Love is Kind
Love is patient, love is kind… It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres… Love never fails… And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
~~1 Corinthians 13
I thought a lot about those verses from 1 Corinthians the last week or so. They are often used at weddings as the example of pure love, of how we are to interact with another, but the full verse is the example of God’s Love for us. But I think they are also an aspiration for many of us, one that I don’t live out as well as I’d like, if I get honest.
I have been a total blogger slacker for nearly a month now and I’m not quite sure where that time went. Let’s see…In the last month I’ve been to or through six states and covered over 2000 miles in that time. I’ve been on retreat, climbed to the tops of some ginormous hills and sat by some glorious fires. I slept outside under the stars and thought I was going to freeze to death one of those nights. I drove an enormous damn moving truck to Florida and then across the state again. I saw my first live alligator and osprey. I took some great pictures, laughed a LOT, cried some and then made some fairly major decisions about some things. It’s been a wild ride, as life often is. But along the way, I was thinking of those verses from Corinthians. I was thinking about how much I’d like to live up to them and how often I don’t. And how that’s where the grace of God always moves, because as it is expressed there, God is patient. God is kind. God never fails. So that means that even when I drop the ball, God is there to catch it, to catch me. I find this enormously comforting.
I love words, love to see what they really mean, as opposed to what I might think they mean. “Love” can be translated in so many ways, going back to the ancients…agape, eros and so on. The word “kind” traces back to the word “kin,” meaning “family,” and traces back from there to share the root word for genus, meaning “to produce.” All of that to say that when Love is kind, it is loaded with meaning. Each small phrase means so much in deep context. True Love produces safety and comfort, the space and patience to produce fruit that can last.
Of course this got me wandering down the lane of my own convoluted thoughts and I have been thinking about Love and God and kindness and patience all week. I’m always trying to balance my gypsy soul with the call to stay in one place…to find the balance between my inner Lover and my inner runner; to forgive the places where I am not patient nor kind with myself or others; to balance my deep, heartfelt desire to be patient and kind with the truth that I drop that ball a lot.
This has been a rough year for a lot of folks I know and they are beginning to wear quite thin in the areas of patience. It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes by Miller Williams,
Have compassion for everyone you meet,
even if they don’t want it.
What appears bad manners, an ill temper or cynicism
is always a sign of things no ears have heard,
no eyes have seen.
You do not know what wars are going on down there where the spirit meets the bone.
In this deep time, I thought I’d pass along some thoughts on Love, from 1 Corinthians 13. If you are so inclined, where you see the word Love, feel free to translate that as “God,” and let those thoughts fill and comfort you.
If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast,but do not have love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
Peace and blessings to all. I hope this finds all of you resting in the Big Love.
Night moon 🙂
The Fun Theory
Can you make people want to do things they should, just by making it fun? The fine, fun and ever creative folks at Fun Theory think so! They have done projects aimed at getting folks to recycle glass, throw away trash and obey the speed limit. But my favorite is getting people to take the stairs for a little exercise. Check this out, and have fun! 🙂
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lXh2n0aPyw]
Big-Beautiful-Wonderful
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?~~From The Summer Day, by Mary Oliver
It’s a gorgeous here, an Indian Summer day that begged me to, as John Muir once said, “Grab a bag of tea and a loaf of bread and hop the back fence into the wilderness.” So I did, and I did so as a prayer. I wandered and watched the trees flex their muscles and waltz with the breezes, limbs doing yoga, rising and falling like the breath of some Great Being in love with Its own Creation. While the wind whispered her sunny autumn songs and played with my hair, I watched deer and hawks and squirrels stop in awe of this perfect day, all of us being idle and blessed. I wandered around on a tie-dyed carpet of autumn forest, and I thought about prayers… what a prayer is and how that gets played out in our lives, about all the fences into the wilderness of our souls, about these wild and precious lives we are given.
I’m honestly not sure what’s happening out there, but a lot of people are feeling rather anxious and experiencing a lot of fear, confusion and grief. I’m watching a lot of people around me deal with a lot of things…broken hearts, broken glass, broken bones, sick and dying parents, lots of questions about what love and faith and prayer means in times like this. The truth is that I don’t know either, but I have my own stories about it, and they bring me some comfort and hope, so I thought I’d share that.
First, it’s always helpful to me to remember that somewhere on this planet, 24/7, people are praying for us…The Jews at the Wailing Wall, the contemplatives of all stripes in monasteries all over the world, the Buddhists in faraway temples, Muslims at the Kaaba, the folks at Global Peace Project and Neve Shalom, and many, many more. Imagine that! Somewhere on this planet, no matter what time of day, someone is praying for us, for YOU. For your peace, for the end to suffering, for health and wellness and abundance, for shalom, for us to remember All is One.
Beyond that, I often find it helpful to remember a Buddhist piece of wisdom regarding times like these. There is a belief in Tibetan Buddhism that says when your world starts to crumble and everything appears as though it’s falling apart, it’s time to step back and get still, to just be with that a minute. I think a lot of us were raised to believe that when things “go wrong,” it is obvious evidence that we are somehow bad people or at fault in some way, but in Buddhism the belief is much different. As it was explained to me, when that many things get wacky all at once, it doesn’t mean I have done something wrong. It actually means that the gods are trying to birth something big and beautiful and wonderful in my life, and they know if I am not distracted I will get my sticky little fingers all over it. The Powers That Be just want to be left alone to create something beyond my wildest dreams, so like redirecting a toddler, the gods distract me so the Big-Beautiful-Wonderful can get itself born. I have seen this happen over and over again, have experienced it so many times that I believe it to be true.
I was talking to a good friend about all of this, about how we try live our lives out as prayers, about all the suffering in the world…toxic sludge in rivers and in our emotions, in our politics and in so many places. But there are also so many kind and skillful people out there to meet those needs, to engage the suffering and work to heal it and bring relief. There are many places of opportunity for the Big-Beautiful-Wonderful to get itself born and for us to be the answer to someone’s prayer. I also see how this unnerves people, to think they could be used by God in some way, to become part of the Big-Beautiful-Wonderful for someone else, but it’s always been that way. And I suspect it will continue to always be that way, for which I am enormously grateful.
All of the prophets and “chosen people” of God have been afraid of their call, never believing they were “good” enough to be used by God. But as the saying goes, God doesn’t call the equipped, God equips the called. Moses stuttered. The Prophet Jeremiah said he was too young. Gandhi tried to be a lawyer but was afraid to speak in public. Mohammad and Elijah ran away and hid in caves. Mother Theresa thought she would just teach school. The Prophet Isaiah said he couldn’t do it because he “was a man of unclean lips.” I love this, Isaiah the prophet and poet a potty mouth– It gives me some hope for my own unclean lips 😉 All of the people from each tradition have said they couldn’t do it, all were afraid and tried to avoid God and their call. But I’ve come to believe that’s part of the prayer too, part of living this wild and precious life.
I believe prayer is always heard and somehow answered, even if it doesn’t appear to be so on the surface. I believe the work we do and the prayers we say help no matter what. I believe that by giving into the flow of the prayers of others, we get sticky with that Big-Beautiful-Wonderful nectar too, all sharing in the abundance because All is One. In God’s economy nothing is wasted, so sometimes I get to have my prayers answered, and other times get to be the answer to a prayer, and somehow that all ends up being the same thing. So I’m not sure what a prayer is, but I do know when we pay attention to the glory, the abundance and the need around us, all of that begins to look as if it is One and the Mystery somehow deepens and yet opens at the same time. And how cool is that?
Sometimes seeing so much suffering in the world is just overwhelming. But there is also so much good and beauty and joy in the world. I think the confusion arises in thinking I have to go “out there” somewhere to meet the need, that it has to be a healing center or build a city on a hill or be another Mama T in India. But the truth is that Jesus said to everyone, “You are the Light of the World.” One of my favorite stories about this is from Father Gregory Boyle, the founder of Homeboy Industries.
In 1992, as a response to the civil unrest in Los Angeles, Fr. Greg launched his first business, Homeboy Bakery. The mission was to create an environment that provided training, work experience, and above all, the opportunity for rival gang members to work side by side. The success of the Bakery created the groundwork for additional businesses, thus prompting an independent non-profit organization, Homeboy Industries, in 2001. Today Homeboy Industries’ nonprofit economic development enterprises include merchandise, retail shops and cafes. Undoubtedly, innumerable prayers have been answered through just this one organization. But I bet those answering prayers have had some of their own blessings too, because we are all the Light of the world.
When discussing how to live as a prayer, Fr. Greg says,
Jesus says, “You are the light of the world.” I like even more what Jesus doesn’t say. He does not say, “One day, if you are more perfect and try really hard, you’ll be light.” He doesn’t say “If you play by the rules, cross your T’s and dot your I’s, then maybe you’ll become light.” No. He says, straight out, “You are the light.” It is the truth of who you are, waiting only for you to discover it. So, for God’s sake, don’t move. No need to contort yourself to be anything other than who you are.
I love that. So from civil unrest arose something which remains Big-Beautiful-Wonderful, and like everything it just evolved from one thing to another. I love that we don’t have to try so hard. I love that maybe the thing we are supposed to do with our Big-Beautiful-Wonderful lives is to live in the question of our own prayers and perhaps then live as if we believe we are the answer to the prayers of others. It’s good to have needs and ask for help–it allows someone else to be the answer to your prayers, and so the blessings extend far and wide. That’s a good thing. As the writer of Hebrews says,
Let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds.
– Hebrews 10:24
So tonight, first a shout out to all of you who have always been and continue to be an answer to my prayers–I bow in humble gratitude. I hope I can be the same type of blessing for all of you. And for all of those experiencing a loss of hope or faith, feeling anxious or overwhelmed, saddened or grieved–may you experience the Big-Beautiful-Wonderful and remember the beauty of your own Light, and remember you are not alone, and prayers abound for your health, healing, peace and wholeness.
Peace and blessings,
T
A Day of Mindfulness seminar and retreat
This is an event fyi…I have known Bridget for years, she’s a great teacher, this promises to be a lovely day. There is a lovely labyrinth at Mercy Center as well if you make it out there.
peace 🙂
Taking Refuge in the Present Moment
Saturday, November 6, 2010 – 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM
** Optional 2nd retreat day, Sunday, November 7, 9:00 AM to 2:00 PM Sunday **
Mercy Center, 2039 N. Geyer Rd, St Louis, MO
By Donation *
Sylvia Boorstein defines mindfulness in this way: Mindfulness is the aware, balanced acceptance of present experience. . . It isn’t more complicated than that. It is opening to or receiving the present moment, pleasant or unpleasant, just as it is, without either clinging to it or rejecting it.” This kind of non-judgmental awareness allows us to find a refuge from suffering in each present moment of our lives. The retreat will support us in deepening our practice so that mindfulness may provide a place of rest in the midst of the challenges of life. The day of mindfulness is open to both beginning and experienced meditators. Those who wish to extend their retreat practice into 2 days may do so.
Teacher
Bridget Rolens, MA, BSOT, has practiced Insight Meditation since 1997. Recognized by the Spirit Rock Teachers Council as a Community Dharma Leader she co-leads the St. Louis Insight Meditation weekly meditation group, teaches classes and workshops, and leads retreats. As Vice-president of Mid America Dharma she has been instrumental in bringing nationally known dharma teachers to the Midwest to teach and has managed numerous retreats for the organization. In 2007 she completed Matthew Flickstein’s “Teaching as a Form of Practice.” She is also the program facilitator for Masterpeace Studios’ Mind-Body Stress Reduction (MBSR) program in Crestwood, MO.
** Space Limited – You must pre-register to attend **
To register please send your name, phone number, home address and email address, with a $20 administration fee to Bridget Rolens, 3934 Arsenal Street, St. Louis, MO 63116
Please make checks payable to Bridget Rolens
For more information call 314-369-1391 or email bridget@pathwaystomindfulness.com.
Bring a non-perishable lunch and any bottled water or special beverage you wish, both days. Tea will be provided throughout the retreat.
*Please note that the registration fee covers only facility rental and other overhead. Teacher compensation is by donation (dana). Scholarships are available to those in need of financial assistance.
Sponsored by St Louis Insight Meditation Group www.insightstlouis.org
Rest for your souls…
Stand at the crossroads and look; ask about the ancient paths, “Which one is the good way?” Take it, and you will find rest for your souls…
~~Jeremiah 6:16
I snapped this picture when we had just hiked over Skull Bridge, at the Continental Divide Trail (CDT) near Abiquiu, New Mexico. The Trail head is just over that bridge and heads south into the Rio Chamas Wilderness area, a gorgeous place no matter what time of year. I wrote about this trip recently in a post titled Smile at Fear; if you are interested, you can read that entry from the Blessings Blog here.
It’s funny to me how small the world seems when I sit at my desk and type, when I can instantly communicate with someone in Nashville or Australia, when I can click a few buttons and pretty much anything I want is at my fingertips. But the world takes on whole new dimensions when you are actually out in it. I am often filled with wonder and a deep sense of unease that it is easier to speak with someone hundreds of miles away via text than it is to walk across the street to talk to a neighbor. I have a house full of things my grandmother’s generation was told would save time and make life easier and I suppose in some ways they do. But time for what? More work? TV? Stress? Family and friends? What do we do with this supposed extra time and ease we were granted? We live in a world moving so fast that when something takes mere seconds I say it is moving slowly. But that’s when I’m inside, dealing with the non-human, unnatural world. Traipsing around on a trail that literally runs from Mexico to Canada makes the whole thing suddenly come into a more realistic perspective.
One of the reasons I love hiking is that the planet truly takes on a whole new dimension when you are walking through it– deserts and woods are not like other places. For one thing, they are just huge, but more than that they are full of wonder and scenery, challenge and solitude, hope and a sense that we are not alone. Interestingly, when I get away from all the stuff that is supposed to save me time, I have all the time in the world. When I get way from the hustle of the millions of people on the planet, the less alone I feel. Wilderness trails offer a chance to reconnect to myself and in doing so I reconnect to my God as well. I love the water, but put me on a trail anywhere, especially in the mountains or the woods, and I have found my bliss. A path simply takes you from one civilized place to another, but a trail…Ah, a trail takes you from what we like to call civilization into the unknown. I believe the further we travel into the unknown, the more we travel the path the ancients knew led to the Heart. By doing so, we allow the soul to take the ancient paths which lead to peace and rest. I think of Augustine’s line,
My soul is restless, O God, until it finds rest in You…
There is something so comforting about knowing that just as this area on the CDT was traveled for centuries before Europeans “discovered” America, so too has the Path of Life has been journeyed for generations before me. The Prophet Jeremiah wrote those words about ancient paths sometime around 600 B.C.E. We really haven’t changed that much in all of the years we’ve roamed this planet…we’ve always been restless, we’ve always sought rest for our weary souls. Leaders and subjects come and go, tides ebb and flow, children are born and someday die in old age, relationships are complicated and endure, money is made and lost and on and on. Cravings have always been with us, as has emotional pain and bliss, but time marches on and the search for meaning transcends generations. This has always been the nature of humans and I assume this will continue on long after I am gone from this body. Our technology has changed, but deep down we all want the same things we’ve always wanted…health, love, safety, joy, freedom from suffering, the chance to live and love and enjoy those with whom we live and love. These are the ancient paths we all walk, and while the details may change, the human story is pretty much the same over time.
The ancient paths are the ones I think we all long for in our depths…we all long to connect to ourselves and loved ones, to something greater than ourselves and to all Life can offer. Tillich said the word “solitude” reflects the joy of being alone, while the word “lonely” reflects the pain of being alone. We all need to have time alone to walk the path, to feel the pain and the joy of that “alone-ness” at times. And while it is comforting to know others have gone before me and I am never alone, the truth is that it is still my path to walk and the choice is mine to walk it. Growth is optional and not everyone chooses it, but that is also an ancient path. Buddha said, “You cannot travel the path until you become the path itself,” and I realize more and more how true that is. As they say in Zen, the obstacle is the path, and we can only truly travel that path with an open heart. What fascinates me is that we all have teachers and endless opportunities to open to the path, but we can only apply the lessons within if we choose to do so with an open heart and mind. So we all travel the path, but our choices can lead to a path of heartache or one of joy. As usual, discernment is the key.
