Learning to Recover From Falling

Growth, Life, Parenting, Redemption 0

We are not helping our chldren by always preventing them from what might be necessary falling, because you learn how to recover from falling by falling! It is precisely by falling off the bike many times that you eventually learn what the balance feels like. The skater pushing both right and left eventually goes where he or she wants to go. People who have never allowed themselves to fall are actually off balance, while not realizing it at all. That is why they are so hard to live with. Please think about that for a while.

— Richard Rohr, Falling Upward, p. 28

Still the Same

Faith, God, Growth, Joy, Truth 0

If we could get a little perspective, we’d see how absurd it is to hold, on the one hand, that the Gospels are the definitive word on Jesus, while holding, on the other, that he doesn’t behave like that anymore. God gives us his Son, and grounds the record for all time in the four Gospels. This is who Jesus is. Against all other claims, doctrines, accounts, this is Jesus Christ. But then — as many Christians have been led to believe — God changed the rules. “That’s not available to you now.” You can’t reach out to him in faith as did the woman with the issue of blood and be healed by his life as she was. You can’t cry out to him and have him deliver you of a foul spirit. You can’t lean upon his breast in intimacy.

It’s psychotic.

It’s also blasphemy. He is the same, yesterday, today, and forever.

Let’s be honest. What is usually going on — what has proven true in every case I have ever encountered — is something more like this: “I don’t experience Jesus personally, so we must not as a rule be able to experience him personally.” Or, “I don’t experience Jesus like that (his playfulness, generosity, freedom, intimacy), so he mustn’t do that any more.”

— John Eldredge, Beautiful Outlaw, p. 156-157

Everything to Gain

Faith, God, Growth, Prayer 0

What do I lose when I have a praying life? Control. Independence. What do I gain? Friendship with God. A quiet heart. The living work of God in the hearts of those I love. The ability to roll back the tide of evil. Essentially, I lose my kingdom and get his. I move from being an independent player to a dependent lover. I move from being an orphan to a child of God.

— Paul E. Miller, A Praying Life, p. 125-126

Song Lines

Core Value, Growth, Joy, Life 0

If I want to live my ability to be fully present and compassionate, my ability to be with it all — the joy and the sorrow — I must find the ways, the people, the places, the practices that support me in being all I truly am. I must cultivate ways of being that let me feel the warmth of encouragement against my heart when it is weary. I must be fiercely and compassionately honest with myself about those choices and actions that are inconsistent with my deepest nature and soul’s desires. I must find the song lines that run through my life, the melodies that remind me of what I really am and call me gently back to acting on this knowing. I must learn how to dance.

— Oriah Mountain Dreamer, The Dance, p. 13

The Secret of Life

Compassion, Growth, Life 0

You will go through your life thinking there was a day in second grade that you must have missed, when the grown-ups came in and explained everything important to the other kids….

But there was not such a day in school. No one got the instructions. That is the secret of life. Everyone is flailing around, winging it most of the time, trying to find the way out, or through, or up, without a map. This lack of instruction manual is how most people develop compassion, and how they figure out to show up, care, help, and serve, as the only way of filling up and being free. Otherwise, you grow up to be someone who needs to dominate and shame others, so no one will know that you weren’t there the day the instructions were passed out.

I know exactly one other thing that I hope will be useful: that when electrical things stop working properly, ninety percent of the time you can fix them by unplugging the cord for two or three minutes. I’m sure there’s a useful metaphor here.

