Dear Miracle

Setting free the beautiful truth inside.

Category Archives: Religion


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Changing Our Future

super-moon2-2016There are times in life we are called to stare into the darkened abyss. Not everything is for joy. You might think of a rising situation right now where this is so.
 
However, the abyss is not for the purpose of shame. We are not called to that.
 
Shame, that is THE problem with humanity, what got us here…the shame we perpetrate upon one another and ourselves. Shame is used by individuals without real power. Shame creates powerlessness in its victims.
 
The abyss is a call towards healing. It strips everything down to its essence, takes the varnish right down to the bare metal. It’s the fire that burns down the house. It is a revealer of what needs changing and what needs loving in order to grow or even survive. Courage is required. Letting go of irrational or unhealthy fear is also required. We are the tipping point of radical change now whether we like it or not, as a planet, as a people. It’s taking us somewhere many of us have never seen before. It’s up to us to set the stage towards the very thing we’ve been asking for on the other side of it all.  
 
When trauma or pain arises, it requires awareness, the willingness to face it for what it is. Ultimately, pain is to be used towards ours and others healing.
 
Whatever level or intensity of pain one suffers through, either by ones own hand or another’s or catastrophic means, correlates to an exact degree in its opposite joy and awareness. It expands what we can hold, our strength, and our consciousness. We come to know wisdom, grace and joy to the degree we’ve suffered on the opposite end of the spectrum. That is if we use those experiences to better rather than embitter us.
 
Whether we are a nation, a planet or a person, it’s when we remain shut down and unconnected that life has to throw bigger hammers at us in order to get us to wake up and pay attention.
 
There are different rules for different levels of consciousness. What might work or be true on one plane of existence might not be for another. There is no one size fits all anything. However, they all work together in attempt to wake us up to the miracle and interconnectedness of everything to everything. They work in tandem to get us to free our minds towards possibilities rather than remaining frozen in fear.
 
It may well be that the abyss we are looking into could be the very thing that ultimately forces us together if we are going to survive and create a different future on the other side. Extremist ideologies, poverty, governmental interference and policies, and increasing militarization may ultimately force us to cross the bridge towards our brother and together create a different future.


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What Fundamentalists Need for Their Salvation

 

Falling SkyI wish the following excerpt were written by me, but it’s not. It comes from David James Duncan, “What Fundamentalists Need for Their Salvation”, Orion Magazine. He, like me, cut his teeth on fundamentalism, so we both know a bit about it. I want to share a brief excerpt with you as it strikes a deep chord within me that I, myself, aspire to, but don’t always live up to.

The article was written during the era of President G.W. Bush, however, the author makes numerous salient points that could be applied to any extremist belief system. There is a middle path between the far left or the far right points of view. A middle path that would unite rather than divide, that would find the commonality in us all rather than the differences. Extremism, hate driven zealotry whether coming from Christian, Muslim or Jew or any other religious or political ideology, seldom comes to any good end.

“True evangelism based on the example of Jesus (whether you believe in him or not–my words) does not suggest the ‘missionary zeal’ of self-righteous proselytizers. It implies, on the contrary, the kind of all-embracing universality evident in Mother  Teresa’s prayer: May God break my heart so completely that the whole world falls in.” Not just fellow nuns, Catholics, Calcuttans, Indians. The whole world. It gives me pause to realize that, were such a prayer said by me and answered by God, I would afterward possess a heart so open that even hate-driven zealots would fall inside. There is a self-righteous knot in me that finds zealotry so repugnant, it wants to sit on the sidelines with the like-minded, plaster our cars with bumper stickers that say, ‘Mean People Suck’ and ‘No Billionaire Left Behind’ and ‘Who Would Jesus Bomb?’,  and leave it at that. But my sense of the world as a gift, my sense of a grace operative in this world despite its terrors, propels me to allow the world to open my heart still wider, if the openness comes by breaking–for I have seen the whole world fall into a few hearts, and nothing has struck me as more beautiful.”

https://orionmagazine.org/article/what-fundamentalists-need-for-their-salvation/


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Letting the Genie Out of the Bottle

Another WorldWhile having a soak in the tub this morning listening to a podcast with Desmond Tutu and Krista Tippet on her program, On Being,  on NPR Radio–I listened in as Desmond Tutu wondered in sadness at the many angry, vocal Christians, who side-by-side with their fear mongering brothers-in-arms, seem presently possessed by a kind of mad ideology these days. He observed that having strayed so far from their original call to love “even the least of these”, they now appear to be singularly focused on the sexual orientation of others while at the same time painting “the least of these” with the brush of “not quite human”.

To be fair, however, I will add there is a silent majority of caring and compassionate individuals who do practice their faith in accordance with the original tenets of their faith. I am not talking about them.

The world is changing quickly. This we know. It is natural to resist change, to step outside the safety of our comfort zones. This is also known. Yet I cannot help but believe these same angry individuals act and believe as they do out of a deep fear of “the other”, those whom they perceive as different from themselves. Obviously, someone has to be at fault for the troubled world they see reflected back at them.  Someone has to take the blame for the mess they think they are in. The fact is, the genie is out of the bottle, and they are working feverishly to stuff her back into that bottle. Their once secure landscape has changed, and they want it back.

Happily though, for many, the genie will never crawl back into her bottle. She has awoken from a long sleep and isn’t about to let anyone put her back in her place. She is finding her voice after being silenced for so long, and has she got a story to tell! The planet over, the genie is out. The time of secret holding and power mongering is being outed. Life everywhere is outing itself on streets and in homes in every nation, resisting the old ways of power gobbling systems that ultimately kill and keep people in shackles. People are talking to one another the world over, telling their stories, rising up, bringing in something new–a new way of showing up in the world, taking their power and dignity back along with their ability to think and decide for themselves what their lives should look like.

No one knows yet exactly what it will look like. We are making it up as we go. For sure, everything is made up in this life by someone or a committee of someones.

So while one system is being born, another is dying at the same time. It is most true that in order for something to live, something else has to die. This is the way of life, the natural order of how it is–but I’ll save that for another blog entry. Presently, chaos is at the helm while the adherents of fear in last stand attempt to stamp out anything they don’t yet understand.

Yet forces bigger than all of us–Life itself, is reworking itself into a higher order, and chaos is absolutely necessary at the same time while something else is arising, while the old system dies–and it will die. Here’s the thing–they might win some skirmishes, but eventually they will lose the war. A critical mass has been formed, and there is no stopping it now. And maybe, just maybe some of these same frightened individuals will discover love for the first time in the process with the realization you can’t authentically fix anything with hate, even if you believe God gave you license.

No matter how it looks, in the beginning, middle and end, love always has her way.