Monday, June 9, 2008

Cleaning House (or at least clearing a path to the door)

We've been sorting through and cleaning out the old family house. If you are familiar with this process, you know that at times you have more of a mess on your hands than you started with. My prayer life and spiritual thinking has reached that point. What a mess! I stand, as it were, in the middle of the muddle, not knowing what to do first. I wanted to address some basic issues of belief, but more and more issues came out of the cupboards and closets of my religious upbringing.

I am reminded of a poster I had in my dorm room in college that said,"When you are up to your butt in alligators, it's difficult to remind yourself that your original objective was to drain the swamp."

But some thoughts have come to the forefront:

The holy presence of "God" and "heaven" and the "communion of saints" is inside us and around us NOW--- not up in the sky, or far away, waiting for us in some future time. It has something to do with the life and light all of us creatures
have in common and share, and when we acknowledge this common bond we are closer to "God" and "Holiness."


Alot of this clutter comes when I try to decide if the Spirit is this or another thing that people say it is, when,as I wrote earlier,God can be all of those things or none or something entirely different. My thinking tends to become clearer when I decide to Let God be God. Let God define God. Isn't that what we pray in the "Our Father": "thy kingdom come, thy will be done..." In other words,"Go ahead. Be God."

Because we humans have been given, or have deveopled, a self-awareness, we have a capability and a responsibilty to examine the intentions of our actions and the outcome of our behavior. INSTANT KARMA!

There's also alot of boxes marked "dopey dogmas" and "Theologians covering their butts" and a huge crate devoted to "imagined sins, original and not so" that are unnecessary baggage and are ready for the dumpster.

No comments: