thesoulpurposedotorg

Forget the past, for it is gone from your domain! Forget the future, for it is beyond your reach! Control the present! Live supremely well now! It will whitewash the dark past, and compel the future to be bright! This is the way of the wise.

Paramahansa Yogananda

By nature, I am not a patient person. I learned the hard way that God answers prayer for patience by bringing to one’s awareness situations that require patience. I don’t pray for patience anymore! However, prayer itself is an exercise in patience…it is waiting for God who comes to us, Emmanuel himself, the Spirit herself.
To “control the present” certainly cannot mean the pitiful attempt to make everything work according to the desire of the day by sheer willpower. Control requires the utmost of patience with myself and with the situation of the moment.
I usually wait an hour past my appointment time to see my chiropractor. In the past (that dark time that is no longer within my domain) I would have walked up to the counter and demanded to know how much longer it would be and proclaim the value of my time and exclaim my displeasure. My children referred to this as “ mom getting her bitch up. See why I like this whole idea of whitewashing my past?
Today was like every other day I have visited the chiropractor. I always bring something to read and my MP3 player on which to listen. It was a snowy day today and I was the only one in the waiting room. Usually it is filled with assorted characters, many of whom appear to have very little in life. On those days, I have become accustomed to praying for each of them, focusing my attention on each one and blessing them silently. There have been times I have seen a grumpy person turn to me and smile…times I’ve seen a tear sliding down a man’s cheek..times I’ve seen a child become calm. Most of the time, I just have that unspeakable peace in the region of my heart. Today, there was none of that – just a silent waiting. As the nurse walked me to the examining room. she remarked about the snow storm and icy weather. I smiled at her and she asked me if it didn’t bother me. I said truthfully “I love the snow – it turns everything beautiful and I don’t mind driving in it. The roads in this area are always plowed and well maintained. I love it here.” She looked at me in dismay and said, “Nothing bothers you! I’ve noticed this about you. You never get upset at waiting, you are always calm and smiling. You must be the most laid back person I know!” I just smiled…and that dark past of anxious impatient control was whitewashed into the gentle power of patiently waiting and a day of living supremely well.

Advent is a spiritual season of waiting and watching which requires one to be awake and alert. I suffer from insomnia as part of a chronic illness. It’s a strange thing to wait and watch for sleep to come…not wanting to be awake or alert and yet being so. I know I’m not alone in this – insomnia plaques many adults in this turbulent time. I wonder how anyone can sleep soundly…perhaps they don’t watch the news or read it on-line. As I watch and wait, I’m learning to use this time to “control the present and to live supremely well now” in surprising ways. (see yesterday’s post for this reference)
This has become a time to repeat the “Jesus Prayer” Om Jesu Christi Misreri Nobis which means O Lord Jesus Christ, shed thy grace on us. I have learned to control my thoughts in this way. A wise man taught me that our thoughts are like creative sounds that manifest according to their own nature. Another way to put this is this: what the mind dwells upon… it becomes.
When I dwell on the peace of Christ through this ancient prayer of the heart, I awaken to that peace. A problem that might be on the back burner of my brain will take on a new shape and solve itself. Perhaps there has been someone that day who pushed my buttons…in the midst of sleeplessness transformed by prayer, I begin to see this other with compassion and to see myself through the mirror of their eyes. Often the news of the day or the debating politicos make me wonder at our future as a planet much less as a nation…..Lord Jesus Christ have mercy makes melody out of dissonance and I remember that God so passionately loves this world that he became one of us. And I watch to see how he will live through us in these turbulent times. The candidates faces waft through my mind and I pray “Lord Have Mercy” and I can see the light of Christ in their eyes even though their hearts might be filled with fear or arrogance that belies that light. Indeed, Lord Have Mercy. Then sleep comes, “God gives to his beloved sleep” the psalmist wrote and as I settle down into the arms of the beloved, sleep comes and my soul is truly awake.

It’s been a long season of writers block for this practical mystic. In a year in which my soul’s work has been one of awe and wild joy, it has also been a year of increased physical pain and aching frustration. But this, this day is the beginning of yet another year of waiting the coming of Emmanuel, awakening once again to the ever new God within us.
I began to read the Bhagavad Gita this year, or rather translations thereof. I’m about half way through the first of two volumns entitled by Paramahansa Yogananda The Bhagavad Gita: Royal Science of God-Realization reading a verse and commentary a day. I’ve been pondering this quote for a week:

Forget the past, for it is gone from your domain! Forget the future, for it is beyond your reach! Control the present! Live supremely well now! It will whitewash the dark past, and compel the future to be bright! This is the way of the wise.

page 97

And so, for this advent I am pondering what it means to control the present and live supremely well NOW as a christian in these turbulent times. What I am controlling to day is an attitude of hope, choosing hope over despair, hope rather than cynicism, hope instead of frustration, hope in contradiction to fear. Won’t you join me?

