Parinama

What you give someone when you give them love is the gift of yourself....It means you give them space. You give them a place where they can be themselves. Herbert McCabe, God Matters Love as spaciousness, presence, compassion, patience.  This Agape love (from the Greek) so different from the other definitions of love flooding our culture and consumption society which focus more on what we get out of a relationship is  rather an unconditional love for another that flows out from the deepest parts of our being.  In the Christian contemplative tradition, it describes the way in our very being is created out of God’s love for life.  When we are able through practice to open ourselves to this love, soften the hard grasping egocentric parts, of this kind of loving will naturally flow out into our relationships with all others, with the Earth, and back with God.  It can come to supersede egocentric love, loves for the sake of gain from another.  Filled with God’s ...

  What if you rearranged past and future in your consciousness as an experiment?  The Aymara indigenous people of the Andes see the past and their ancestors in front of them because they know they can learn from them and they see the unknown future that they imagine as behind them yet unseen.  Carmen Acevedo Butcher How strange it feels to imagine myself walking towards my past, my back to the future. I am surprised at the comfort it gives me, to sense lost beloveds and precious memories coming towards me ever new, to experience and be with again. In these moments, I am re(collected) with parts of myself long neglected, the past with my present, the future following.  I find myself and healed and full in this new integration.  Transported into the past, I am filled with longings for what has changed, lost, and in need of repair (the regrets).  For those sweet memories, my imagination is rich.  As I go towards the past, I smell and feel the warmth of a ...

  On the night before he was arrested, Jesus washed the feet of his disciples.  It was an act of great humility, love and care.  In this tender act, he demonstrated to his disciples what it meant to be a teacher, one who guides others with deference, earthiness, mercy.  Jesus also allowed his own feet to be washed.  Six days before his death, he allowed Mary, Martha’s sister, to wash his feet with the most expensive of perfumed oils.  Judas had objected saying that all that money could have been used to feed the poor.  My understanding of what Jesus told him is that while the poor need our care, we also must take care of ourselves so that our work in the world, our love, care, social justice, is integrated with the innermostself, the soul.  With that intimacy with the soul our movements and actions in the world integration will embody both integrity and humility.  As Mary prepared Jesus’ feet for his death, I imagine her tears flowing onto th...

Along this spiritual path, we are invited to live with “open hands”.  Hands that are open to receive life’s unfolding, to let go of what is no longer needed, to give into the bounty of life and receive it back in a new form. I have found it nearly impossible to live with open hands but not entirely. At some point in the struggle to accept what is happening, life itself wrenches my close palms open so that I might find a way through to the new life.  When crossed into thresholds of loss, the first human reaction, instinctual, is to grip, to hold on more tightly to what is being lost, to try and salvage the old life.  How could we do otherwise?  What has kept us, loved us, restored us is slipping away and with it our sense of solidity, vitality, strength, protection. There is for me an experience of being thrown into a new and foreign land, the tools I used to plow my fields no longer work in this new place.  The brick I used to make my house doesn’t exist only re...