Just Faith, Everyday

How am I to write about these things I have stood for always, in some way; how am I to acknowledge and then help those suffering in fear?  Listen to them.  Listen without prejudice to the truly vulnerable. Place myself *near* the truly vulnerable.  I can certainly take the lessons of direction I’ve received, think through ways to ask the right questions, just as my greatest teachers have for me, to allow others to see their own unique path. Theirs is not mine, after all. Where I have to draw a line is in deliberate and hateful acts of racism, discrimination of any sort which cuts off or degrades human life.  I am appalled that there are people I know who don’t care about or even acknowledge this everyday reality. There can be love even if you don’t agree, even if you don’t share experiences or ways of life. Love is this at least. I think of children and how loved they can be, and how easily they can accept others in that love.  There’s naiveness in this, o...

Every leaf falls at its own pace. Accidents happen, and turn our lives upside down.  We become aware more often in the sudden and unexpected, unless we take time to listen to our everydayness, take time with the pace, not get paced. Recently returning to the Examen , I've found myself far more in touch with something internal and less disconnected from my family, far less likely to jump ahead in time, make assumptions, and let my emotions lead me. Instead, I am slowly relearning how to read myself, my daily situations, and others, pausing long enough to do this, and become more aware. I find so many think their own realities are the real ones, and others fake or wrong, but that’s our human problem—that we cannot see and won’t acknowledge the many facets of truth in reality, and have chosen to live for so long in surreality that it’s too hard to step out of it. That is, until you do step out, and then spend some time being in that space, not counting on the cues and tools that set y...

Getting lost within yourself is an unsettling feeling. What matters is counting on faith that things will happen, and people will get through. That there will be spirit enough to conquer the bad within and without, to cut through chaotic sound and fury, and lead in good ways.  What’s maybe most disheartening is when those around you give up on you.  Then it’s about really counting on the one who created you, trying to know, to grasp at not being alone in the struggle.  Words for me have always been my sanity point—writing itself as a way to make sense of the chaos and reach toward God. When I write, I find a way to draw out of me the many mixed emotions and ideas I have, all tangled together.  It’s extreme mess, this tangle, and all that I love and is important to me is in this mess, so I must, feel compelled, to disentangle. To look at the mess and see it for what it is.  It’s unsettling to see this mess, and feel helpless as to what to do with it.  I feel...

“The way you come to fully appreciate the infusion of the Spirit is to more and more come fully into the moment, where this moment is enough.” RAM DASS “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.” Mother Teresa I am having a particularly hard time being in this moment, so filled with hatred and violence and insanity—the audacity and hypocrisy of the politics in the world at this moment. It feels all like a joke, a bad one at that, and I want to take the world by the shoulders and shake it, and say, what they hell is wrong with you?  I am 43 years old, know what my parents went through immigrating here, know what the past several decades mean to so many who have worked hard to bring good into the world, and to make their way. But these quotes remind me there is more to life than soundbites, stupid people, and the insidiousness of ignorance, and that my work is yet cut out for me—that I must strive even harder for justice now. It’s exh...

We know things, seek information daily, value facts and data (we even pay for it!). Some refuse to see the actual cost of all this information. We don’t know each other: in some cases we’re trying, but in truth, we’re overwhelmed by the chasm between differences, and all the info in the world can’t help that. If we reach for each other and share willingly, at least, there’s hope for connection, for authenticity, but we have to see ourselves and others as fully human: bad breath, bad habits, sparks of goodness, all of it. Making room for each others’ failings— while striving to make better our everyday situation—is the humble beginning. The challenge comes in doing this for those deemed unworthy (whatever that might mean to you—we each have our prejudices).  Striving to eliminate those prejudices and replace them with real experiences—not fantasies or imagined doom, fueled by all that’s wrong with modern communication—is where the real work of connection begins, and where some of th...

What a strange thing to wake up thinking you’re in another place.  How travel can, with time, engrain in you a sense of home, a permanence about space that stays in your mind, becomes a part of your senses in such a way that even if the place is not your final destination, it feels like it is, or was.  Having two homes to me means this: to feel a pull like tide between these two places.  I come to my Georgia-home-I’ve-created and, especially at night when I dream, suddenly think I hear my father rummaging downstairs, or my mother turning open the blinds, and if I’m really straining, smell that brine from the sea on the breeze. My senses are really into it this year, drawing me into a deeper contemplation about the reality of home as much as its feeling.  There’s meaning to it—  something so life-defining it’s difficult to overlook or ignore—and it causes in me a desire to meditate on how home-space, in its flexibility as I get older and modernity digs deeper, is...

Grief is such a difficult thing to overcome: it wraps around us like some constricting creature, causing us to do crazy things, to reduce to our basic instinct.  It’s impossible without the movement of the Spirit to make sense of anything this world throws at us. The violence and hatred, senseless death (as if any would make sense, but especially the ones we could prevent). So much sorrow. I pray for an understanding which would allow peace to settle on every heart and soul in the world—a peace that comes from a right place, from THE right place. That hatred would disappear as a result. That’s a pretty big dream, though. Hate won’t disappear altogether until humans take the brave step to look—and enter— deep down inside and confront where hate comes from: stop it in its tracks from within and without. Stop making rash judgements, and look and act with the love of the Creator, who gives us grace and free will in equal measure. Until we use these gifts in a way which opens up relatio...