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On a day when things are turning out as we wish, we might say that life is good. When frustrations or painful memories oppress us, we might think that life is just one difficulty after another. Both are generalizations, based on the feelings of the moment. Life is surely much more than that.
We did not choose to be born, but each of us becomes responsible for how we live and for how we value life. The two are closely related, since the way we live very often depends upon what we believe about our life, and much of what we believe about life depends upon how we live. If we see life as a gift rather than an impersonal accident of nature, we tend to fully utilize mind, body, and heart in the way we live. And if we reflect with gratitude on what we receive and give in life, our belief in the goodness of life increases.
We also know what it is like when we feel blocked in our intentions and unappreciated for what we do and then wonder if life truly has meaning. Or, when we look too much at the miseries of life, we can almost literally lose heart and find that we have little energy for doing things that bring joy to us and to others.
The greatest perspective about life comes, paradoxically, when we think about what happens after life. That is, when we honestly accept that this life as we know it comes to an end and consider what we believe awaits us in an after-life, we are liable to include God in our reflections about this life, and to more fully appreciate that it does not really end with death. However, if we rarely think of our lives as being related to God, we might not be aware of who we are even in the present, much less who we are called to be after we have finished living in this temporary environment of restricted time and space.
We often perceive life as truly precious when it is threatened, whether because of something affecting our health or due to an external cause for concern. But the most profound experiences of valuing our lives, even if we might be severely limited physically, accompanies our awareness of God as choosing us to be who we are. This radical choice is for now and always, since love, of which God makes us capable, does not end any more than God who is love comes to an end. We are, through no deed of our own, participants in God’s eternal life. We can choose to ignore or even deny our origin and intended after-life, but just as we did not choose to be born, we cannot choose to opt out of living forever.
The radical choice that is ours is whether to love.
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Memorial Day for most people in the U.S. is more a holiday than a reflective memorial of those who died in the country’s military services. Even fewer people remember and pray for the civilians who died during those times of war. Closer to us, perhaps, are memorials for those we know who have died, including loved family members and friends. These occasions are often graced and consoling experiences when we engage in them because of our direct personal connections with those who have died or for the sake of our friendships with those who grieve the loss of their loved ones.
When we attend a memorial, we participate partially according to the kind of gathering, whether formal or informal, or whether more specifically religious or more generic. But the most significant factor affecting us is our personal set of memories, thoughts, and feelings at that time. Our imaginations will spontaneously engage not only with our memories, but also with whatever we hear, see, and observe within the memorial event. Even if we choose to keep our responses as much as possible to ourselves, our bodies will resonate with whatever our minds and hearts perceive, so that then or later, we will receive fully the experience that matches our level of participation in the memorial.
The meaningfulness of any memorial, whether a large service or a small gathering of people, is always personal. No words, images, music, or any aspect of human origin can touch our hearts as much as the truth of our personal relationship with whomever is being memorialized. This is true whether it be at the memorial for an individual or for an extensive group of people. No matter how a memorial is organized, and no matter what our preferences might be for some modes of celebrating rather than others, we can find personal value in any of them if we focus our minds and hearts on the person or persons who have died.
Our reasons for participating in memorials might be mixed, but ultimately, we do so for love, even if the word does not enter our conscious awareness. The underlying reality that binds together the living who celebrate the occasion, and the dead for whose sake we gather, is that love does not come to an end with someone’s death. We are not asked what we believe about life after death when we come to a memorial. But we arrive with implicit and explicit beliefs, and if we reflect on our experiences, we might become aware that any affective movements within us are at least in part the consequences of our love.
Our gift at a memorial is our presence. In return, we receive affirmation that love has not, and does not, come to an end.
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We usually associate profit with monetary gain, although we may also be familiar with the words of Jesus, “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his soul?” The attraction for profit-making is strong, but most of us have learned that there are different sets of values regarding the gaining of profit, and some rightly take precedence over others. We might rate the forming and maintaining of good relationships with people as of more importance than making financial profit from them. We may have learned from experience that the pursuit of ever more possessions can become an obsession with material things at the cost of the spiritual treasures of integrity, honesty, and more importantly, even love itself.
We take care, then, as to what kinds of profit complement our lives and which are obstacles to our development as self-respecting people. Personal growth can be understood as a positive form of profit-seeking when we do so with a desire to become more fully available as a helper for others. Were we to become experts in some field primarily for admiration and approval by others, there would be no appreciable profit for us or even for any short-term-only admirers and approvers.
