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?

In the well known story of the prodigal son, we hear the story of how we sometimes choose to separate ourselves from God. We say, “thanks for the gift of life, I’m out of here,” leaving our father’s house, to live as we will. To live as if it is just us, as if we were somehow separate from the great love that created us, separate from the stream of providence, separate from one another.  We hear the story of how living with this belief of separateness eventually leads to isolation and spiritual depletion.

And some of our motivation for going away seems to be a need to push the boundaries, to see if that great love will follow us no matter how far we go.

It’s like the Push me, Pull you game in love, “Do you love me when I’m like this?  How about now?  If you see me at my worst will you love me?”

While human love is rarely unconditional and often cannot withstand these kinds of tests, God’s love is big enough to handle our antics.

Yes, God still loves me now!  No matter how ugly it gets, no matter how much I make myself miserable, no matter what, in every moment that love is pouring forth beyond measure and inviting me to come home.

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?

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?

]]> http://sagereflections.org/?feed=rss2&p=59 2 http://sagereflections.org/?p=54 http://sagereflections.org/?p=54#comments Wed, 17 Mar 2010 12:23:47 +0000 Rev. Sage Currie http://sagereflections.org/?p=54 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.

We honored her in worship here in Fryeburg, reading the wonderful excerpt  that was printed in her obituary where Dorothea offered the lovely and  profound statement:

“God’s will is not alien to my own will;
God’s will is that I find my deepest joy.”

Christian history and tradition is full of all kinds of ideas of what “God’s will,” might be for us.  At times renunciation of the world, self flagellation, servitude, denial of the flesh, martyrdom, etc.  And perhaps for each Christian these paths were what, at the time, led them to their greatest joy & their greatest connection to God.

And what I wonder will lead me to mine?

I am grateful to Dorothea for her life, for her bravery and her wisdom.  She has stood in a line of saints that have been helping to birth the new church into the world for generations.  May we all honor her part by doing ours.

When you miss the turn to a store you wanted to go to do you say to yourself  ”Oh, well… I didn’t really need to go,” instead of turning around to go back?  When you miss a day with a new exercise routine  do you then feel so ashamed and dissapointed with yourself that you don’t ever get back to it?  Do you have trouble learning new things because you can’t stand to be in the place of not knowing what you are doing?

I believe perfectionism is one of the most destructive personal demons of our time, because it denies our very human nature.  When we can’t have a do-over, when we can’t pick up and start again, when we can’t be in the place of not knowing, then we can’t change.  And if we can’t change, we can’t grow, we can’t learn new things, we can’t play and discover all that we might in this exciting and fabulous creation that we’ve been invited to be a part.

So, as you may note… I am battling this personal demon of mine by picking up my abandoned blog and starting again…  While I have visited my own feelings of shame and dissapointment for falling off the blogging wagon in the first place, I am giving myself a do-over, I am declaring all is not lost, I am getting back on the wagon and saying perfectionism be damned!

It’s good to be back!

What is amazing me today about these angels in the making that I am journeying with is what scares them.  It’s different for everyone as you can imagine.  For some it’s pain, for some it’s losing control, for some it’s leaving loves ones and family.  For one gentleman who I have recently come to know it’s that some of his hair is changing color.

Of all of his symptoms, all of his pain, and loss of function, weakness, weight loss, it’s this odd, unexplainable symptom that has him the most bothered.  And when I ask him why he tells me “fear of the unknown.”

Death is the ultimate unknown.  What will it look like when we cross that veil?  What is it to spend your days knowing this unknown is waiting to meet you?

And can we meet the unknown with something beyond fear?

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

Eternity Now!!

So I am back   And I am back coming to you live from a whole new spot on the globe.  Yes, I haven’t just been hiding from my computer over the last three weeks I have been moving to Portland, ME and starting a new job with Allegiance Hospice.

My call has shifted, I have had to say goodbye for now to the parish, goodbye to my many beloved friends at The Church of the Holy City in Wilmington, and hello to a grand new adventure.  A new adventure of journeying with people on the edge of this world and the next.  Journeying with people saying their goodbyes and preparing to say their hellos to a even bigger spiritual future.  It will be an adventure!

So stay tuned!

I will leave this initial entry with just one very simple reflection that is sitting with me this evening.  If I make it to very old, what will I be like?  What will you be like?  Thoughtful?  Dreamy? Crotchety? Content?  Flamboyant?  If you become a lot more what you are right now what will that be?

Hmmmmm.  Good to be back!