“Teilhard proposed that union with God must be effected by passing through and emerging in matter. That is, we are not rescued from the world by divine grace; rather, we are saved or made whole in and through the world by cooperating with divine love. Love is a consciousness of belonging to another, of being part of a whole. To love is to be on the way toward integral wholeness, to live with an openness of mind and heart, to encounter the other- not as a stranger- but as another part of oneself.” ~from The Unbearable Wholeness of Being by Sister Ilia Delio
On Sunday, Bill quoted Jim Findley, “God protects us from nothing, but sustains us in everything.”
I believe in the power of love to keep me in one piece when everything falls apart and in the power of pure joy and delight. To me, these are moments of grace. These moments I am reminded why I practice.
Some moments are as simple as witnessing a child realize they can draw when they are taught what to look for.
Some moments are as hard as sitting with your child who wants to take his own life or sitting with your mom who suddenly lost her partner.
The common thread in these is the reverence for love at the center of these moments. I believe that my daily practice is rehearsal for these moments. These moments that show up no matter how we try to orchestrate the good ones or avoid the bad ones, whose timing I have no control over, these are the moments that remind us that we are participating in something larger than us and we can either try to make it about us, our illusion of our separate self, or we can show up and participate in what holds us in the moment together to begin with, the truth of our oneness. We can participate in love. We can let love evolve us toward wholemaking. Every one of my practices prepares me to NOT run away, figuratively and quite literally at times. Because I have been able to sit with curiosity and love in those moments, I have faith that love doesn’t need me to know what “to do” in them. My small self tries. My human suit crawls and shakes to get up and run away but that inner guide I sit with in practice, the one that teaches me that I am enough, in every situation, it reminds me to breathe. It reminds me that I am just as worthy of witnessing the pure joys as I am strong and courageous enough to bring tenderness to the harshest of human suffering. Good or bad, high or low, the groundedness in love the indescribable strength in these moments can only be defined as grace to me. I don’t have any other explanation because I know I alone am not strong enough to humanly will that power. I have the power when I acknowledge that I am not alone. I witness what the power of that love and groundedness transforms and I know for a fact that I am only a witness, or at best, a participant, simply because I am willing and capable of being present.
May you be present to the moments of joy and delight and sustained and held together tightly in loving kindness and compassion when things fall apart.
Grace in, peace out,
Brooke