It all depends on the stage

/ levelprayingfield

It has been a very intense week – for me personally and for the world. Life and death issues play out, with huge unknowns, for my friend Fred. My solace comes in tending to him, focusing simply on the moment at hand, trusting that, in time, what is meant to be will surely reveal itself.

Life and death issues also play out for the world. Ebola is brewing. This week saw the beheading of the third (this time a British) journalist by ISIS. Obama delivered a national address seeking to drum up support for a limited, internationally coordinated offensive.

So many things went through my mind when I listened to President Obama’s address.

I thought of the Dalai Lama’s response many years ago when asked an earnest question by an audience member after one of his speeches. I saw a video of it. The inquirer was a young woman, about 25 years of age. It was at a time when China’s oppression of Tibet was actively violent, headlining the news. Tibet was taking a passive stance.

This woman asked the Dalai Lama, “When China treats the Tibetans so viciously, why don’t you fight back?” I remember her face–confused, sad and scrunched up by what obviously seemed to her a cataclysmic failure to act when action was so clearly indicated.

The Dalai Lama replied softly, “Well, we would be like China, then, wouldn’t we?”

In hindsight, it was a completely appropriate response by the spiritual leader of a country in Stage 5 (Purification phase) of its spiritual development. Likewise, it was a completely unsatisfying response to a conscientious 25-year-old becoming ripe in her individuation stage, building toward her own personal “I Am” (Stages 2 and 3).

Hearing President Obama address the nation, I thought about America – particularly after the President’s concluding litany about “the difference we (America) make in the world.” He spoke of American leadership as “the one constant in an uncertain world,” then delivered a long sequence of assertions:

It is America that has the capacity and the will to mobilize the world against terrorists.

It is America that has rallied the world against Russian aggression and in support of the Ukranian people’s right to determine their own destiny.

It is America – our scientists, our doctors, our know-how – that can help contain and cure the outbreak of Ebola.

It is America that helped remove and destroy Syria’s declared chemical weapons so that they can’t pose a threat to the Syrian people or the world again.” (Hmmm… does the United States have chemical weapons? I wondered.)

and it is America that is helping Muslim communities around the world… in the fight for opportunity, tolerance and a more hopeful future.” (Hmmm… do they see it that way, too? I wondered.)

The President spoke about the values that we Americans have held and embodied for the world “since our founding” – freedom, justice, dignity. They’re all beautiful, essential values; values that brought this nation to its own “I Am” stage of spiritual development.

SeeSawBut remember that spiritual growth occurs in stages. No mental constructs are utterly true always. In fact, in pure Being, mental constructs fall away entirely.

So when President Obama went down his list of “It is America” claims, I found myself wondering: where does that fine line exist between a) appropriately extending our wisdom to others who are striving to attain the spiritual goals we have mastered (what I call “positive karma,” and we’ll look at that in a future blog); and b) sticking too long in egoistic assertion when really the next spiritual step is to let go, as the Dalai Lama knew to do for Tibet?

When does declaration turn into hubris? When does the conviction of the “I Am” turn into “the most dangerous time when you think you know what’s supposed to happen?” If applying the tasks of the right stage at the right time is so key to optimal spiritual growth, isn’t it to our advantage to figure out what stage we’re in, as individuals, members of group souls, nations, races, etc.?

In your own life, this is a great question to ask God directly. Because the last time I checked, “the one constant in an uncertain world” is not American leadership, as President Obama declared, but God.

“Hey, are you okay?”

/ levelprayingfield

I have been called many miles away from my home for the health emergency of a very close loved one. This loved one is very private, so I won’t say any more about his particular circumstances except to call him Fred and say that it’s serious, and Fred is very central to my life. So on Friday when Fred’s health suddenly went “tilt,” I felt like not just Fred’s but my whole world did, too.

I have been praying a lot. Reflecting a lot. Sighing a lot, then remembering to stop every once in a while to let the sighs dissolve gently into tears.

I have been thinking about how I know Fred, about all the history we’ve shared.

I am struck by how this situation might have been prevented many years ago had the people close to Fred at the time said something. “Hey, Fred, are you okay?”

I am struck by how the people Fred and I have known together over the years also might have had different, more happy and productive lots in life if, when we were younger, we had spoken up. “Hey, are you okay?”

So many ambient possibilities for healing, dampened due to words unsaid. And the words were unsaid because we were afraid of interfering, afraid of embarrassing ourselves or someone else, afraid that our concerns wouldn’t be well received. In hindsight, those all seem like pretty flimsy reasons not to speak.

