't know then there was really another world, as I do now, or that there was a spiritual realm of such incomprehensible and ineffable beauty and power, as I do now. I didn't know then that this whole world is, as Shakespeare so perfectly described it, a mere stage and we but players on it.  It's probably the longest running non-Hollywood produced thriller.  It's epic.  I think that's all I can say about it.  It's epic. And, it's time that show goes off the air to make room for the ultimate reality show. I honestly think the ultimate reality show begins right there, in the center of your being, right there inside your beautiful mind, next to your tender compassionate heart.


I know our future is uncertain.  Maybe the world has never been as volatile as it has been this last month and still every day the news reveals more chaos.  So, maybe there never was a better time than right now to fall in love with God. There was never a better time to surrender to God's most passionate love for you and to allow yourself to give up your fear, your control, relax all your anxieties, let go of all your goals, agendas, ambitions, grievances, complaints and  plans - at least for an hour or two - and just let yourself feel God's love flow through you.  Maybe it's like learning to float on the lake when you were a child.  At first it was hard, then it was easy and then you could just float on the water all day, if someone didn't call you in.  


When I was a child, it was God's love that saved me.  Today, as an adult, it is still God's love that saves me. Only now, I share it with you.  I understand your fear.  I invite you into a world of peace, of love, where that's all there is.  It's beautiful and quiet and radiant and fragrant and it leads to a place of such power that nothing in this world even comes anywhere close to it.  Come away from the madness and let the love of God embrace you as only a great lover can. Stay awhile, as long as you can, and maybe, just maybe things will be different when you return to your life.

"Just meditate like Christ"

Free at last!!

"There's something in the soul 

that cries out for freedom."  

 - President Obama

God save the people

When wilt thou save the people?

Oh God of mercy when?

The people, Lord, the people

Not thrones and crowns,

But men

Flowers of thy heart 

O God are they

Let them not pass like weeds away

Their heritage, a sunless day

God save the people 

God save the people, not thrones ... not governments, not dark powers, not principalities, but the precious children of God's heart.  

The words of Godspell have been ringing in my heart over these past couple of weeks as I watched the news coming out of Egypt.  In so many ways, it's a miracle that the people have finally found the courage to speak out and stand up for their freedom.  


Throughout our history on Earth, people have risen up against oppression, against the cruelty of dictators and malevolent monarchs, against exploitive economic conditions and systems.  Since the beginning of recorded history, the story of the human race on Earth has always been about the liberation of the human being from any dark power over them, against any selfish force or system that would silence them, suppress their creativity, oppress their own self determination, autonomy and self expression. It has been the root of all revolutions, uprisings.  It is at the center of the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts, the Irish-British conflicts, the power struggles in Haiti for several hundreds of years.  


Today, that ancient song is now being sung in Egypt.  I truly believe that as each nation stands up for freedom and the dignity of each and every human being within its borders, the human race becomes more whole.


If collectively we are one being, one single human orchestra playing - all together - a magnificent symphony in  harmony, then we all need to play our own parts, sing our own parts, listen to our own hearts and play out of those self possessed hearts, until the whole human race resounds with the angelic chorus.  


For too long petty dictators have usurped their power, over taxed the people, manipulated and exploited the people selfishly.  The story in Egypt is archetypal, symbolic of the human struggle for freedom, and its president Mubarak is no different.  Although a humble man in the beginning of his presidency, according to veteran newsman Dan Rather, Mubarak managed to stay in power for close to 30 years while imprisoning and even torturing those who would oppose him.  Cashing in, for his own personal wealth, the billions of dollars sent to Egypt from the United States each year, he amassed more than a billion dollars which he squirreled away in a Swiss bank account while his overtaxed and overburdened people staggered under a 20 % unemployment rate.   

Shall crime bring crime forever

Strength aiding still the strong?

Is it thy will, O Father

That men shall toil

For wrong?

Oh, no, say thy mountains

No, say thy skies

Man's clouded sun shall brightly rise

And songs be heard, instead of sighs

God save the people! 

The news stories of Egypt's poverty, of whole families scouraging garbage dumps for food or items to sell, living among the tombs in graveyards for protection from the searing sun overhead, breaks my heart unbearably. It is the timeless story of man's inhumanity to man, of man's struggle for freedom - in any culture, time or nation.


