Parinama

“Three different times I begged the Creator to take the thorn in my flesh away.  Each time they said, “My grace is all you need. My power works best in weakness.” So now I am glad to boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of the Creator can work through me. That is why I take pleasure in my weaknesses, and in the insults, hardships, persecutions, and troubles that I suffer for my life. For when I am weak, then I am strong.” St. Paul, 2 Corinthians 12 An accumulation of research is expanding our understanding of the pleasure pain paradoxes of the body/mind/brain. Dopamine, the neurotransmitter responsible for motivating us to seek out pleasure and avoid pain is the key physiological driver of this paradox.  When we hit on something pleasurable, food, sex, drugs, praise, we are bathed in a high of good feelings, ease, and happiness.  We naturally want more of this and will go after these good feelings with the behaviors that stimulate us in these ways. The problem wit...

When there is a baptism at my church, the reverend along with the newly baptized with their family and friends, process around the pews. The reverend dips an evergreen branch into holy water, flings it out to the crowd as says to us, “Remember your baptism.”  This brings me unexpected tears every time as I remember my own baptism, not the actual experience since I was only a few months old, but the story that was told to me about this day along with the pictures. It was 1963 and I was baptized into the Catholic church by my father’s cousin a newly formed Franciscan priest, Father Bob.  It was his first baptism, so it made it extra special for him, something that he has always remembered. My mother and father were there, still so young with dark brown hair and smooth golden skin, holding me with what looks like such care, reverence, and joy.  Grandfathers Louie and Nunzio were there along with Grandmother Philly who wore one of those small flower-patterned hats that women ...

When asked by his followers “Rabbi, what are the most important commandments?” Jesus responded, “The first is to love God with all your heart and the second is to love your neighbor as you love yourself.  Other commandments are built upon these.” What does it mean to love God?  What exactly are we loving?  And with what kind of love? The mystics who believe in an ‘in-dwelling’ God, would say that we love God when we are merged with the in-dwelling God.  This is not unlike the “yoking of the consciousness with the Divine” that we find in yoga philosophy. In this yoking, the small self that we measure by our status in things like wealth, power, praise and the adoration of others, falls away as we feel ourselves beyond measure in our unity with the infinity of God, mystery, Divine life itself.  There is in this merging the feeling of love flowing two ways, towards the presence that holds us and back towards us in return.  James Finley describes this beautifull...

Religion  - from the Latin religare “to tie back” Yoga – “to yoke” At their root, the practice of religion and yoga refer to the same thing, a yoking or tying back in.  What exactly is being yoked? The scriptures and mystics teach that the “yoking” is between the consciousness and the divine Self or God.  While we are never disconnected from this root source of our aliveness - God never lets us go - we come to feel we are disconnected only because we forget we are connected.  Our suffering grows from the soil of this disconnection, our forgetting. Here we are speaking about a very specific kind of suffering.  This is not the suffering of bodily pain or heartbreak.  This is the suffering we experience in our forgetting our unity with God where we come to believe we are only our small self and all that happens to this self. When we forget, we come to believe that we are our gains and losses, our achievements and failures, our wealth and our poverty.  Par...

  Hatred is a false way of taking away the doubt and free-floating anxiety that covers the fragility of human existence. Any negative focus takes away existential angst by giving us a false place to stand, but the payoff is that it makes us feel both superior and in control. Hate settles the dust and ambiguity that none of us like. Hate is much more common, I am afraid and seems much more effective than love……Unless there is someone to hold and accompany us on these inner journey, much of humanity cannot go inside. Without such accompaniment, most of us will stay on the surface of our own lives. There, mean-spiritedness is the best boundary and protection from being bothered by others. But with such accompaniment we will find our souls and the One who lovingly dwells there. Richard Rohr, Dancing in Stillness After many years of soul searching and pain, Rich Logis made the difficult move to extricate himself from MAGA, a movement he likens to a cult and an addiction.  While he ...