Instead of metaphorically seeking to gain the whole world, which is an unendingly burdensome project that is destined to fail, we have the far better option of accepting the unique participation in the ongoing creative movement of God that is available to us. Although only some of the profit is perceptible in the present, it is already a sharing in the unending, eternal and absolute good that is God.
To make this kind of profit, we do not need to accumulate capital for investing. Rather, we can exercise our spiritual muscles by “walking in faith” and so receive profit which we do not gather and keep, because this kind of profit grows by giving it away. Love is like that. God loves us, and so we exist. When we, with trust in God, choose thoughts, words, and actions that express our unique ways of loving ourselves and others according to the graces we receive, God’s love continues out-bound to our profit and to that of our neighbors. This is how we gain the whole world, with God, without losing ourselves. We will only see the fulness of the profit we have gained when we enter the eternal life that God has ready for us and desires to give to us after this life.
Unlimited profit is ours for the receiving, not the taking. God gives freely to those who come with open hands, not with tight fists that are only for grasping.
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Whatever we might think about spirit, we know that it cannot be a thing or an object with limits of size or amount. And whatever specific beliefs we have about spirit, almost all of us accept that it is good. Although we have had some negative spiritual experiences, such as impulses to act in ways that we knew and believed were wrong for us, we did not attribute them to a good spirit. When we imagine a Spirit of God in the world or in us, it must be boundless, active, and present everywhere and at the same never coercing how we act or behave. Either intuitively or with conscious faith, we accept God’s Spirit as a Person.
If we reflect on those many times when we recognized the activity of God’s Spirit, either within us or in the wider world around us, we will easily perceive that they are all manifestations of God’s love for us. Our capacity to love and to accept love is limited, while God’s love is boundless. And Love identifies not just what God does, but who God is. God, as Love, is Someone, and certainly not created, as we are. This Spirit person of God is, quite appropriately, called “Holy,” to distinguish God as Spirit from all the other uses of “spirit” in human languages and understanding. Among us, we would never think of anyone’s spirit as being anything other than an aspect of the persons we know and love. However, we can and are encouraged to communicate directly with God as Holy Spirit, a Person.
Our unity with others is always partial, no matter how close our bonds of love. As Persons, God is Holy Spirit and Father and Jesus, completely in union with one another as God. We can relate separately with each Person, and we can relate simply with God as God. It looks strange in writing, yet it is easy in practice. Our minds can get lost in our limited set of categories and in our capacity to understand reality, but God who creates us also provides us with the spiritual gift of faith which enables us to communicate with God each according to the truth that resonates with our minds and hearts at this point in our lives.
When we let ourselves be in the presence of God, who is Love, we might be more aware of our desires to be loving persons ourselves. We can pray to the Father, we can pray to Jesus, and we can pray to the Holy Spirit, without concern for whether we ordinarily pray more to one Person than to another. All that matters is that we open our hearts to God’s Love.
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Compassion
Love is an amazing power. When we receive love, we grow and expand within ourselves. The same happens when we love others: when they receive, they open out and flourish. We appreciate mutual love more than any other, whether with a life partner, family members, or close friends. Yet, we are capable of loving others even when there is little or no reciprocation and still find that our hearts enlarge in the process. We have a saying that reflects the reality of such love, “My heart goes out to them.” Compassion is another word for love like this that does not expect or require a return.
If we reflect on even the past 24 hours, most of us will recognize moments of spontaneous compassion when we felt the pain of someone whom we know was affected by one of life’s possible hurts, or when we were saddened at the apparent distress of others whom we might not even know at all. Compassion is a gift that flows from those who know that they are loved. So, we have cause for gratitude when we allow ourselves the inconvenience and suffering that sometimes accompanies our compassion, because only those who are aware of being loved can “overflow” with it to the extent of caring for others who might not respond. When we pray for those who suffer, they will probably never know that we cared for them in this way, but that does not deter us in the least.
The most extraordinary exercise of compassion we receive is from God, who knows our every pain, setback, disappointment, and diminishment from the inside, not as an outside observer. We might be more aware of our small physical sufferings than even some of the more significant internal wounds which we might have tried to cover over with denial or rationalizations, but God takes them all in, compassionately. When we accept this always-present love that fully understands us, we are always better off, just as are all those with whom we are compassionate. Although the pain and suffering may remain, compassion for hurts that are compassionately shared is both welcome and effective, no matter how much or little the sources of distress might remain unchanged.