As I watch the jubilation in the people's faces as they finally - after these 30 years of oppression - stand up and speak out, I am reminded of the joy that comes when we finally face the oppressor - whether political, economic or personal - and demand our freedom, our dignity, and our God-given creative rights.  


If we are each a bright star of light and power, and yet we allow a dictator or any system or person to dominate and control us, we have lost our brilliance, our divine power, and consequently lessened God's glory on Earth.  Each and every one of us must insist on our own dignity, our own right to free expression and creative freedom.  


This fight for freedom in Egypt, the birthplace of civilization, gives me hope that we are growing closer to the day when all of humanity will be free and will live up to our divine right to take our rightful place in the great human concert.  Our true maestro only asks us to play our instrument to the best of our ability, to sing from our heart.  He or She does not tell us what tune to play or how to play it, only to play with all our heart.


As I see the determination of the bright young people rallying for their freedom in Egypt, I am hopeful that this idea of freedom will spread throughout the world.  If enough people gather together there is no power that can stand in the way of a people determined to be free.  


As an American, I know this is true.  Perhaps we Americans take this for granted, but if there is only one thing that we can say with some sense of pride and dignity, our founding fathers - and not necessarily all those who led the government since - knew that all people are created equally with equal rights under God and the truth of who we were created to be, divine beings in human bodies, would not, and could not ever be realized until we were free.  The real work of our lives and souls begins then.  Once we are free, then we begin to work to find and bring forth our own inner light to realize and live by its power and creativity. 


I support Egypt's courageous pursuit of independence, and stand with all people struggling for their right to live lives of grace and dignity in full creative self expression.  I admire the courage of the people who had the sheer nerve and conviction to face whatever Mubarak's secret police might do to them. I also offer a silent prayer for their peaceful transition out of oppression and poverty into freedom and prosperity. 

Heaven overflows with love for YOU!

Heaven is always pouring its love toward us, flooding us with love, light, joy and power.  It's all around us and yet it seems sometimes we are too preoccupied to notice. I think if we knew this, really knew this, we would all turn around and run toward God with our hearts, minds and arms wide open. 


The divine draws from its own infinite source to create. Since it's clear that the divine doesn't draw its power from us, it flows toward us, offering itself to us, rather than away from us and taking from us. Heaven doesn't need anything from us.  It doesn't need a sacrifice, a slaughtered lamb or a long lingering fast or even alms and tithes.  


God's love really only wants to love and by receiving God's love, the flow is opened.  As part of creation, the divine flows toward us (as it does for all of creation) to evolve us, uplift, empower and continue its creation of us. 

Underlying some religions is the idea that we must serve God, that we must sacrifice to God. Tandem to that, is the idea that if we fail we will somehow be punished.  It seems to me that if that were true, the whole world would really be a horribly mean sham.  It seems incongruent with the God of creation.

I have come to realize that many of us have been duped for way too long.  We've been blindly believing the biggest fallacy out there which consequently has led many to dismiss the whole God subject.

God does not judge, nor condemn, nor criticize because love does not judge, nor condemn, rather it is allowing, accepting, believing, nurturing, building, healing. God loves with a power beyond our wildest imagination. Judgment, condemnation, criticism stunt creativity, stifle the flow from the heart by instilling fear. I think it may be challenging for us, who live in a world completely run on the idea of judgment and punishment, to shift away from that idea and accept that love is allowing rather than controlling. If we as a world can step away from the fear of God, and embrace love, I truly believe the world would cease its endless fear-based conflict in no time.


If we really knew that God only wants to give to us,  lovingly, tenderly, patiently completely without judgment, innocently, without guile, deceit and very much without an agenda, our lives and our world might be very different. I can't help wondering what that would look like.  


I think we have misunderstood what "giving up our lives" for God meant.  I am convinced that when Jesus told us that to receive life, we must give up our lives, he was talking about giving up the empty masks we wear, which we think are our lives and in which we are so heavily invested. He actually only asks us to give up our fears and dramas in exchange for real lives of freedom and love, given to us when we receive God's love.

Over  the ages, God sent messengers,  prophets, wise men and women to tell us that we are made in God's image, and God loves us and wants us to drink from his great stream of life the love, power, joy and creativity in order to grow up and fully realize our potential as God's children. 


