Easter Saturday.. a day of waiting
When I stop running from what frightens me, and instead try to feel and understand it, I learn to deal with the world with greater kindness.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
Naomi Shihab Nye, Kindness
photo AMISOM Public Information
Everyone, from time to time, experiences a challenge which makes life seem less safe, when things seem to tighten around them – a new job, relationship difficulties, facing an illness or being let down. Under these pressures we may stumble and even fall:
If there be anywhere on earth a lover of God who is always kept safe,
I know nothing of it, for it was not shown to me.
But this was shown:
that in falling and rising again we are always kept in that same precious love.
Julian of Norwich
photo of memorial for Captain Scott South Pole, by Barneygumble
For Christians this evening begins three days of reflection, the most significant part of the yearly calendar.
Often people devote their primary attention to the facts of their lives, to their situation, to their work, to their status. Most of their energy goes into doing. Meister Echhart writes beautifully about this temptation. He says many people wonder where they should be and what they should do, when in fact they should be more concerned about how to be. The love side of your life is the place of greatest tenderness within you. In a culture preoccupied with fixities and definites and correspondingly impatient mystery, it is difficult to step out from the transparency of false light into the more candlelit world of the soul.
John O’Donohue
photo: echiner1
I sit before flowers
hoping they will train me in the art
of opening up
Shane Koyczan, 22 May 1976, Canadian poet and writer
photo katrina wiese
A quote for the beginning of the most important week in the Christian calendar:
The quieter you become
The more you can hear
Ram Dass
photo USFWS Mountain Prairie
Face the shadow side of yourself, but do not identify with it. It represents only part of who you are. So there is a difference between relating to the denied parts of yourself (bringing light to them), and totally “acting them out” (which is to leave them in their unconscious and dark state). This is why it is so foundational to know yourself, and to learn to be honest about your real motivations.
The hero in us wants to attack, fix, or deny the existence of our dark side. We can also be tempted to share dramatically everything about it as a way to control it (sometimes called ventilating or dumping). The saint merely weeps over the shadow and forgives it — and by God’s grace forgives himself for being a mere human. He opens his arms to that which has been in exile and welcomes it home for the friend that it often is.
Richard Rohr, On the Threshold of Transformation: Daily Meditations for Men
