Tag: Life

Falling is part of life

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Cross on Observation Hill, McMurdo Station.jpg

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

The modern temptation: Letting work define us

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

File:Candle lights (565924507).jpg

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

Self-forgiveness

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Forgiveness 0001.jpg

There’s a kind of basic misunderstanding that we should try to be better than we already are, that we should try to improve ourselves, that we should try to get away from painful things, and that if we could just learn how to get away from the painful things, then we would be happy.

Pema Chödrön

When we practice meditation, we practice a double movement: there is a movement of return to the breath, a movement of recollection of presence, of samadhi — and there is a movement of mindfulness, of allowing everything to be just as it is. Last Sunday, I realized that the movement of return can also be a movement of allowing, of self-forgiveness. All the prodigal sons and daughters of our thoughts and dreams and gnarly little complexes are welcome to come to the feast of this present moment.

Tracy Cochran, Be a Lighthouse

photo scem.info

Learning to be open

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Lilium longiflorum var. longiflorum (2).jpg

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

Being kind to ourselves – even the difficult bits

Karl Duffy6 Comments

File:Shadow Person.jpg

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

It’s mid-week: Jump into life

Karl Duffy2 Comments

File:Child01.jpg

Hope for the Guest while you are alive.
Jump into experience while you are alive!

Think… and think… while you are alive.
What you call “salvation” belongs to the time
            before death.

If you don’t break your ropes while you’re alive,
do you think ghosts will do it after?

The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic
just because the body is rotten —
that is all fantasy.
What is found now is found then.

So plunge into the truth, find out who the Teacher is,
Believe in the Great Sound!

Kabir says this: When the Guest is being searched for,
it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest
that does all the work.

Kabir.

photo GFDL