If you hear, ‘Look at you. You quit! You’ll never get this. Look how long you’ve been trying to be aware and you’re still a failure at it,” realize this is conditioned mind trying to control you - and recommit. If you play close attention, you are going to see how a process has been keeping you prisoner. You’re going to learn that when you’re present in the moment you don’t need to fear yourself, anyone or anything. A huge part of doing this work is getting to the point where it all falls apart.

We don’t need to get through the good times! We need to learn what to do when things don’t go well, when the voices get the better of us, when we feel like a failure and want to give up. What I hear over and over is that people start something they want to do, do whatever it is, feel great, stop (for reasons they rarely understand) and get the stuffin’ beat out of them by their conditioned voices for being a lose and a failure. It’s a cycle…

At a certain point we must without self-hatred, stand at the crossroads, hear the little voice that says “You can go in a new direction,” heed that voice and make a choice to end suffering.

Cheri Huber, Making a Change for Good

I need to write yet I rarely do.  Whether journaling my day or expounding on where my thoughts and heart travel, I fill my life with other tasks and priorities.

When I sat down to write this, I was about to go down a well-trodden lane in my life.  I wondered why I don’t just don’t write and was ready to reprimand myself both mentally and here on my blog.  Instead, before that could happen, this floated clearly into my mind and spoke not only out loud, but loud:  “You don’t want to let the cat out of the bag!“  Did I mention it was loud?

What cat is that? That cat would be me.

I’ve said various versions of this before.  But here it is.  I’m going to do it again. The cat. I’ve let her out. Again.  Because that’s what there is for me to do when a voice speaks out loud.

I’ve been on a journey that feels strange. I don’t know where I’m heading. And I certainly don’t know where I will end up. In fact, I think the idea of “ending up” somewhere, anywhere, has revealed itself to me as an illusion. I find it very difficult.

I read a portion of a book about one woman’s leaving the church because of its lack of recognition (at best) and complete suppression and oppression (at worst) of women. (This is another post altogether.) It, combined with so many other things, left me looking yet again at my relationship with Christianity. Maybe it’s the nature of how Christianity is taught and inculcated into us, or maybe (and I have to emphasize here, hopefully), hopefully something more true and pure, but I haven’t been able to simply slough off my connection and hope in God and Christ. Still, I’m more at odds with my faith than at peace with it.

Then today, I finally got around to reading an interview of Bart Ehrman on Salon.com. His book, “Jesus, Interrupted“, was published recently and it is causing a bit of a stir. He was raised Episcopalian and his 10th grade year asked Jesus into his heart. (Unrelated side note possibly interesting only to me: the summer of my 10th grade year was when I first asked Jesus into my life… a personal decision separate from my own Christian training and upbringing.) Bart Ehrman followed his passion to the Moody Bible Institute and that was where things began to unravel. Ultimately, he went from being a traditional, Bible-inerrancy believing Christian, to a more liberal, meta-myth Christian believer to where he is today. He’s agnostic. What was the straw that broke the camel’s back for him, and caused him to move his check marked theology box from God-believing to agnostic? Suffering. His words: “I finally got to a point where I just didn’t believe it anymore. I just didn’t believe that there’s a God who’s looking over this world and is in some sense active within it, who’s intervening to solve problems of suffering and is answering prayer. I just don’t believe that.”

I grew up with both a spoken and unspoken training and belief that God is somehow intervening and fixing our lives and our suffering. Today, I find myself in Ehrman’s camp. The world and my experience holds too many inconsistencies for me to believe that God intervenes in the ways I once conceived of. If the suffering isn’t fixed, the average Christian argument (and mine for so very long) is that God has “mysterious ways” that we can’t understand… and that there is a reason for the suffering we experience. But the assumption still lies in the view that we aren’t supposed to be suffering… unless we are to be brought out of it for God’s glory or there is a greater good (a mystical, spiritual weaving of purpose, or a burning of the dross in me for my own good) that God has designed but I don’t/can’t/won’t understand or know.

Paul & I talked a while back about the possibility that what makes God God is God’s inexhaustible and illimitable nature to be with, take in the world’s (and our) suffering. God’s ability to be with…

Since that conversation, I’ve been thinking that this God, that has eternal capacity to hold close and be with the evil, pain and suffering in this world… is, not a form or entity (and as such, may have outgrown for me the title and my prior definitions of “God”), but is instead Love. And in being with and holding suffering close… suffering is, by Love, transformed.

The experience of life is, for me anyway, turned on its head if I consider that suffering isn’t something to be done away with, but rather something to embrace. Not in a self-punishing, masichistic sense, but in a peace-giving, life-affirming and ultimately transformative sense. Honestly, I’m not sure how that looks yet.

Hardly a sensical or comprehensive theology or idealogy, embracing God not as some type of quasi-human deity like we think of the Greek gods or similar, but rather the essence and being of Love… That has created a new kindling in my heart and soul. Prayer has been a mess of an experience for me over the last several years. Recently, my prayers have turned into some form of this:

Love Eternal, Love Divine,
I give myself to you.

Love creative and transforming,
I give myself to your service.

Love sacrificing and suffering,
I humble and give myself to you.

Love forgiving, accepting and whole,
I give myself to you.

Love Eternal, Love Divine,
I surrender to you.

And praying these prayers, they are moving and challenging me. And most importantly to me, they are both reshaping me into someone that I want to be and on a journey that I do, most definitely, want to be on.

Despite the fact that Mother Nature is messing with us by bringing snow, rain, wind and cold these first two days of April… thanks to Ahmis, it’s springtime in the Moment home!  Last weekend, Ahmis trimmed her cherry tree back and offered me an enormous vase to fill up with branches upon branches of trimmings. I put them in water and in two short days, we have this!

Amira & I enjoy telling each other how beautiful the flowers are.  She makes me laugh when she sniffs them and tells me that they smell like tortillas.  I have giggled too each time she’s given herself a startled tickle on the nose by diving in too close to the blooms.

So, happy spring everyone, even if Mother Nature isn’t quite yet in the mood…