I have come to realize that while God does not ask us for anything other than an open, receptive heart and mind, that is not a small thing either.  God's love is alive, catalyzing, enlivening, empowering and has a kind of life of its own.  It will change us.  It will cause us to enter an entirely new reality, a real life, a life of love focused on giving, rather than seeking for ourselves.  I think we would find that we would only want to give which may be why Jesus said it was more blessed to give than to receive.  


Love's essential nature is to give, to extend, to create, to increase and so by giving, it accomplishes its nature.  By accepting God's love, we are accepting life itself which takes us to a whole new and wonderful level and experience of being alive.

Slowing down time to change the future

What if we could slow down time, blow pedals off a flower and watch them gracefully float by or watch a hummingbird wing his gentle way to a flower pot, all in slow motion? What if in that moment in which we do slow down time, if we could even alter the path of things usually moving by so quickly that we are caught off guard - as in Superman stopping a bullet in mid-air?


I think it's a matter of perception and conscious awareness. If we don't know ( as in, forget our former preconceptions) that we can't, maybe we can.  I mean, for example, if we don't think that big bully is going to beat us up, then we might not react to him or act as if he's going to, possibly triggering his lower beating-you-up nature, and rather he simply walks past us, smiling.  I wonder if our perception or learned expectation of someone leads us to unknowingly act a certain way which actually triggers that person to behave as expected. I wonder, instead, if we expected something better, might we get something better?


In school, I remember my history teacher telling the class that we needed to learn history so we could have an overall understanding of the world today, since tomorrow's news is the continuum of yesterday's history. That seemed to make sense, then.


Today, it makes no sense to me whatsoever and, in fact, may just be why we are still engaged in wars and shootings and strutting around carrying guns in holsters because we all still think it's 1776 or the mid-1880s in the wild west. 


Why don't we junk the past. I mean, leave the history book on the shelf, and begin all over again, right now, in this very minute. Let's see if we can literally unhinge the future from the past and give it a fresh new chance by creating a kind of virtual time gap here in the present, which Eckhardt Tolle calls "The Now."


If we can mentally banish the past from our perspective and reaction process for the moment, and look on every single new event with brand new, innocent as a newborn baby's eyes, we may not be so quick to the draw or the battlefield.  We just may see things a whole lot differently, even more kindly, more lovingly, more creatively. 


Doesn't it seem like time stops when you're playing or creating something? Perhaps your consciousness has shifted into a stream of conscious creativity, surging up from the depths of your being. You have literally entered into a zone of timelessness.


I wonder if we could do it at will, whenever we wanted? What if we extended our consciousness of this present moment and took a deep breath and invited God into the moment and invited God to help us be wiser, more loving and help us make the best responses, so we could create a more beautiful future?  Does the past really have to define the future too?  

What if every moment was created this way, by slowing down our response to any and all situations and waiting and inviting God into that time gap? It seems kind of revolutionary, but what if this very moment, we stopped thinking about what's going to happen (as we expect it might) in the next moment, and realized that time could be stretched vertically rather than the usual time-line horizontal? I wonder if we could stretch this moment consciously into a kind of spiritual depth, all the way down into the fathomless depths of consciousness, to allow the power of divinity to surge up into our hearts and decision-making? What if we slowed down our minds and invited God's presence into our consciousness as we looked again at any given situation or encounter with fresh eyes, cleansed of our past conditioning?


A scene from Star Trek's "Insurrection" in which time is slowed down has always intrigued me. Captain Picard goes to the Ba'ku planet, where the Federation and their Son'a allies are conducting a cultural survey. The Ba'ku seem at first to be a simple race of only six hundred people, living in one village on their isolated world. But when Picard meets a Ba'ku woman, Anij, with whom he falls in love, he gradually learns that there is more to her people than meets the eye.


 She, like most of her fellow Ba'ku, is more than three hundred years old. In a scene in which Captain Picard and Anij are rescuing the children from Son'a invaders who want to take over the planet due to its metaphasic radiation that reverses aging, she gives him a slowing down time demonstration. She intrigues Picard by blowing pedals off a flower which float magically through the air in slow motion. She has learned, in fact her entire race has learned, how to enter into that eternal "Now" to access the creative and healing power of the divine, which isn't in the future, but rather is right here, right now, in the depth of this very moment. The Ba'ku have learned how to stay eternally present, which may also effect their perpetual youthfulness.