I wish I had known then to separate out the saying from the outcome. I can’t control what other people do with what I say – that’s their choice, their freedom. But I can control that I say it. I can control how I say it. I can bravely, gently offer my heart, mind and observations. (My motto is: say it once and let it go.) I don’t need certainty that I’m correct – in fact, I’ve found that things usually go better when I am not at all certain I’m correct! All I need is the certainty that I care.

What are you holding back from saying? What do you see and believe might really help someone, yet for some reason you are holding back from stating it outright?

If this experience with Fred has taught me anything, it’s that time and love and words are precious.

“Hey, are you okay?” It might just as well mean, “I love you enough to speak up.”

 

 

Being at 7,000 feet

/ levelprayingfield

Plane_ToParis

I’ve been traveling. A little bit of very welcome vacation.

On the way back home, nearing the completion of our flight, I found myself in the middle seat of a row of three, my husband to my right on the aisle, and a 20-something-year-old woman next to the window to my left.

This fellow passenger had already taken her seat when my husband and had boarded the plane. We nodded hello as we stowed our belongings and got settled. Then she put up the hood of her hoodie, put on her earphones, pulled down the window shade and withdrew into her privacy – where she remained for the next 6 hours.

The crew announced the emergency instructions before takeoff. We barreled down the runway. The flight attendants served drinks, then the meal. Movies shieked and glowed from seat backs in all directions. My husband and I went to the bathroom, then a couple of hours later, made the trip out of our cramped row and down the aisle to the back of the plane again. Then drinks and a snack were served once more. And all this time, our seat mate remained utterly quiet (apparently sleeping), nestled tightly within her hoodie. Occasionally she stirred. But otherwise she was OUT.

She was still gone from the world when the captain announced the final approach to our destination.

Now typically at take off and landing, I press my nose against the window and watch everything I can going by out the window like a dog with a manically wagging tail. I am fascinated to see the perspective on earth from above.

But on this particular day, for I think the first time in my life (or for at least for as long as I could remember), I could do none of that. A little wistfully, I glanced over my husband’s torso to the right to see if I might get a glimpse out of the plane on the other side. But the window shades were drawn on that side of the plane, too. In fact, I noticed as I glanced about, the shades were drawn all around the plane. There was no way I would see outside. Not on this landing.

At one point, I started to reach over across my slumbering seat mate to grab the window shade and toss it open. “What will it matter?” I thought. “She’s sleeping! She won’t notice one way or another… and then I’ll be able to see…”

But I fought back that folly. It was not my place to open her shade. The shade lay in the domain of the passenger seat, not my seat.

I was just going to have to accept that, this time, I wasn’t going to see outside the plane.

“Okay,” I thought. I settled in to observe my inner experience, then, if not the outer one.

The plane was certainly in midst of the drama of landing. I could hear the landing gear grind into position. I saw the flight attendants scurry through their final checks and buckle into their seats. When normally I would be craning out the window to visually embrace the new terrain into which I was heading, this time I could only sit, looking straight ahead at the little glowing map in the seat before me. Everything outside the plane was beyond the reach of my experience.

It suddenly occurred to me: This is like Being. Being is utterly accepting. Being does not seek to influence or strain. Being sits, at peace, with events moving all around. But Being exists within all that movement in a state of neutrality. Everything is simply witnessed. Everything simply just Is.

To sit, accepting and passive, in that plane as it landed – with no straining or intention to influence (or even to assess the outside) – was to be peacefully contained in a trusted world.

To Be, spiritually, in this world, is to ride the plane of Earth with no straining or intention to influence as it glides along in its orbit. To remain peacefully contained in a trusted world.

Without my doing anything but sitting, I could trust that pilot to land me safely. Likewise, I trust a Divine order to guide me and to guide the world. Even and especially when I can’t look out the window.

The Audacity of Growth

/ levelprayingfield

In my last blog I wrote on the topic of sin. I said, “But I also came to see that there’s a place and a time to worry about sin. The time when sin becomes meaningful is after you’ve  declared the “I Am” at Stage 3.”

I thought I’d spend a little more time explaining what I mean by that.

FatMaleKid_SmallYesterday I read a statistic in one of my favorite publications, The Week magazine. The Week was quoting from The Wall Street Journal when it recently reported :

More than two thirds of American 17- to 24-year-olds would fail to qualify for military service because they are too unhealthy, lack a high school diploma, have a felony conviction, or are taking prescription drugs for conditions like attention deficit/​hyperactivity disorder.

