Love’s In The Air (My Lenten Prayer)

Lover,
In my darkness, and light.
Lover
Of my sadness, and life.

Around me is love.
It’s everywhere.
Did you, my Lover,
Pour it there?
Am I to simply
Grow aware?

Or has it spilled
From my own heart?
Of all this love,
Which is MY part?

From You? From me?
Are both the same?
All which is “Love”
Has that one name.

Neil D. 2021-02-18

.

https://youtu.be/RoIvi1j6Bp8
Love Is In The Air
Everywhere I look around
Every sight and every sound
In the whisper of the trees
In the thunder of the sea
And I don’t know if I’m just dreaming
Don’t know if I feel sane
But it’s something that I must believe in
And it’s there when you call out my name
Love Is In The Air
In the rising of the sun
When the day is nearly done
And I don’t know if you’re an illusion
Don’t know if I see it true
But you’re something that I must believe in
And you’re there when I reach out for you

Aching To Know

God knows I’ve diagnosed everything wrong with me and others: My relationships. But, if everything has an explanation, faith would be moot. I am infinitely valued and infinitely complex. I am God’s unique child–not another like me.

Ever.

Though I compare my self to other selves, there is no comparison.

Creation without me is senseless. For I AM!

There is no creation without me, for as long as I am ordained to be. Which is forever!

I don’t think God intends me to understand all things. What would be the point of faith then? As a child needs a parent, so I need my divine Parent.

NEED.

Not a nice-to-have.

A fundamental and desperately hopeless–without hope–NEED.

It’s how I was made. To fundamentally need to know my Origin.

The Tree of Knowledge’s fruit is forbidden NOT because it hurts God. Directly. But only because God hurts, knowing that *I* hurt when I try to eat its fruit.

Its fruit is too big, chokes me. Not because of some inferiority, or curse. Or decree that I must be subservient to a master.

I cannot know all–even about my own self. I am too gloriously and unfathomably rich and complex. And that unknowability–even of
my
own
self
–makes me ache.

When I ache, my loving Parent aches more than I.

THAT is love. Love is immeasurably more than knowing, understanding.

Love is everything.

Both ways.

And even when it doesn’t come from my way?…

It’s coming from the Other Way…

.

Neil D. 2021-02-15 (originally February 15, 2019]

Related: Young Messiah: “There’s still so much that I don’t know. But I do know this… I think I’m here just to be alive. To see it. Hear it. Feel it. All of it. Even when it hurts. Someday you’ll tell me why else I’m here. I don’t know when. But you will. I know that. Because… Father, I am your child.”

Afraid to be sad?

Are there things you avoid because they make you sad, or might?

Are you afraid to be sad?

I’d like to think you really shouldn’t be afraid to be sad. You’re so, sooo much bigger than sadness. There’s plenty of room in the hugeness of who you are. Sadness won’t crowd out the rest.

While your sadness sulks in its small corner of you, it feels left out and lonely. Other parts inside you are fearful of acknowledging sadness, hiding over there in the corner. Other parts of you wish sadness would go away if they ignore it. But there is plenty, plenty of room in you for sadness.

Plenty of room for sadness to turn her face toward the rest of you and not be shamed.

The part of you that loves is more than enormous enough to love sadness.

Do you expect to have any happiness without risking sadness? You deserve some happiness, so you’re going to have to risk sadness.

You’re going to have to risk living. Or you’ll be dying, without being aware of it, until you wake up later. Everyone wakes up. Don’t let fear of sadness keep your eyes slammed shut. Sadness isn’t anywhere as large as you think it is. Not compared to the love hiding inside you.

Neil D. 2021-02-13

Einstein on Compassion and Our Imprisoned Small Minds

I bet that if I showed you the quote below, and you didn’t see the title of this article, you could not guess who wrote it in 100 or 1000 tries.

Millions (or more) want to escape our “imprisoning delusions of consciousness.” Or so we say. I don’t think we entirely mean it. “Yeah, it would be nice, but it seems impossible…” I surely don’t disagree that it seems impossible, or that it may truly be impossible in this realm. But I think the part that we don’t entirely mean, is that we believe it. I don’t think we actually believe it. Like, it is too contrary to our experience for us to buy it. Or so impossible that it’s not even valuable to consider the plight as reality. It takes too much control away from our ego, if we admit it. It seems like, or we hope, it’s just a distorted or wrong way of thinking. And this is the real reason I offer the following quote, penned by whom most of us would agree is the most gifted scientific mind in our Western history. As desperately as you and I might not want it to be true, he certainly believes that it is:

“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
[condolence letter to Norman Salit, March 4, 1950. Reprinted in “The New York Times,” March 29, 1972]
.