What the ancients knew, that we all must learn, is that the good path will only open to us as much as we can or will give ourselves to it, without judgment of ourselves or others. In doing so, eventually we find what all the mystics tell us over and over about the path…such as, we are not punished for our anger, but we can be harmed by our anger. We are not rewarded for our good deeds, we are rewarded by them, including the ways in which our immunity and our cellular structure becomes stronger and more resilient as we practice compassion and joy. The deeper we go, the more love and humility and compassion we find, thus the more rest we find for our weary souls, which leads to more compassion and humility. I’ve come to believe essence of true humility is knowing I am neither too much nor too little, and that I don’t have to prove myself to anyone—even me. But that was one of the lessons of my path, I didn’t come in with that understanding at all. Like all of us, I grew into it and hopefully will learn to walk this path with a wise heart.
Just as Jesus said to love one’s neighbor as self, and Buddha said there is no one more deserving of your love than you, we all have to walk the path of embracing our own goodness. We have all faced demons and struggled on the path. We have all embraced the path or run from it, not realizing it was all still the same path. We have all had conflicts with parents or children, friends or bosses, teachers, lovers and maybe even someone we called an enemy. But choosing the good path leads to rest, and a rested soul is a wise soul, and wise souls usually come to understand the conflict is within, not outside of us somewhere. Thus they seek the wise path of peace.
We all walk these ancient paths, and the paths often diverge into addictions and an experience of suffering. The path always eventually leads to the same place of Home, but not everyone knows to ask up front, “Which one is the good one?” But the Universe, in all of its gracious abundance, always lights the path before us until we know to ask, until the answers become clear. Because this too is the nature of the path, leading us from one civilized place to another, ever offering the Light yet another day. Gautama Buddha addressed this hundreds of years ago with his own disciples, hoping to shed a light on the path for them, yet hoping they would also take responsibility for illuminating it themselves. He said to them,
All that we are is the result of what we have thought. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him. If a man speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves him.
But do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.
So today, for all of us standing at the crossroads and asking, ‘Which one is the good way?’ I wish you peace and clarity, and rest for your souls.
peace 🙂
Massage benefits…
From a recently published study…At some level I think it’s appropriate to file this in the “duh” category, but there is also good data here 🙂 If you would like to see more data on this type of thing, I have several links on the Blessings Enterprises website, as well as on the Spirituality of Grief blog.
This is a cut/paste from the New York Times article, you can read the whole thing here.
Regimens: Massage Benefits Are More Than Skin Deep
By RONI CARYN RABIN
Published: September 20, 2010
Does a good massage do more than just relax your muscles? To find out, researchers at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles recruited 53 healthy adults and randomly assigned 29 of them to a 45-minute session of deep-tissue Swedish massage and the other 24 to a session of light massage.
All of the subjects were fitted with intravenous catheters so blood samples could be taken immediately before the massage and up to an hour afterward.
To their surprise, the researchers, sponsored by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, a division of the National Institutes of Health, found that a single session of massage caused biological changes.
Volunteers who received Swedish massage experienced significant decreases in levels of the stress hormone cortisol in blood and saliva, and in arginine vasopressin, a hormone that can lead to increases in cortisol. They also had increases in the number of lymphocytes, white blood cells that are part of the immune system.
Volunteers who had the light massage experienced greater increases in oxytocin, a hormone associated with contentment, than the Swedish massage group, and bigger decreases in adrenal corticotropin hormone, which stimulates the adrenal glands to release cortisol.
The study was published online in The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. The lead author, Dr. Mark Hyman Rapaport, chairman of psychiatry and behavioral neurosciences at Cedars-Sinai, said the findings were “very, very intriguing and very, very exciting — and I’m a skeptic.”
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