Saturday, April 13, 2024
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
What is my rule of life?
When a rule of life keeps me sedentary, it might be not such a good rule. “Read, write, listen, pray every day.” That’s been my rule for years, and there’s nary an active verb. My friend Shannon suggests I add “move” to the beginning of my rule.
Move, read, write, listen, pray.
So yesterday I walked. Yesterday I moved around the apartment faster than a speeding bullet. Yesterday I noticed my fingers swinging across the keys as words flowed onto the screen. Yesterday I stretched, and did a few squats, and straightened my back several times. And then I rested.
I think “rest” belongs on my rule of life as well.
Move, read, write, listen, pray, rest … every day. Eight words to live by.
It’s a pleasant thing to feel my body sync with my mind. I notice that and relax. When I play music – harmonica or guitar or piano – no matter how incomplete the songs or scales might be, I feel a unity that lets me rest. It comes with writing, too, and with listening, and with prayer. Self-awareness brings my body closer. My body no longer lies over the ocean, o bring back my body to me.
How about when I touch someone else, or they touch me? That might bring the most joy. It can become a healing touch, and then each of us feels more whole. In I, Judas Taylor Caldwell explores the mystery of healing.
In truth, I had discovered in myself an ability to heal and to tranquilize the sick and troubled that I would not have suspected. I had noticed, without comprehending, that whatever healing powers I had dwindled when my mind was not completely on the person to be healed and there was no feeling of accord with nature. It was almost as if the healing gift functioned through a special channel which became stopped up when I felt no flow of energy from the surrounding atmosphere.
“Think of the living breath from the Father,” Jesus said, “and with this breath comes the living force from God’s universe.”
I considered this, trying to understand. “Is there not a healing vibration in the atmosphere which the healer captures and then transmits to the subject?”
“You speak of mechanics, not the source, Judas. It is like treating the symptoms rather than the disease.” (p. 168)
Jesus, completely human, breathed in the Father’s “living breath,” and healing poured out of him. And he invites us to follow, living not just in the shadow of the Father but breathing in his breath.
When they had rowed about three or four miles, they saw Jesus walking on the sea and coming near the boat, and they began to be afraid. But he said to them, “It is I. Do not be afraid.”
Jesus’ way of being one with natural things becomes something to learn from and follow, rather than just to be amazed at. His way of healing without effort becomes a way of life for all of us, when we breath in the “Father’s living breath.”
I think of another metaphor, something Richard Rohr posted yesterday from his book Everything Belongs, about what he learns from Jesus about encountering God:
For Jesus, prayer seems to be a matter of waiting in love. Returning to love. Trusting that love is the deepest stream of reality. That’s why prayer isn’t primarily words; it’s primarily an attitude, a stance. We can pray unceasingly, if we find the stream and know how to wade in its waters. The stream will flow through us; all we have to do is keep choosing to stay there.
This is not the way I live. My rule of life aims to get me there, listening to God, praying with my body and mind, touching others …
Touch. Another verb?
Move, read, write, listen, pray, touch. Every day. Give us grace, Lord, all of us, to do what you call us to do. And be what you call us to be.
They wanted to take him into the boat, but the boat immediately arrived at the shore to which they were heading.
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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