“We celebrate the death of death, the destruction of hades, the beginning of another life eternal, and leaping for joy, we hymn the Cause, the only blessed and most glorious God of our fathers. For truly sacred and all festive is this saving night, and this shining light-bearing day, the harbinger of the Resurrection, whereon the Timeless Light bodily from the tomb upon all hath shined.”

from the Russian Orthodox Prayer Book

How might life be different if we truly believed that hades has been destroyed? How different the living faith of the church universal would be if we truly, truly believed that death has lost it’s sting and hell is no more. Would we not have less need to judge, to change others into our image, to anxiously see only that which conforms to our preconceived notions of what outh to be?
I’ve been living for some time now with the conviction that there is no hell except that which we create for ourselves. Perhaps all of us, certainly I, have lived through hells of our own delulsional thought built slowly by wrong-headed descions, thoughtless actions and mindless cruelties. Tempted to see hell as something to avoid only in death by clinging to beliefs handed down to us by someone who clung to them unthinking, we become unable to see the hand of God in each simple breath of life.

On this Easter day, I joyfully proclaim “He Is Risen!” and delight in the response “He is Risen Indeed!” And I know that this life is an immense gift to embrace and with each waking hour long to see just a little more of God’s glory in preparation for the day for which all creation longs when we will be embraced by the Light. May each of you who read this embrace this Light which came into the world, always has been in the world and always will be right there in your heart.

I was ordained to the gospel ministry 20 years ago today. I remember the event well. My son read scripture (he was six years old) while my daughter played in the nursery. A group of lovely, lithe teens danced a sacred dance to the tune of Simple Gifts. My husband of those years put a stole on my shoulders and blessed me. I had no idea of what I was getting in to. It was just another step of obedience on a very long journey of divine love.
At that time, the journey was mostly within the structures of church, albiet an ecumenical understanding of church. I knew absolutely nothing of other religious expressions. Some of this journey was a running from as much as a running to. But the grace of Christ has been painfully apparent in these ensuing years. What is most evident to me now is that for all the knowledge I have gained in my brain, the truest knowledge has no words and is in my heart.
I didn’t know where this ordination would lead me. I would have been terrified if I had known it meant the continual melting of all that I thought I was and thought I knew to become merely a vessel. I was like Peter in those days – anxious to prove that I would do anything for my Lord whom I was certain I loved the best. I had no materialistic asperations other than to pay the bills. I was awed with the joy of motherhood which to this day I see as my holiest calling. But I did not know that 20 years later I would find my self living on a mountainside with my ultimate spouse melting into God’s presence in a life of prayer far from home.

The second sequence of the Pass Along Concepts conference calls on the principles of The Secret answers questions about where God is in understanding “the Secret.” It can be heard at:
http://www.passalongwebsites.com/secretcall/ndw/
In essence, life is God living us.

I have not read or seen The Secret that has been featured on Oprah but what I have heard thus far certainly expresses truths I personally have experienced. Truly living from the inside out. You can listen to the first of four sessions on the Law of Attraction for World Peace with James Twyman and James Authur Ray recorded on Wednesday February 28th. It takes about an hour to listen to – time well spent:
http://www.passalongwebsites.com/secretcall/jamesray/

Here’s an excerpt from the Introduction to the gospel according to Luke in the Message Bible :

“Most of us, most of the time, feel left out – misfits. We don’t belong . . . One of the ways we have of responding to this is to form our own club, or join one that will have us. Here is at least one place where we are “in” and others are “out” . . . The terrible price we pay for keeping all those other people out so that we can savor the sweetness of being insiders is a reduction of reality, a shrinkage of life.

“Nowhere is this price more terrible that when it is paid in the cause of religion. But religion has a long history of doing just that, of reducing the huge mysteries of God to the respectability of club rules, or shrinking that vast human community to a “membership.” But with God there are no outsiders.

“As Luke tells this story, all of us who have found ourselves on the outside looking in on life with no hope of gaining entrance (and who hasn’t felt it?) Now find the doors wide open, found and welcomed by God in Jesus.”

“God’s Spell” Luke 4:14-21; I Cor.12:12—31
January 21, 2007 UCC Greene
Rev. Peg French
Continue Reading »