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Ringing in the New Year

12/31/2011

Today I am gathering in and surrounding myself with all the blessings that sit side by side with all the challenges of 2011. The thing I am most grateful for is simply Life. With every day that passes, my understanding of Life seems to expand, and my experience of it deepens and becomes richer.

As I think about the coming year, I hardly know what to intend. One intention is that I be open to all that Life is, arms wide. Another is that my life focuses more and more on compassion, forgiveness and humility as the most powerful elements of creating and living a life imbued with a solid ground of being and rife with spirit. And most poignant about any resolution is that I remember every day what I wrote today.

It is my hope that during this next year (and in all years to come) we will seek a deeper commitment to a community that is driven by justice for all people, filled with the joy of living and surrounded with an aura of love.

I am steeped in gratitude for our continued connection and send you all so much love.

Happy New Year.

Thank you to my dear friend Lisa for offering me the use of some of her words for this post.

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A Season of Giving

12/23/2011

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This is about the only time of year when we seem to breathe a big sigh of relief. For most of the year we muddle along, paying too little attention to what goes on around us, and focusing mainly on the nitty-gritty of everyday life. Then Christmas time comes, and there is a flurry of activity culminating with a feeling of being wrapped in wonder. But even as we struggle our way through the hustle and bustle, something seems a bit different.

I notice it most in my wife. Generally, the last thing she would do is head to the malls in our area for any kind of shopping experience. It's not that she minds the stores, but the vast parking lots, the rampant consumerism and throngs of consumers are all things that irritate her, almost more than I do. But yesterday she called me from her car, in the parking lot of the mall, where she had been waiting for more than 20 minutes just to get out of the parking lot. I expected a string of expletives, but what I received was a reasonable and sane person, not happy, necessarily, to be stuck in the mire of parking purgatory, but not at all overwhelmed by the experience.

And that's the way much of life seems at this time of year. Our tolerance grows significantly for the things that slow us down, or get in the way of our routine, or make us irritated, or feel like impositions to our everyday living. And I don't know about you, but that just plain feels good to me. I worry less. I live more in the present. I let go of things that at other times of year might nag me for days.

I suppose that what causes all this is that we expect to feel different at this time of year. We expect people to be nice. We expect to be more forgiving. We expect to feel excitement and tolerance and compassion. And we are all focusing on giving; whether gifts of stuff to family and friends, or gifts of support to the needy, or gifts of love--giving is kind of the watchword at Christmas time. We are thinking about others more than about ourselves.

It is arguably the most profound lesson of Christmas. It is not the size or expense of the gift. It is not actually anything material about the gift. It is from giving humbly and selflessly, with love and compassion, and with forgiveness, that we truly receive the greatest gifts; we receive the gift of tolerance, of inner calm and of a true love of humankind that strengthens us even amid all the struggles of life.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if we gave this to ourselves and to others all year? It's not impossible.

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and a Happy New Year

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Just be Happy.

12/13/2011

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How many times have I heard (or said): "I just want to be happy." Or the converse: "I wish I didn't feel so sad." This is wonderful sentiment, but I have to wonder if this is not trying to shoot the moon, so to speak. Emotions are part and parcel with our everyday life, and there will always be peaks and valleys. The idea that we might be happy all the time or avoid the depths of sadness is like hoping we'll win the lottery without buying a ticket: ain't gonna happen.

I think comments of this sort actually express a deeper desire that we all have to feel such confidence and contentment in our lives that we are able to take in stride these fleeting peaks and valleys of living. To me this means being able to experience the purity of a happy moment without grasping at it to try to make it last longer than it's natural life. And it means being able to experience our sadness (or other less pleasant emotions) without the fear that it (they) will overwhelm and consume us. We can have this experience when the spirit part of our mind-body-spirit relationship is taking the lead over our emotion in our experience of life. Or to put it another way, when our spiritual ground of being is strong, our emotions can be seen with reasonable perspective.

We are actually born with this solid ground of being. All one needs to do is to imagine a child asleep in your arms to understand that. A child goes through emotions "like green corn goes through the new maid" (as we say in New England), but they seem to be able to return with ease to a place where the concerns of emotional turmoil are set aside, and calm prevails.

Now the trouble is, if you are reading this you are not a child. All the same, that same state of calm still exists within you. We will not find it by trying to return to the elusive "inner child." Rather, it is invoking the almost equally elusive "inner adult" ( as my friend Ashley Davis-Bush would say) that will give us access to a solid ground of being. In children, it happens automatically. In us adults, it is a choice--a choice that takes practice--but a choice none-the-less. We can't get there by merely trying to eliminate our emotions.

This is where a firm foundation in spiritual practice comes in. Spiritual practice does not necessarily mean prayer, church, meditation or the like. Spiritual practice is any intentional action which strengthens our connection with, and confidence in, our ground of being. It is anything we do to live more firmly in a solid ground of being so that when happiness or sadness emerge, as they inevitably will, we are still sure that we can enjoy the highs and withstand the lows. So, play music, sing loudly, walk on the beach, meditate, make something, do regularly those things that strengthen your ground of being: it is there that contentment consumes sadness and allows happiness a moment in the sun.

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Are you saved?

12/3/2011

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Salvation is kind of a funny word. It brings to mind repentance and vestal virgins and sometimes even (ala Heaven's Gate) aliens coming to save us from ourselves. Most religions tell us that we have to be saved, mainly from ourselves and what those religions deem to be our inherently bad selves. This seems rather depressing actually. Few of us are inherently bad, at least bad enough that we need someone to step in and tell us how to make amends for our shortcomings after first telling us what our shortcomings are.

I know my shortcomings, and some of them are not pretty. Also, I am not ashamed (usually) to admit that I have them, or to admit that changing some of them (well, many of them, perhaps) is unlikely. Like everyone, I am not always fully truthful (to others or to myself). I have my quirks and my buttons get pushed in not-so-good ways sometimes. In other words; I'm normal.

But nothing I do is so heinous that I need to "repent my sins in the eyes of God," so to speak. I am not a murderer, or a thief, or an adulterer. The real issue is how I assuage my guilt about being normal. I mean everyone makes mistakes, and sometimes on purpose. Been there, done that, can't be avoided. Yet even knowing this, I am still somewhat haunted by the foibles that are the normal course of living. The curse of New England style guilt.

But in the end, ya gotta laugh about it. Life is, after all, not about being perfect. And I suspect that were there to prove to be a God, it would think it laughable that we would even for a minute think that we might transcend our idiosyncracies. Only in a perfect world would there be perfect people and a perfect God. And if we were created in the image of God, then clearly, God is not perfect.

So why for even the slightest minute would we expect it of ourselves?

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Rev. Ben

I am an Interfaith Minister. My ramblings are primarily random thoughts, and commentary on life, love and the pursuit of happiness. See more on the ABOUT ME page (above).

To be notified of my new posts, use the RSS feed below--if you use Google reader or other such.

Ringing in the New Year

A Season of Giving

Just be Happy.

Are you saved?

Rev. Ben

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