Monday, September 4, 2023
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Friends are friends forever
James Finley, Mirabai Starr and Earl Fields just won’t let me go. Their thoughts and example, living their contemplative lives, enrich and inspire me. First Finley:
If we do not meditate there will be no meditation in our lives.
If we do not patiently work through the obstacles we encounter, we can lose our way and lose ourselves in the process.
The entire journey is one in which we are called over and over again to surrender to a self-transforming process not of our own making. Each time we give ourselves over to our contemplative practices, whatever they might be, we find ourselves, once again, one with the communal mystery in which there is no separate self.
Our own wounded egos can circle about contemplative experiences in ways that make us less, not more sensitive to our own real needs and the needs of those around us. Religious faith, artistic inspiration, romantic-sexual love, the process of psychological healing, and all other arenas of contemplative experience and self-transformation, can and should be arenas of heightened compassionate sensitivity to the real needs of those around us.
And a New Mexico author and professor who lives in Taos, Mirabai Starr, speaks of her experience and that of many others:
You sit down to meditate not only because it helps you to find rest in the arms of the formless Beloved but also because it increases your chances of being stunned by beauty when you get back up.
Encounters with the sacred that radiate from the core of the ordinary embolden you to cultivate stillness and simple awareness. In the midst of a world that is begging you to distract yourself, this is no easy practice. Yet you keep showing up. You are indomitable. You are thirsty for wonder. Â
And I think of Jesus’ sermon, beautifully portrayed in Season 3, Episode 3 of The Chosen, Jesus knows his role on earth in God’s plan and speaks clearly about it, as he begins with the scroll of Isaiah:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring glad tidings to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.
 Rolling up the scroll,
Jesus handed it back to the attendant and sat down,
and the eyes of all in the synagogue looked intently at him.
He said to them,
“Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.”
Jesus the Indomitable. Jesus, full of wonder.
Our quiet friend Earl, afflicted with Parkinson’s Disease for years and years after being caught as a child by polio, was filled with wonder. And he was indomitable. When we left Waynesville in 1989, where he and his wife Marlene had lived all their lives, he made a wood-burned plaque for me, which I keep and cherish.
The Lord himself with a word of command, with the voice of an archangel and the trumpet of God, will come down from heaven. The dead in Christ will rise first, then we who are alive will be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air. Thus we shall always be with the Lord.
Earl died, and our friend Marlene still lives in the home they built in Waynesville. I think of how, on a quiet day in the spring of 1989, Earl must have been reading 1 Thessalonians, got to chapter 4, then how he noticed verse 17, and thought of me. Perhaps at that very moment, he got to work.
And now, all these years later, I love him so much for it.
(1 Thessalonians 4, Psalm 96, Luke 4)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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