Things Unseen: Becoming Love

     
     

Becoming Love

You Are Love Becoming Love

--Richard Rohr, Daily Meditation, November 26, 2014

Your True Self is who you are, and always have been in God, and at its core it is love itself. Love is both who you are and who you are still becoming, like a sunflower seed that becomes its own sunflower. Most of human history has called the True Self your “soul” or “your participation in the eternal life of God.” The great surprise and irony is that “you,” or who you think you are, have nothing to do with its original creation or its demise. It’s sort of disempowering and utterly empowering at the same time! All you can do is nurture it, which is saying quite a lot. It is love becoming love in this unique form called “me.” 

It seems to be a fully cooperative effort according to St. Paul (Romans 8:28), and according to my own limited experience too. God never forces himself or herself on us or coerces us toward life or love by any threats whatsoever. God seduces us, yes; coerces us, no (Jeremiah 20:7; Matthew 11:28-30). Whoever this God is, he or she is utterly free and utterly respects our own human freedom. Love cannot happen in any other way. Love flourishes inside freedom and then increases freedom even more. “For freedom Christ has set us free!” shouts St. Paul in his critique of all legalistic religion (Galatians 5:1).

We are allowed to ride life and love’s wonderful mystery for a few years—until life and love reveal themselves as the same thing, which is the final and full message of the risen Christ—life morphing into a love that is beyond space and time. He literally “breathes” shalom and forgiveness into the universal air (John 20:22-23). You get to add your own finishing touches of love, your own life breath to the Great Breath, and then return the completed package to its maker in a brand-new but also the same form. It is indeed the same “I,” but now it is in willing union with the great “I AM” (Exodus 3:14). We are no longer absolutely one, but we are not two either! (Think about that if you can.) 

--Adapted from Immortal Diamond: The Search for our True Self

 

 

Happy 2nd Easter!

    
    

Easter 2015

If we really "got" Easter, this world would be a different place! See my sermon for the 2nd Sunday of Easter here: Transformed by the Risen One?

 

Things Unseen: Courage

         
      

But You Can't Keep Me Down

Camellias - the South's blessed testimony to resilience and the beauty of woundedness!

Last Saturday morning I had a few minutes at St. Thomas' to wait for a friend to arrive for our trip to Camp Hardtner for a Congregational Vitality Institute day--a wonderful one, too, BTW!

The many camellias planted among the trees between the church and Bayou Dr. were clearly damaged by our icy weather, but blooming beautifully anyway.
  
 

Snow day!

        
           

Being

Today's question: How do you picture a day spent "being"--as opposed to "doing"?

 

Photographer's Journal: Camp Hardtner

     
      

Invitation to Stop

And I did. And took in the emerald water, the green grass, the golden brown of last summer's grass-like plant, and the balmy breeze coming across the lake. 

For Lent this year, I am following an online series by the Brothers of Saint John the Divine. It is about our relationship with time, which was the first thing in creation God called "holy." 

It has not been a surprise to me to learn already that my own relationship with time is pretty disordered.

Yesterday's lesson was about invitations to stop during the day. For the brothers, the monastery bells invite them to stop what they are doing for prayer four times a day. 

Scenes like the one above are my monastery bells. They are invitations from the universe to stop for a moment, drink in the beauty, give thanks. That I do so with a camera makes it no less prayer.
        

Camp Hardtner

    
    

Perfect Peace

Home from Happening 53! What a blessed experience in a beautiful place with some fine young people. The Spirit was with us.
   

Wildflowers: Arkansas

              
                

Blue Sage (Salvia azurea)

In October, I attended the Arkansas Native Plant Society annual meeting in Texarkana. One of our hikes was in the White Cliffs Natural Area of western Arkansas. It is situated on a large outcropping of chalk that overlooks the Little River and gives the area its name. We saw many interesting plant species. It was October, so only a few things were still blooming; this lovely little blue flower was surely one of the prettiest!
      

on a large outcrop of Annona Chalk, rising out of the Little River floodplain (now Millwood Lake) and includes a 100-foot high chalk bluff over the Little River, from which the area derives its name. - See more at: http://www.naturalheritage.com/natural-area/white-cliffs/#sthash.CLUb4sD0.dpuf

on a large outcrop of Annona Chalk, rising out of the Little River floodplain (now Millwood Lake) and includes a 100-foot high chalk bluff over the Little River, from which the area derives its name. - See more at: http://www.naturalheritage.com/natural-area/white-cliffs/#sthash.CLUb4sD0.dpuf

on a large outcrop of Annona Chalk, rising out of the Little River floodplain (now Millwood Lake) and includes a 100-foot high chalk bluff over the Little River, from which the area derives its name. - See more at: http://www.naturalheritage.com/natural-area/white-cliffs/#sthash.CLUb4sD0.dpuf

on a large outcrop of Annona Chalk, rising out of the Little River floodplain (now Millwood Lake) and includes a 100-foot high chalk bluff over the Little River, from which the area derives its name. - See more at: http://www.naturalheritage.com/natural-area/white-cliffs/#sthash.CLUb4sD0.dpuf