Neil D. 2021-01-29

Fundamentalism, one step from atheism

“Sometimes I feel like God isn’t mentioned enough… when ppl are asking for help we are reminded that we are not alone. That God is sitting right next to us.”

In a scene starting at, “Two decades earlier, I sat on the top step in an apartment swimming pool while a foot away Joseph…” here, I the father was “sitting right next to” my child. I did not feel like I was not mentioned enough (which is the whole point of that article). When Joseph nearly drowned and was “asking for help, [he was] reminded that [he was] not alone. That [Dad] is sitting right next to [him].”

Before I was a father, I was an ardent, militant, falsely pious, self-righteous, dogmatic “soldier of Christ.” I was going to give God God’s due, and be sure that others did too. I’m not so much now. It doesn’t seem to me that Christ needs me. Not that way, anyway. It seems, specifically NOT that way.

As each of us parents sit next to our children, do we want them to know we are there? I think too often, too much. I think it is a distorted impulse that we want our children to “know” they are loved and ok. Look at them when they are full of joy. They don’t give two shits about feeling safe under the watch of their parents. WE are the ones who create paranoia in them by over-emphasizing the value of safety at the expense of joy. It is OUR need for them to be safe, not their need. And it is OUR delusion that we can keep them safe from everything. Before they were our child, they were Someone Else’s.

I think this is very much where we get our distorted militant sense of God’s need to be worshiped. God’s need to be mentioned. God’s need to be thanked. We have that distorted. It is actually US who NEED to worship something larger than ourselves, to express thankfulness, and to feel safe. Not God needing it. Our prayers are for our OWN benefit also, we forget too easily. We are comforted by the notion of a Higher Power in charge of things we lust to control. We grasp at being God.

Yeah, God sits there next to us all the time. Not just the times when we notice it. But I don’t think God cares nearly as much as we do about whether God is noticed. That does not seem to be God’s nature. God’s nature seems to be entirely aimed at us, not aimed at our attention to God. I bet God is moved with gratitude when we return love, sure. That surely seems to be what love is, and there is no reason that God’s love needs to be any different than our love for God. I don’t think it is by chance that we have given God a parental label. The natural order of things, by which parents love their children unconditionally, seems prudently ordained:-)

When I am watching my child pour out joy, the last thing I care about is whether my child notices my watch. I myself do not even realize I am watching. That’s the infectiousness of innocent, child-like joy. Why would I deny that God gets lost in our joy that same way? Jesus sure seemed to enjoy wedding receptions, and wanted the wine to keep flowing.

The child does not have to know who the Parent is for the Parent to know who its child is. Even when an atheist experiences joy in creation, I don’t think God gives two shits about being credited. That care is ours. I’m cautious about ascribing that care to The Love.

So, yeah, I sometimes wish more people would mention God. Just so *I* can be reminded what’s inside each of us… Inside me…

.
Neil D. 2021-01-28

Goodness is NOT from God “alone”

Don’t be too quick to summarily ascribe all of your good fortune to God/God’s will. That’s a perilous fundamentalism which leaves many empty when they aren’t feeling “rewarded” by God’s will.

There is absolutely such a thing as too much dependency on God. It fosters a failure to recognize our own immeasurable agency as God’s creatures.

A reminder:
God has ordained creation such that WE are to be cooperative participants.

Paradoxically humble pride is a sort of satisfaction and gratitude we feel for accepting that invitation—for God’s ever-readiness to have us back and to work with and through us to unfold Love in creation:

“With God, we can;
but without us, God won’t.”

The notion that God is in charge like a watchmaker or puppeteer, and God does all the good things in our lives, is an incomplete notion. It is a failed attempt to reduce mystery and paradox to a fundamentalism. It is the fragile ego clinging to oversimplification. It is cowardice, not glorification of God.

The indicting evidence against any reduction of divine principles is universal and incontrovertible: No mythical hand comes down from heaven. Instead, God’s own children are God’s hands in this world.

The longer we believe that God’s power comes from somewhere else, the longer we perpetuate a disconnection between our minds and hearts—our egos and souls. Our souls are the home from which our creator has ordained our agency as sacred and divine.

Our soul is the canvas on which the divine image and likeness appears.

.
Neil D. 2021-01-28