The 11th Step – “Sought through prayer and meditation to improve my conscious contact with God, praying only for the knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry it out.”
“God is love, and he who loves is born of God. He who does not love, does not know God.” St John
The short form of my world view is as follows:
In the beginning all that existed was Perfect Love. That Perfect Love expanded, created and invited creation to partake in its loving party. Selfishness entered and said, “You can’t be happy that way, you have to look after yourself.” For a time Love seemed to have lost and selfishness ruled supreme. And then Love came again, this time more tangibly and demonstrated what Perfect Love really is, by giving up everything for something other than itself – indeed, something at war with itself -- Perfect Love sacrificed itself to selfishness and died. In so doing, Perfect Love conquered selfishness creating new life and invited us to share with Him in it.
The catch is that to know this Perfect Love, we have to follow it into death – death of self and demandingness.
A major stuggle in my life is that it feels as if nearly every message I receive from the world runs counter to my world view. I live in the instant age of immediate gratification where the internet makes answers to questions nearly instantaneous; where drugs and alcohol kill pain soon after they are taken; where I can view porn or find a “date” with a few clicks of a button, where marketing companies come up with new ways to manipulate my senses to cause me to want so unnecesarily…
The sensory bombardment of the post-modern Western world screams at me to demand more – more comfort, more quickly, more cheaply. And like every addiction (and as a society we are addicted to this) what we have is never enough. We search for new ways to accomplish what used to be accomplished easily. We need more, more, more… We die a slow death of consumeristic selfishness. And all through this marketplace of selfish demands, Perfect Love still walks and still speaks sometimes quietly, sometimes loudly, beckoning me to turn from death and discover what I was made for – love.
This is why meditation becomes so necessary. Without it I miss Love. I move too quickly too often. I rush through and miss the voice asking me to get out of the middle so that He can give me what I really want. I need to tune out the noise and listen to the whisper. I need God moments, that increase in length until I find them taking the majority of my time. In so doing I will discover what Perfect Love calls Eternal Life. The great news is that I am able to live it now. I don’t have to wait for the afterlife to live eternal life now. (Thank you Jon Foreman)
Daydreaming is one of the ways that I try to create my own “eternal life”. I try to live either in the wreckage of the future or the glories of the past. My mind wants to inhabit a place other than my present reality. I try to re-live life or live in the future in order to believe I have control. When I buy into this lie I exclude any chance for eternal life. Eternal life is really found in accepting the present reality and allowing Perfect Love to rule everything in it.
I need help to do that. Meditation is a central help to me do that. I focus on every breath. As I breath in I consciously think, “God in,” and when exhale, I consciously think, “Me out.” I focus on feeling my body: my heel resting against the chair leg, the ball of my foot on the warming hardwood floor, my elbow resting on the dining room table, my fingers as they hit the keyboard, my bracelet as it digs into my wrist…the coffee taste still resting in my mouth. The presence of Love all around me as the early morning darkness knows it has to give way to the breaking day. And as the day breaks I continually ask…
Lord make me a channel of thy peace -- that where there is hatred, I may bring love -- that where there is wrong, I may bring the spirit of forgiveness -- that where there is discord, I may bring harmony -- that where there is error, I may bring truth -- that where there is doubt, I may bring faith -- that where there is despair, I may bring hope -- that where there are shadows, I may bring light -- that where there is sadness, I may bring joy.
Lord, grant that I may seek rather to comfort than to be comforted -- to understand, than to be understood -- to love, than to be loved.
For it is by self-forgetting that one finds. It is by forgiving that one is forgiven. It is by dying that one awakens to Eternal Life...
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