Are you shocked? I was shocked. Two thirds. Doesn’t sound like we could put together much of a defense if we were ever tested militarily, huh?

This statistic suggests that the next generation in America is mostly flabby — of body, mind, spirit and emotion. This is offspring from what has historically been one of the most powerful countries – if not the most powerful country – in the world.

But let’s break this down within what we know about the stages of spiritual evolution, looking at how the stages play out within a developing nation.

America_R2Remember we looked at America’s evolution when we were discussing Collective Experience (see chart).

This statistic about today’s American young adults fits poignantly but logically right in with the trajectory of development after such a meteoric national rise to the top. Think about it.

It takes a certain arrogance and maniacal focus to rise up. It took guts for the colonial fathers of our country to thumb their noses at the British. It took balls to fight and win the Revolutionary war, to dare landing on the beaches of Normandy. It took ingenuity, brilliance and perhaps even some vengeful blood lust to build the atomic bomb that put an end to World War II. Sheer audacity fueled and won the race with the Russians to the moon. All these events were key in the unfolding, expanding consciousness that is the United States of America. To be American is to have a very specific human experience.

The consciousness of America is a consciousness that states, “Anything is possible.” America is built on the notion that if can you dream it, you can do it, for opportunity abounds. In our nation’s history, we have dreamed and then accomplished extraordinary things again and again and again.

But inevitably, that arrogance has a price… as the pursuit of any specific vision has a price.

LaoTzuQuoteLao Tzu said: “When people see things as beautiful, ugliness is created. When people see things as good, evil is created.”

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. It is a law of nature, governing how the world stays in balance when there is any departure in any direction from the core statis of Being.

So… every assertion will have its inevitable recompense.

The reckoning of that recompense is the recognition of one’s sin. Sin is the error that you made to be so daringly arrogant in the first place.

After Stage 3 (that is, during Stages 4 & 5) is always the time when that arrogance of self-appointed initiation becomes evident. In Stage 4 (“Repercussions”), you start seeing the consequences. By Stage 5, the consequences have set in to the point that you start to becoming pummeled by them, setting the stage for Purification.

In that context, the current generation of young Americans makes sense. They are flabby not because they’re any less substantial or worthy as human beings than their forbears. Rather they were simply and somewhat inevitably raised with the assumption of the American Dream. They grew up feeling yawningly entitled to it. Why shouldn’t they? That’s the world they grew up in – the ripe Stage 1 into which they entered. How very unlike the Stage 1 of their forbears who lacked privilege, grew up ravenous for opportunity and driven to make the most of it.

Easy, big consumption grew greedy. Diets grew careless. Monetary greed cut education budgets. Concern for the benefit of all took a back seat to self-interest, which left the poor sometimes to discover ruefully that morals are a luxury of the haves. Regarding medication, Ed Hallowell says it best: we live amidst “culturally generated ADD.” We never stop! Of course we don’t, we’re Americans.

Here’s my point: this is all normal. It’s all just part of the process.

Yes, as Americans we may come upon heavy regrets if our 67% Gen-F (for flab) is ever put to the test and comes up lacking. That would set the stage for a Purification for us, for sure. Should we not have pursued, then, the audacity of the American Dream? Of course we should have! Would you ever tell a two-year-old not to try to walk, or a sunflower not to try to sprout, or kids not to imagine what they want to be when they grow up?

This is simply what we do, here. We go through these stages, and it’s how we grow. There is tremendous audacity in it, as there is recompense and purification. It’s why on a certain level we’re all sinners (as it says in the Bible), and we’re also all forgiven – because as we grow in consciousness we come out of the thrall of our hubris. We let go to God’s will.

This is the way of life on Earth, a transient experiment in the conscious discovery and expression of God. In the end, we come to realize it’s ALL God, and we all come home.

 

 

Sinfidel

/ levelprayingfield

Last weekend I had a reminder in real life about the meaning of the word “sin.”

In my 20’s and 30’s, I struggled with the Judeo-Christian emphasis on sin. I was doing my best to be a thoughtful, conscientious person finding my way in my young life. To go to church and be told to confess “how I’ve been bad” felt just plain strange. Or wrong. Offensive, actually. I had a hard time reconciling my deep love of God and all the things I heard at church that rang true with the recurring emphasis on how much of a “sinner” I was (along with all humankind).