— Anne Lamott, Some Assembly Required, p. 91-92

Cooling Emotional Fires

Growth, Peace, Relationships 0

The destructive effects of anger are easily recognized. When even mild annoyance arises it can quickly grow and overwhelm us. Inner peace is lost. If we look at how anger arises we see that it usually happens when we feel unheard, unseen, or unfairly treated. If in that moment we look within, we may sense a feeling that anger can help us get even with the offending person or change the vexing situation. So the anger that arises can seem to have value, but in reality it cannot. There might be some logic to responding with anger if it could negate the offense that has taken place, but that cannot happen because the deed has already occurred. So anger cannot reduce or prevent the perceived wrong. In fact, if we react to a situation in an angry way instead of with patience, not only is there no benefit, but negative energy is created, which is likely to exacerbate a volatile situation. Further, when intense anger arises, it impedes our ability to use sound judgment and envision the consequences of our actions. Anger, annoyance, and impatience deplete energy. Patient effort strengthens our resources. We need to practice cooling emotional fires and alleviating fierce disruptions in our lives. The benefits of developing greater patience will be felt in all our relationships: intimate, casual, professional, as well as that all-important relationship, the one we have with ourselves.

— Allan Lokos, Patience, p. 22-23

Spiritual Activism

Faith, Growth, Life 0

There is nothing more radically activist than a truly spiritual life, and there is nothing more truly spiritual than a radically activist life. If you fight for peace with an unpeaceful spirit, you guarantee that unintended consequences will trump your intended ones. If you struggle fora sustainable economy with unsustainable effort, you guarantee your own failure. The earth’s outer ecology will, inevitably, mirror our inner ecology. So there can be no lasting poverty reduction in society unless we grapple with greed reduction in the soul. If we want loving relationships, joyful communities, and peaceful nations in society, we must cultivate an inner fecundity of Spirit. That, of course, is no argument for passive pietism and quietism; it is, rather, a call to the most costly, radical activism, the one that calls us to be the change we want to see in the world. It is the call to be the light of the world — not merely to complain that the world is too dark. It is the call to be the salt of the earth — not merely to protest the world’s rottenness. It’s fruitless to argue being versus doing: you can’t do what you won’t be.

— Brian D. MacLaren, Naked Spirituality, p. 237

What Can I Learn?

Growth, Healing, Trials 0

Symbolic perceptions allow us to see that the real meaning of a crisis lies in showing us what we need to learn about ourselves. To blame the other players in our drama for helping to teach us what we need to learn is the height of foolishness. If, for example, I need to learn what it feels like to have something stolen from me, then anyone capable of stealing will do as my teacher. Spending my life resenting a particular “teacher” — waiting for the moment when I can punish the thief or make him feel guilty for all my years of mourning my loss — ultimately interferes with my learning process.

— Caroline Myss, Why People Don’t Heal and How They Can, p. 90

Training Grounds

Compassion, Forgiveness, Growth, Healing, Trials 0

Some of the most amazing people we meet are people with the worst personal stories. Their stories were their training grounds and the laboratories of understanding that became their greatest gifts to others. They discovered that once they digested and released the energy of sorrow and trauma, it was replaced by a large capacity for compassion, wisdom, and a passion to contribute to the well-being of others. The degree of personal greatness some people achieve is directly related to the amount of forgiveness they had to do. In this way, self-healing is intimately related to living a purposeful life.

— Mary Hayes Grieco, Unconditional Forgiveness, p. 10

Graduate-Level Course

Forgiveness, Growth, Healing 0

Forgiveness is a private process that we do for our own sakes, and there is no experience of hurt, loss, betrayal, or disappointment that is beyond our power to heal and resolve. When we forgive someone, we are saying that even though this experience of hurt (painful, difficult, unjust, abusive, and so on) has happened to us, we are going to completely release that pain and move forward without it. Even the most broken heart can be mended through forgiveness, and the steady practice of forgiveness throughout our lives will reframe for us the worst stories of our human journey. When we are wounded and suffering, an attitudinal choice lies right in front of us: will we feel and believe that we are victims of cruel fate, slogging through unrelenting and meaningless struggles? Or will we empower ourselves to take the opportunity to travel to higher ground, employing universal spiritual principles? In the hot laboratory of daily life, day by day and year by year — no matter how difficult it gets — each one of us has the power to transform our painful stories from those of a victim to those of a willing student of life. Like a master-in-training in a customized wisdom school, we can turn our wounds into wisdom as we complete each lesson of the graduate level course called Unconditional Forgiveness.

— Mary Hayes Grieco, Unconditional Forgiveness, p. 1-2