Archive for the 'Eternal Life' Category
“Everything inside our bodies that is sensitive and alive is spirit. And we are sensitive in our bodies from head to toe. When body and spirit separate, which we call dying, we are still ourselves, and we are still alive.” (Heavenly Secrets #5883, Emanual Swedenborg)
We are all born and we all will die. And in between we eat and sleep, work and play, dress ourselves, drive in cars, pay bills, mow our lawns, raise children, marry, divorce, fill out paperwork, earn degrees, are hired and fired, on and on… And in the midst of all the physical events our spirits are growing. Our spirits are being shaped. We learn and explore, we open up, we shut down, we experience grief, we experience healing, and hopefully through the many ups and downs of our internal experience we learn to love.
Our human nature and our divine nature are inherently intertwined.
I am pondering today what is happening in my spirit, as I enter into the details and dramas of the day. How is my spirit being shaped and molded? And how perhaps is my spirit expressing itself in this human reality that I am living?
We truly are spiritual beings having a human experience and what a fabulous spiritual playground this earth is! What will today hold?
June 17 2010 | Eternal Life and Nature & Spirit | No Comments »
This Easter I posed the question;
Would your days unfold differently if you woke up each morning and reminded yourself that you are an eternal being?
In an article in Time Magazine, a 1997 study was published that reported 81% of Americans responded affirmatively to the question ”Do you believe in the existence of heaven, where people live forever with God after they die?”
81%! A lot of people believe in eternal life. And what I would like to ask is how is this strongly held belief in eternity effecting our lives now? What would it look like to really consider what it means to be eternal?
To consider the eternity of our own spirits is to be reminded of the mortality of all the seemingly substantial “things” we deal with every day. Our cars, our homes, our jobs, our wardrobes, our bills, our overweight or underweight bodies, our savings accounts, our art work, our wedding rings, our to do lists, our mortgages…… it seems that almost everything slips away.
And so what is it that stays?
To wake up each morning saying “I am an eternal being,” is to shift our attention to the “things” that do stay. To the ways in which we are shaping our eternal spirit.
Am I inviting kindness into my life? Am I facing my fears? Am I able to be still with myself, with those I love and with God? Am I able to experience joy and find joy in the Lord’s creation?
These are just a few questions we might ask ourselves if we were to truly shift our life focus from the impermanent to the eternal.
What would your days look like if you remembered your eternal nature?
April 15 2010 | Eternal Life | No Comments »
“Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen, room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.” ~ Pema Chodron
So far this holy week it has been the Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron who has offered me the greatest wisdom for understanding and being present to this week of suffering, death, and resurrection. While I prepare my Easter sermon I am taking the challenge of being present to the whole story, to my whole story, and letting the story of new life emerge from that. Can we be here now? Wherever that is?
March 31 2010 | Death and Dying and Eternal Life and Spiritual Struggle | 2 Comments »
There seems to be a limit to everything. I so quickly get to the bottom of the ice cream container and my checking account responds quite predictably to the purchases I make. I had a hospice client who would almost repetitively say “There’s a limit to it!” when describing the various ways in which her body was giving out.
Our bodies also seem to be limited, only lasting a certain period of time.
But is there truly a limit to everything? Is there a limit to love?
I know many people, myself included, that have been stomped on by love, shaped by people in their lives who have believed there was a limit to love. Parents who believed showing too much love would spoil their children, and more often parents, boyfriends, girlfriends, husbands and wives that felt limited in their own abililty to give and receive love.
But there is no limit.
The scripture I’ll be preaching this week describes Mary Magdeline using precious aromatic oils to annoint the feet of Jesus while Judas Ascariot watches on saying, basically, “how wasteful!”
There is nothing wasteful about showing love. It’s the only thing that has no limit.
March 17 2010 | Eternal Life and Love | 4 Comments »
To journey with someone as they pass into the next life. To say goodbye. To forgive. To be thankful. To accept. Wow. This job of walking with the dying and their families in hospice is truly humbling.
I’m not quite sure what to reflect on it all yet as the newness of this work settles in. So I want to share a poem that I discovered.
Is Life the Incurable Disease
Is life the incurable disease?
The infant is born howling
& we laugh,
the dead man smiles
& we cry,
resisting the passage,
always resisting the passage,
that turns life
into eternity.
Blake sange alleluias
on his deathbed.
My own grandmother,
hardly a poet at all,
smiled
as we’d never seen her smile
before.
Perhaps the dress of flesh
is no more than a familiar garment
that grows looser as one diets
on death, & perhaps we discard it
or give it to the poor in spirit,
who have not learned yet
what a blessing it is
to go naked?
Erica Jong
August 09 2008 | Eternal Life | No Comments »
LIFE IS ETERNAL – I am serious it is. This past week I have been building my “home” on the internet and now that it is complete and I am set the task to settle down and “reflect” I can think of no better place to start than here. Eternity. Now. That’s the great paradoxical mystery. That eternity is a really long way off and it is right now in this very moment.
In Sunday School at my church last week I had the children draw a time line from now to eternity. It was as you can imagine not to scale, but the small strips that represented their 5 and 7 years only took up a small corner of the (19 foot or so) timeline that ended at a “google.” (They are very smart kids, this was the biggest number they knew.)
So we talked about eternity, that long unfathomable stretch of time where their great grandparents and pet hampsters were playing. And we talked about how this eternity is shaped by the choices we make now, how we are right now building our heavenly homes based on what we love. (This discussion dovetailed well into a game of “I’m going to eternity and I’ll bring ___________.”)
What will you bring? Or better yet what do you have with you right now?
Eternity is timeless, it is now and it is forever. We are all beings of this eternal world, made alive by the timeless spirit of God, created to open fully to that timeless substance of creation : LOVE.
As we approach Easter this is on my mind. How do my daily choices look in the light of eternity, in the light of having all the time in the world and no time to lose?
March 17 2008 | Eternal Life | No Comments »
