You Have A Choice

You do not need to respond to all that someone offers.  Your choice is what aspects will be of interest, or to offer your own.  Arguing about what is presented, expressing annoyance, or any such thing is of no value.  If you must say anything, say, "That is something," since it is and the specific whatness of it is unimportant.

After Addiction

Having moved beyond the addictive part of their addiction people are finding themselves with religious experiences marked by submission and fear, experiences and punitive as they had been years ago.  It was a God who might give but who as readily might take away, and in as capricious a way.  Sadly, they were calling this spirituality.

Like Father, Like Son

I notice myself saying and doing what my father would say or do.  I am glad I can smile at most of them.

Hoarding His Personal God

The more he talks of his personal God and of his personal relationship with that God, the more estranged he becomes, and God as well.  He thought the personalizing was other than the hoarding and perhaps it was, though exclusive things and solitary involvements have so little environment in which to grow, no place in which they can naturally occur.

Living Forward and Backward

"There is this difference," he said.  "You live forward looking for what might be coming.  Anxious you are to see round the bend and on down the road, while I live backward looking toward what was and wondering why it went so quickly by.  I've no need nor wish to see as you do.  Someday neither will you, but that is not today so I'll not pull you back -- as long as you don't try dragging me forward."

Different Realms

Some things will always be special.  What follows is not less for being different or for happening later.  It was just not there at the beginning and so was not there to share in a moment, or a time, that does not become retrospectively available.  Some friendships and some loves are this way too.  They were there when things happened -- things that cannot happen again; or they were a first, a realization or sharing or what no one else will ever know.  It is not that one is better for being then or that the other is more for being now.  They reside in different realms and each can be sacred.

A Place for Outrage

Perhaps we all need a time of outrage and its focus is less significant than is its occurrence, but its duration adds little and the sooner we can get on to a more productive use of self the better.

Use It

God did not give you a brain because he had run out of cabbage.

Making Room on the Mantle

We carry within us the entirety of our heritage, some being more prominently displayed while other aspects surface only occasionally.  It is as though there was only so much room on the mantle and along with the treasures passed down we must find room too for items more valued by the present generation.  If we only had space enough for faded photographs and tarnished pieces, we would be displaying the history we had at best heard about from someone who may have heard it whole.  It is not too different with our Church where the old and respected things, the heritage none of us got to create, can be displayed more prominently than is the moment.  While it is venerable and in some ways a wondrous thing, it is faded nonetheless.

Fear of Dying

He was telling me how afraid he is of dying.  He is terrified of what is not even a likelihood, much less an actual prospect.  Perhaps were it closer he would not have been so afraid.  Maybe had death come near enough to be recognized he might not have wanted to run.  Death is an aspect of life and while it is more uncertain than some others it is not an aspect that need engender such dread.  I wished he were not so afraid, but I did not wish him closer to it so that he might better understand.  Instead, I said what I so often do.  I said, "It will be all right."

Guilty For What

There are so many people feeling so terribly guilty about what they cannot even name and all they are sure of is the terrible penalty for whatever it might be.

Questions Instead

He used to have all the answers.  He now has some of the questions.  It was a better than fair exchange.

Celebrate Life

Life is to be celebrated rather than solved.  It is a statement rather than a question.

Fleeing The Moment

When we are uncomfortable in the moment, when we are focused instead on something else -- a different person, a different place -- then we have lost the moment, given it away to fantasy, and while at times it is hard not to, it is not wise.  My tendency when fleeing the moment is to be drawn toward what was, or to bring forward from then the people who were parts of moments past.  At times it is my effort (or my wish) to share with them what currently is, but mostly it is the familiarity I am seeking.  It is inviting them to notice or to ratify what is available (and sometimes sadly so) only to me.

Second Guessing

There is no shortage of knowledge about what should have been, how we should have acted, what we should have said, and to whom; or about what we were meant to do in any of the responses we envision for them.  We know how we meant to react, though at the time it was equally clear that doing (or saying) nothing made more sense.

Original Ideas

If you really wanted an original idea, you should have been born three thousand years ago.

Too Much Intensity

Too much intensity about anything, especially over time, indicates a limitation in the focus or in the individual who has narrowed life to accommodate this single issue.

A Week Without Evil

I wonder could they do a week without mentioning sin.  I wonder could their belief tolerate no reference to evil.

Going to Lazarus

Lazarus was already dead by the time word of his illness reached Jesus.

Would-Be Memories

Because he knew how it would have been, he can remember what never happened.

Stuck

For all the changes I would like to think are possible, making them is less easily done.  I run backward rather than forward, and I suppose reasonableness is not the issue.  Making sense is not the same as making anything happen.

The Answer

You would still be the answer to so many things, and were you still with us so many of those questions would never have arisen.  But life is as it is.  And death is too.

Through Another's Eyes

The more we look through another's eyes the less accurately will we see.  All that we will notice is what we find so unsettling and offering it to someone else only precludes our understanding, and our coming to terms with what we have so far only feared.

Settle In

We settle too readily into routine, becoming too quickly the expert, the fixture.  The wonder is hidden until lost and there is no sense of the newness in each moment.  It is time perhaps not to move, but to instead notice and to wonder all over again.

Solomon did not ask for an understanding mind

A Question of Focus

Narrowing our focus, the details become more grand than they are.  Broadening our view makes detail disappear into limitless, though blurred, horizons.  Both views are accurate though neither is true.  We must know when to alter focus, aware that ease with either may signal the onset of obscurity.

Respond to Anxiety

Unless we respond to our anxiety we risk being overrun by it, and sooner rather than later is the better rule.

A Contented Man

The man born blind had not asked to be cured, nor did he ask an explanation when Jesus put mud on his eyes.  He went and washed as told and when able to see he found no need to tell what had happened.  Called by the court he went, and questioned he answered.  He avoided debate offering only the facts of what had occurred.  Leaving them he did not rush to find Jesus, but permitted himself to be found.  He listened, believed and would be content to go had not the Pharisees needed to speak again.  In the end he is sent away, and he goes -- still accepting, as content within himself as he apparently had been at the start.

The Therapist's Paradox

Why are the issues I can so clearly and cleverly resolve in someone else's life so much more complex in my own; and why do I hesitate to undertake what I support and urge them to do?

Why Ask Why

It seems we spend a good deal of time asking why when it is not the right question and maybe none would be.  It seems so many things just are, that events occur and consequences may follow them, but the why is not available.

Partial Truth

As long as there is only one correct response, one right way to be, a single proper way to act we will run after it, letting go whatever seemed only partially true, not realizing that partially true things are as true as anything else we might run in pursuit of.