Later in life, after I awakened, I understood the emphasis on “sin.” But I also came to see that there’s a place and a time to worry about sin. The time when sin becomes meaningful is after you’ve declared the “I Am” at Stage 3. Prior to that, as you’re struggling to define who you are, the notion of sin is confusing and demoralizing. It’s not a helpful message when you’re trying to gain confidence, not lose it.

Then enter last weekend, with a gentle reminder in the here-and-now about sin and the persistent benevolence beneath its message.

I was attending the wedding of a friend I have known for (gulp) forty years. Over those many years I had become very close not just with her but with her family – who all attended the wedding, too. The reunion brought a sweet and quiet, ecstatic relief like from drinking water after a long, parched fast.

The weekend started for me on Sunday morning where I was to meet Mary Ann, my friend’s mother, at church. When I’d heard she would be attending the service, I sprang at the chance to worship in communion with her and help her get to the next pre-wedding event. To meet at church seemed perfect, as our relationship was rooted strongly in our shared love of God.

Soon enough, Mary Ann bobbed into the narthex. We rushed to throw our arms around each other for the first time in a decade.

“Oh, my stars!” she sang out, “You are the most beautiful creature! You look just like an angel!”

I couldn’t help but laugh. I remembered hearing those exact words, cried out in just same way upon our very first meeting, forty years before. At the time, I’d been a pimply-faced high school junior and this woman had been a complete stranger to me. I had encountered her in the stairwell of my new dormitory. I was going down to get more boxes from the car; she was coming up with a suitcase, and there in the middle on the landing was her daughter, my new roommate, whom I had only just met in our new room. Seeing us converge on the stairs, her daughter had sought to make an introduction: “Mom, this is my roommate,” she said.

“Oh, my STARS!” As Mary Ann responded, her southern accent rang sharply in the stairwell. “You are the most beautiful CHILE! You look just like an AYNgel!”

At fifteen years old, I had never been greeted in such a way – at all, let alone with such passion by a stranger. My stomach dropped as I figured I was in for a very strange year.

So to hear the same words replayed, yes, I did laugh. I said, “Mary Ann, do you know those were the very first words you ever said to me?” I laughed again. A great big belly laugh, “And I thought you were the weirdest woman I’d ever met!” In making the remark, I was laughing at myself.

But something didn’t feel right. Was it the shyness of a reunion after a long time? The discomfort of being flattered? Why had I reacted the way I had? The service would be starting soon. My husband and I guided Mary Ann up front (where she could hear) and into a pew.

As we knelt our heads to pray, I felt “ew” inside. Here I had just seen my beloved Mary Ann for the first time in a decade, and I’d responded to her compliment with a laugh and a quip about how I thought she was so weird when I first met her. Ha ha ha.

The service continued. The hymns, the readings, the sermon, the chance to reflect. I thought about how, yes, surely, Mary Ann was hyperbolic by nature. Yet her ability to see the best of me clearly and reflect it back had profoundly guided my life. At several forks in my spiritual road I’d found my way only because of her support. From Day 1, she had always seen me as an angel. She’d seen my inner worth and held it up to me like a mirror constantly and faithfully enough for me to finally find it directly within myself.

I thought of Saint Augustine, a 4th century Christian mystic. I had just been reading his writings the week before as I was asking for guidance on next steps in my life. Augustine had written, “Give thanks, then, and embrace what has been given you so that you may be worthy to enjoy what you are called to.” Augustine quoted Psalms (115:11), “Every man is a liar,” and Ephesians (4:25) “laying aside the lie, speak the truth,” to make the point that to be anything less than the best we are capable of being – the likeness of God – is a lie. To be the likeness of God is to fulfill God’s intention for us. It is to be what we are (at Stage 6).

BlackSunglassesThus I realized, right there sitting in the pew at the 10:00 service, the purest, simplest definition of sin. Sin is the disregard and discrediting of God’s creation, and of our place in God’s creation. When I laughed at Mary Ann’s remark, I might as well have been spitting on her love of me, and on the qualities she was seeing in me. Qualities that God had created.

It struck me also that this understanding of sin is very much like how the Koran describes an “infidel”: someone who has forgotten the truth of Allah and become ungrateful. In that moment, yes, I had been an infidel. I had forgotten the truth of Mary Ann’s and God’s love for me. I had been ungrateful to that love. A simple, “Thank you” to Mary Ann, an acknowledgment to God who made it all happen, and offering Mary Ann a hug would have been a much more appropriate response.

When it came time to recite the Confession of Sin from the Book of Common Prayer, I spoke it from a very immediate place. I also apologized to Mary Ann after the service concluded. Then it was her turn to laugh. She said my remark hadn’t bothered her, but she was glad if I felt I had learned something. “You know, we learn so much more from our mistakes than our successes,” she chirped.

Then we went on to enjoy the weekend festivities. Fully. Gratefully.

God bless you, Mary Ann. As always, my teacher, holding up the mirror. Let her be a mirror to you, too. What are the places in your life where God, directly and/or through others, is smiling on you? Are you receiving this grace gratefully?

The Antedote to Hopelessness

/ levelprayingfield

I heard on NBC News last night that 60 people were shot, 9 dead, over the July 4 weekend in Chicago due to gang violence.

What??

A woman on the NBC video segment had it right, I thought. Speaking as someone from one of the affected neighborhoods, she traced the violence to hopelessness. I wish I could find the video online. I wish I could show you that woman’s sad, astute face.

NBC-News_ChicagoMurders-070714

This news comes to me the day after I have finally finished writing this website (took me a year); the day after I am busy finishing up the last pages, writing about the importance of holding tension during the spiritual process of being human.

The youths in Chicago clearly didn’t hold tension. They clearly let all the intolerable fear, frustration and adrenaline pent up inside rip out their veins into their wrists steeled against quaking rage, aimed down their fingers, blasting into a terrible world that they could validate as being all the more terrible by unleashing corporal damage on another human being. At least in so doing they could prove themselves to be right in their horrible convictions.

Certainty borne out. But at such a price.

Einstein said, “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”

Sunflower Gen 2 July 2014 - 1Yesterday upon finishing the website, I looked back over the computer logs and was startled to see that I had started the website exactly a year before. Started on July 6, 2013. Finished on July 6, 2014.

This morning upon finishing the website, I walked out into the garden to see that my Gen 2 sunflowers – offspring of the original sunflower that guided me to start this website to begin with – were, that day, beginning to bloom. Kinda wild, huh?

Lao Tzu talked about Wu Wei: the effortlessness and harmony that come from living in a completely natural, uncontrived way. Without control, force or the attempt to influence.

The news last night was not just about Chicago. The news last night was about our lives – all of our lives – and all of our struggles, in a world that seems to be going increasingly mad.

What will be your center point? The place where you can rest in Wu Wei? What will be the source of your hope, your miracles, your ability to hold your own tension?

I promise you, my friend: it is in you. It is all around you. It is the stuff of Being itself. It is who you are.

Sunflower Gen-2

/ levelprayingfield

Sunflower_062613Last June, I noticed something that looked like a weed pushing up from the soil in a flower pot in my garden. It was in the same pot in which the purple Clematis grow – which take over everything – so I was surprised to see another plant trying to muscle in on Clematis ground.

I reached to pull it, when that still, small voice inside said, “Stop.” I stopped.

The plant continued to grow. A few days later, I called my husband out into the garden to examine it with me. “We’ve got an alien intruder in the Clematis,” I said. “What do you make of that?”

He said, “It looks like a sunflower.”

I gasped. I had never grown sunflowers. But I love sunflowers. I love the way they stand strong, shine brightly and turn always toward the sun, ever optimistic and willing.

What’s more, sunflowers had taken on a kind of holy significance for me, ever since – in 2002 – I had come up with the sunflower analogy to explain the stages of the evolution of consciousness, and how those stages explain the underlying unity of the world religions.

So to have a sunflower suddenly crop up in a tiny blue pot in my back yard – when I didn’t plant it, when I’d been working my garden for about 7 years and had never brought a sunflower seed into my garden. I mean… a sunflower??

I continued to watch the spindly stalk grow, now mystified and increasingly awestruck. If it really was a sunflower, out of the blue, surely it was God speaking to me. Speaking to me through a bird that must have pooped into my flower pot, but nonetheless speaking to me.

Time and some searching on Google Images verified my husband’s hunch: it was indeed a sunflower. Then it became my task to determine in prayer what God was trying to tell me through that sunflower.

By the time the sunflower came to full glory, I felt I understood God’s message.

sunflower_071013

After my long decade of purification and letting go of agendas, God was saying, “It’s time.” Time to finally share what God had shown me. Time to bloom.

That’s when I started building this website.

Nine months later, this website is still under construction. I chip away at it a little bit each weekend, the only time I have in very, very busy work weeks. But it’s coming along, with just a few more pages to go, now.

Last September, after the sunflower had gone to seed, I collected its seeds carefully. I stored them in a jar. With the threat of frost now gone, yesterday I planted several of them, the next generation from my beloved, sunny messenger.