This may seem like graduate or doctoral level "mindfulness," and for now it may just be an idle idea. Or, perhaps, it could be an invitation to open our minds even wider to a possible way of thinking about life, a way that may lead us deeper into love with life, each other and even ourselves and thereby increase our own power to invent even better lives and an even better world.

You are the light of the world

Do you remember who you are?


Can you remember when you were a child and the world was a huge, wonderful and mysterious place for you to explore?  You loved to see pictures of animals and exotic foreign places around the world.  Remember? You probably didn't even care what the words were in your favorite story books, you would lean way around your mother or father to see the pictures.  It was all wonderful and all you wanted to do was get out there and see, smell, hear and feel everything around you.


So, what's happened?  Are you still that child, are you still a little explorer who has a thirst and curiosity for life?  Is your day still about finding a way to laugh and sing or run through the fields with your friends, or climb the neighbors fence just to feel the thrill of getting way up high, of swimming just to feel the water around you or riding a horse to feel his strong body beneath yours and see the world from up high?  Can you remember riding in a truck and barely being able to get your little legs up on the step to lift yourself up high in the vehicle?


Who were you, really, then?  Did you think you were someone other than that little mind inside your litltle body that just wanted to have fun?  No.  You did not.  You never ever gave it a single thought.  You just wanted to play and be happy and be with your friends and explore this beautiful world TOGETHER.


But, today, so many of us who were once little playful explorers, are tied down to depreciating house values, low level jobs, maybe full of the woes of other people's worries, too.  We forgot how to laugh, a long time ago.  We fell into the trap of thinking that we had to "find ourselves," as if we'd ever lost ourselves.  But, the sad truth is we had lost ourselves as we were taught to identify our talents and then put them to work in a field that suits us, and then before we knew it we went out there looking for a "suit" that fits us, an "out there" identity to replace that natural, free, joyful self with which we came into the world.


We forgot.  We all forgot and then we got lost in our forgetfulness.  The sad truth is our exterior identity is not us.  It is not real.  It is like putting on a mask and saying we are that mask.  The mask is not us.  We are that presence, that pure presence of radiant delight and curiosity and creativity and friendship, that is being covered up by the mask.


The Gospel says, "Blessed are the poor in spirit for they shall inherit the kingdom of God."  You might wonder why the poor in spirit would inherit a kingdom?  Simply, because they never found a mask that fitted and so remained there in the kingdom of Heaven, spiritually.  The Gospel says only those who are like children can enter the kingdom of God, probably because they never left it.  We come into the world as little angels, but we lose our beautiful bright angelic lights because the world tells us that we need to put on these masks and be successful, make a lot of money so we can have a lot of stuff, so we can show everyone around us that we're very good - very, very good and so deserving of praise, money and prestige, even status and power.  But, in the end, when the game is over and the mask rolls us, what is left?  Who is there?  Was it worth it?  You answer that.


If we were to return to that state of innocence in which we arrived here, and rather than put a mask on and work very hard to diminish the joy and light and free spontaneity children are minded not to be, if we were to turn back the clock a few decades, and start again, maybe we could or would embellish upon that light that flickered for a few years in the sunlight of our childhoods and allow it to grow, fan the embers of God's spirit within us, and allow it to grow and mature, and then who would we be?  Then, what kind of power might we have, what would we do with that power, with all that joy, with all that curiosity and friendship-building?  


I truly believe it is never too late - even if you are 100 years old - to take off the mask and plunge back into the radiante beings of light, of joy, of peace, of playful creativity, that we once were.  It's never too late to embrace the joyful natures we were born with and in that embrace, surrender all the worries and care of our lives to the great Source of all life, the One who created us and loves us and waits longingly for our return.  


We are, each and every one of us, the light of the world.  Together, we are an amazing blaze of glory that would be seen throughout the universe, if only we would each take off the mask, and let our individual lights shine.  Lately, I've noticed more and more people stepping into the gap in kindness, embracing "the child" whether it's a little nine-year-old girl who was shot in Tucson or a little six-year-old who, as she was singing the national anthem, lost power to her microphone and the entire stadium of fans, sang along with her.  


Maybe as we return to our own state of childhood, take off the mask, and put on the courage to be a child again, remember who we are, then our little lights would all begin to shine more brightly, a light that would shine as brightly as a star throughout the cosmos.  Just maybe.  I know for me, that is my goal and my hope for myself and all of us.