There is so much suffering among people, whether close to us or only known through what we learn, that we can easily become overwhelmed by our initial sense of powerlessness. This is the occasion for us to rely not on ourselves, but to join our compassionate concern to that of God’s. God is present to each person in the totality of their needs but also bears them in love that extends from this life into the next, and all in the same act of loving compassion.
Our love is truly an amazing power, for it is God’s love acting in and through us.
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If we lose something of value, such as a wallet, we become greatly concerned. If we find it, or it is returned to us, we are greatly relieved. Similarly, when we are so disturbed in spirit that we cannot see which direction to turn we describe our feelings as that of being lost. Then, if we find our way forward or receive insight about how to think and act, the feelings of disturbance subside and are quickly forgotten.
Feelings are not the same as reasons. Sometimes we know what causes us to have feelings of being lost, but that does not cause the feelings to disappear, any more than knowing that our anxiety is caused by having lost a possession diminishes the level of our angst. It might seem logical to conclude that the only way to deal with feelings of being lost is for us to either find a way out or to be given such a path. An alternative, which applies not only to feelings of being lost, but to all disturbances of spirit, is to treat our feelings as being of value and then to relate with them in a manner befitting our spirituality.
All feelings, whether pleasant or not, are reliable sources of information that enable us to go through life intentionally. To think of feelings as enemies or as some kind of outside interference does not acknowledge the spiritual aspect of our lives, such as love, trust, generosity, courage, and many more such human capabilities. None of these qualities are brought forth within us through reasoning alone. Rather, our feelings provide us with the means for making reasonable decisions, sometimes instantaneously and even before our minds are engaged. When we attend to them as helpful data, body and spirit together give us access to truth that is unobtainable in any other way.
To return to the example of a lost wallet, and the consequent feelings of anxiety, those feelings indicate the importance to us of that specific item, calling up energy for reasonable action. The discomfort does not suggest that anything is wrong with us but does present us with the fact that we need to deal with a present bothersome reality quite carefully, focusing on what we can do, not on feelings alone. We accept our experience of anxiety as an inner communication of importance rather than a threat.
However, some feelings are so intense when they occur that we cannot see them as information and need some other means of moving forward. When we are lost in a state of mental and emotional turmoil, one dependable exit is always available: opening our feelings to God’s love. Rather than an escape from the feelings, prayer of this kind is being able to go directly through them with our minds and hearts focused on God loving us even in our personal and private “messy room.” By receiving the love that is offered to us, we become aware that we are no longer lost.
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We have very likely had experiences of second guessing a decision, which often ended in confusion rather than our having found a legitimate reason to revise our initial resolve. Sometimes, when doubts arise about a path we have chosen, it is very helpful to recall our thoughts and feelings at the time we made the choice. If in so doing our minds and hearts concur with a sense of peace as we recall that original decision, the turmoil of doubts will diminish, and we will also have opened for ourselves a cause for gratitude.
Because our minds are constantly active, processing new information and experiences, doubts can be helpful indications of a need for reflection. Some of our initial decisions have been made impulsively or in reaction to events or people rather than weighed in our hearts for verification of being responses that we freely and consciously chose. Nor is every decision truly a matter where conscience, our integrity, or our life values are involved. Often, we quite reasonably decide to experiment, with a tentative decision, so that we can learn whether, for example, lifting small weights for exercise is something we wish to continue.
However, one or other of the significant decisions we have made, and which we have followed out in practice for a considerable amount of time, can be subject to doubts, especially when some new and unexpected experience raises strong feelings in us that might be unfamiliar but disconcertingly attractive. Reflecting consciously on our “first guess,” which was certainly much more than that, can provide us with the clarity we need for deciding whether to hold fast to our original decision or to carefully explore a change that will almost certainly have significant consequences for us.
Doubts can often raise fear, because the possibility of change usually involves dealing with some unknown and perhaps unknowable future consequences. Reason alone is usually insufficient for resolving doubts. At such times, prayer is often exactly what we need so that we can engage healthily with fear and anxiety and move on to resolving qualms and misgivings. When we open our thoughts and feelings to God, our level of fear is usually lessened by the awareness of being accepted and understood. If we also reflect on our belief that God is love and always desires whatever is good for us within the realities confronting us now, we are even more likely to find ourselves calm enough to see a helpful way forward to resolving our doubts.
Although we do at times make significant changes to paths in life that we had previously chosen, it is well worth revisiting that first decision to ensure that we know what had moved us to choose it.