Wednesday, May 1, 2024
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Warm fuzzies
When I grew up in my early therapist days accompanied by the book I’m OK, You’re OK, I learned to love the idea of warm fuzzies and cold pricklies. The book is still in print. Which kind of words and touches would you like to receive, or give?
Henri Nouwen talks about this in a different way:
Today I imagined my inner self as a place crowded with pins and needles. How could I receive anyone in my prayer when there is no place for them to be free and relaxed? When I am still so full of preoccupations, jealousies, angry feelings, anyone who enters will get hurt. I had a very vivid realization that I must create some free space in my innermost self so that I may indeed invite others to enter and be healed. To pray for others means to offer others a hospitable place where I can really listen to their needs and pains. Compassion, therefore, calls for a self-scrutiny that can lead to inner gentleness.
Therapists and spiritual directors need their own counselor, or spiritual companion, or life coach. Call it what you want. I meet with my own once a month. I talk, and she listens. Once I get started my words and ideas often spill over one another. When I ask a question, she responds, often with reflective listening that takes me just a bit deeper than I was. Her insights are always helpful. In her office I feel surrounded by warm fuzzies.
Our daughter Andi kept a pet hedgehog for years. It was not, I must say, a very good pet. Holding it was an art form. It kept very much to itself and came out at night to eat and drink. His name was Manny. He was a cold prickly++++, although occasionally he softened his nettles and perhaps enjoyed our touch. Still, he was never a warm fuzzy.
Some from the party of the Pharisees who had become believers stood up and said about the new Christ-followers, “It is necessary to circumcise them and direct them to observe the Mosaic law.”
Paul, not such a warm fuzzy himself, had a tough decision to make. Not so tough, actually. A former Pharisee himself, he stood up against his former brothers, saying that the essence of God’s relationship with all of us, Jew and Greek, man and woman, was love and grace. And our response to that love and grace was obedient love, and generous grace to God and those around us. This is what Jesus taught, and Paul knew it. The law brought by Moses from Mt. Sinai guided our lives, but God did not require obedience to it, only obedience to the law of love.
Jesus used a metaphor to communicate this idea.
I am the vine, and you are the branches. Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit, because without me you can do nothing.
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
#