If the first sunflower brought a website, what this year’s crop of sunflowers will bring?

Sunflower-Gen2_041314

God at the Grammys

/ levelprayingfield
Kasey Musgraves performs "Follow Your Arrow" at the 2014 Grammy Awards Ceremony

Kasey Musgraves performs “Follow Your Arrow” at the 2014 Grammy Awards Ceremony

Once you see the cycle of spiritual growth and how it recurs through life, you start seeing the pattern everywhere. Which starts becoming comforting. Life stops seeming so random, its edges seem less cruel. Instead, there is a divine, perfect purpose being pursued, over and over again.

Take last night. My husband and I watched the Grammy Awards. Kasey Musgraves performed her hit country song, Follow Your Arrow. (I loved her outfit!!)

Aha! The song couldn’t be a truer expression of the challenges facing the individual in Stage 2 (“Stirrings”), approaching Stage 3 (“Declaration”). Read Kasey Musgraves’ lyrics. This is a song to any individual beginning to feel his or her true, authentic self peek out from beneath the expectations and “shoulds” of Stage 1’s GroupThink.

It doesn’t matter what you’re into, the song says. Just be true to yourself. Be who You Are. Follow your arrow.

No wonder it’s a controversial song. It’s got to be. There would be no struggle to declare “I Am” if there were no resistance. That’s how we become spiritually strong, by learning to meet that resistance; by learning to believe in ourselves first. It’s all part of the plan. (Until the plan changes in Stages 4, 5 and 6!)

It’s a great song. And Kasey delivered it with just the right combination of earnest heart and hilarity. But I suspect last night’s prestigious award came partly from the fact that the song expresses such core, human truth. Congratulations, Kasey Musgrave. And great dress.

The Steady, Underlying Beat

/ levelprayingfield

Today I was having coffee with my husband and the dog – a weekend ritual – when my husband said, “Hey, look at this!” He handed over his iPhone and showed me the image of a beating heart:

Heartbeat

Source: Industry Tap

I looked over at it with curiosity. Then, with an inner double-take, I felt my eyes pop as my curiosity quickly gave way to amazement. Then my amazement gave way to gratitude and awe.

The deepening of my emotions accompanied the deepening of what I perceived in the picture. As I first encountered the image, I wondered, “What is this?” Instantly, vaguely, I recognized the shape of a heart.

Soon I was looking deeper. I saw electrical impulses charging the heart, muscles contracting, chambers filling, blood rushing, all flawlessly timed. All so generous. So perfect! And all occurring within me right now without my even having to think about it.

I looked up at my husband so comforted. I had been feeling a little blue today. Overwhelmed by having had a bad cold this week, by being concerned about the care and well-being of my 89-year-old mother, very far away; trying to keep up at work, and through it all being sad about having horribly neglected this website. I was feeling–well, frankly–a little sorry for myself that I just didn’t know how to keep up and stay true to the one thing in life – my lifelong love of God – that means the most to me. That relentless juggling act: how to keep your awareness trained dearly on the world of spirit and still keep both feet planted solidly on the ground?

But in one random, inquisitive gesture, my husband was reminding me, that underneath it all, my heartbeat was steady, generous, perfect, constant. I didn’t even have to think about it.

I know this is true, too, of the Divine. It is steady, generous, perfect, constant. It beats beneath and around and through everything we are, everything we do. It never fails us, even when we’re tired, sick, blue. We don’t even have to think about it, either–it will never fail us even though we can enter into long lapses of forgetfulness. But when we do remember… oh, what blessed comfort that is.

Can this type of violence be stopped by understanding?

/ levelprayingfield

NBCNightlyNews_010814

I saw a segment on NBC Nightly News tonight about what Brian Williams called “the most urgent crisis unfolding in our world” – sectarian violence in Central African Republic between Christians and Muslims that has become so severe that it is decimating the population, affecting mostly children. The video is heartbreaking.

This is exactly the kind of violence that this website is intended to prevent.

Meanwhile, upstairs in my computer, this website is about 2/3 done and not yet launched… I chip away at it after a long work day each day and the progress seems so slow… but I am pedaling as fast as I can…

The question remains to be answered: can simple understanding help bring about peace? When conflict is necessarily built into the system of human growth, and when arrogance and the need to control is built into human nature… is it realistic to expect a Bigger Picture to put a rest to these terrible religious-based feuds?

We shall see over time. Here’s my first blog. Off we go.