Monthly Archives: September 2012
Faith or Imagination?
I have found that much of what I use to believe or call faith was just imagination. When I was younger and new to Christianity they told me to have faith and God would grant me that which I asked of him….then they would add, “as long as it isn’t selfish.” It took me years of frustrated blind ignorance to come to understand that everything is selfish when I’m not surrendered to someone or something greater than myself. Even my prayers for others would be selfish, or my service to the poor. It all stems from “I feel sympathy” or “I feel good when I do this for you, or others”. It all has a motivational basis within us that in some way or another ultimately comes back to what we get from the action. (more…)The Gospel of Thomas (v. 11)
This heaven will pass away and that which is above it will pass away. The dead are not alive and the living will not die. In the days when you ate what is dead, you made it alive. When you come into the light, what will you do? On the day when you were one, you became two. But when you have become two, what will you do?
~Gospel of Thomas (v.11)
This is a very cryptic line that Jesus spoke to his disciples concerning the purpose and meaning of life, as they knew it, as he knew it, and as God knows it. There are two levels of heaven that Jesus refers to here, or rather two perceptions of heaven both will pass away. The first, this heaven, that which we create through Love on Earth, and more personally, Jesus was referring to Himself, will pass away; he died on the Cross and our mortality is limited. The heaven above refers to that which took place prior to Creation, before their was opportunity to become enlightened and as we Christians refer to it, redeemed. (more…)
Intimacy
There is a blessing that comes with those who endure the path of sorrow and tears. Those that bottle it up and won’t allow it to flow deny themselves this, unaware that it is in the depth of the soul when the heart longs for peace and is desperate for a gentle touch, a moments caress, the embrace of Love if only for a brief respite. (more…)Finding my way home…
Home is my place of safety, security, where I dwell most and my source of meaning and purpose for all I am or endeavor to pursue. Here in this limited existence as a member of humanity I have had for most of my life a since that I wasn’t at home, that I was “a stranger in a strange land” and that home awaited my return at some distant unknown departure from this mortality. I have known I’m loved, as I am, completely and unconditionally for a long time now, only it was like I appreciated the intention and the sincerity of the gesture but since I had no obligation to keep I let it be just that, and went on with life as I understood it to be. It wasn’t until I sought to actively become the love I received for another that I truly began to change from what was a meaningless existence without purpose, or at least my “given” purpose for living….just the continued insistence of often well meaning others who tried to tell me what should be my meaning and purpose as they see it.
I slipped into grave depression as I gave up on life ever having any meaning at all because I couldn’t produce the passion I required to adopt what others insisted should be my motivation, care, and responsibilities. Without passion and attachment to something other than myself, as having more importance than myself I was listless and disgusted with having to exist at all. I became detached from everything as a result of my passionless existence. What many seek through meditation and years of focus to achieve I did as an act of defiance to a world insisting I be something I’m not, which produced nothing but isolation and hopelessness, though without the chronic worries that most people carry. Some detachment is necessary for a carefree existence in a world of uncertainty and calamity…but it needs to be balanced with compassion and love, genuine love to be anything other than a self imposed exile from all human relation.
In learning to love unconditionally another soul, another person more than anything else in existence I finally came to understand the true meaning of the Christian cross, and what it means to daily pick up that cross and follow. I knew what I needed was to be like Jesus, not necessarily worship Jesus. I modeled my devotion for my beloved after his gospel example and found that to love this much means to love even in the face of rejection, revolution, hatred, and to the extent of the worst sins possible to imagine, it all has to be endured or the love is not true, just a conditional affection that can be lost if the standard isn’t met to satisfaction. In learning to love in this fashion, everything is sacrificed in the effort. Pride, ego, hopes, dreams, family, friends, faith, religious beliefs, and the expectation of ever being loved in return are all nailed to that cross if the love is true. That is what it means to love someone as Christ loves his Church, and that is how I came to know Love…through the daily dying of all that I was until Love saw in me the endurance required to entrust the soul of another into my care.
In the remnants of this once sane and proud young man is now the heart of Love that will never perish and is awake and aware of my presence at home in the security and affection of the one who loves me so much as to give me the time required to bring me around and turn into the very one Love always knew I would be.
In my current awareness I now know me to be both Lover and Beloved both are possible through the essence of the Love that has always been here and waiting for just this opportunity to bring this into fruition. I feel alive! And though I sit here, the scarred and wounded man left from this experience, I know Life as if for the first time, and I think of my absent beloved and know, she is worth the price and worth the wait, even to the end of time itself.
My journey has led me to death and life again, and I believe it has only just begun. :-)
A peace without pictures.
I am accustomed to extreme bouts of mental unrest, and far too many events of staggering confusion in my disease of Paranoid Schizophrenia. At times, my mind becomes the battlefield of a war that seems to never end and the carnage is the deep wounds of a fractured psyche and phobias that resonate with the call to arms in a futile attempt at control. (more…)
Prayer…
“Religion has lost sight of Jesus’ message…We aren’t focused on the great mystery. Rather religion has tended to create people who think they have God in their pockets, people with quick, easy glib answers. That is why so much of the West is understandably abandoning religion. People know the great mystery cannot be that simple and facile. If the great mystery is indeed the Great Mystery, it will lead us into paradox, into darkness, and into journeys that never cease. That is what prayer is about.”
~ Fr. Richard Rohr (a Jesuit Priest)
One of the wonderful things about prayer is that it isn’t predictable. It is delving into the the ultimate unknown, but never is it unknowable. (more…)
Wisdom Through Experience @ http://experiencewisdomnow.blogger.com posts belong to Zion Marion Amoure creator of IamZion.com, ©2013
