Some reflections

It’s snowing, and the ground is covered in white.  Fresh snowfall is incredibly beautiful as it covers over the scars of our selfishness and greed.  It is a reminder that “behold, I make all things new.”  But so often, my response is a jaded, “if only.”  This faith thing is not easy.  We are thrust into a world of power, prestige, and possessions that has a way of invading our lives and trying as we might, but we can’t really extricate ourselves.  Our culture shapes us more than we want.  As the poet said, “The world is too much with us.”  And yet…..

And yet I am reminded that the secular is where we encounter the sacred, as there is really no separation between sacred and secular.  The sacred is that which lies outside our capacity to create – our amazing planet, our solar system, the ever-expanding cosmos, the spiritual realms that defy our imagination.  Everything we have and do is dependent on that great uterus we call Mother Earth. Without her, we would be nothing, for we cannot separate ourselves from her.  She is our umbilical cord, our very life.

Freedom and fulfillment, then, is not accumulating vast quantities of wealth and power but the ability to become more fully who we already are, to love and embrace who we are, to recognize that we are a part of something so vast and wondrous that reality lies far beyond our comprehension.  But we can get glimmers.  We can know ourselves as precious and beautiful, a creation of the great I Am.  We can embrace the reality that the more we live in harmony with our environment and others the better able we will be to live within our own skins.

I’ve said it before, and I will say it again.  I am so grateful to the 12-step program and its emphasis on taking the focus off of others and putting it back on ourselves.  Our job is not to fix others but to work on our own issues, to travel the painful road of self-examination and inner growth.  In that way, we effect change in others.  While I grew up in the church,  my faith was born in those life-giving rooms where we each stopped keeping our self-eroding secrets and embraced the gifts of faith, hope, and love.  Conversion, I believe, is the path from self-hatred to self-love which can happen in a confrontation with God, as Bill Wilson, the founder of AA, described, or like many of us, occurs slowly over a lifetime.  Both roads lead us to discover  God within and without.  Both roads are blessings to be embraced and nurtured.

And so, as we enter this new year, may we recognize that it is from Him alone that all loving will, the power, and the life to do are born, the song that beautifies all.  May they be the ground from which all our actions grow.