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Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Psalm 118 Rebirth

Christ icon in Taizé
We celebrate the resurrection of the Christ this week. This triumphant story has a profound connection to our own walk with God.  Death is an important part of our spiritual life.  In order to know God, we must die to what we think we know so that we are available to God's revelation. The creative power of God (right hand) raises us up and out of the confusion of the world. If we open our hearts and minds, Spirit can show us the straight and narrow path (open to me the gates of righteousness), the way to our inner Christ. Only when we surrender our lives to God can we enter into our spiritual domain.

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Psalm 118 Death

The congregation in an Oriental Orthodox churc...
Do you respond to the idea of death, with resistance or acceptance? The dramatic stories of the holy week in the Jewish and Christian traditions remind us that we must be willing to face death directly in order experience salvation. Are you in tune with the small deaths that you are confronted with daily? As spiritual seekers, we must die day-by-day to our attachments to the world.

Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Psalm 126 Awakening from the Dream

dramatic dream
Have you noticed that we tend to label things we do not want or do not like, evil? It is interesting how we take our own expectations and standards and make them the benchmark for ‘right’ in the world. Much of the suffering in this world is merely a dream (or perhaps nightmare) of our own creation. This is not to say that we should completely discount the presence of evil in the world, but it does help us take a step back and look more closely. More often than not our experience of suffering is caused by our own inability to let go of what we think should be and instead accepting what is.

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Psalm 32 Acknowledging Our Sins

A powerful light shines in the dark.
Do your sins define who you are? Are they opportunities for you to learn and grow? Or do you hide your sins from yourself and others to maintain a facade? To sin is merely “to miss the mark” and we are all constantly doing that. How we process our missteps is just as important as the actual sin.

It is important to remember that we must acknowledge our sins before we can be healed of them. What does that mean? It does not mean that we wallow in them, feel guilty about them, give them power over us, or punish ourselves over them. It merely means that we must delve deep enough within our consciousness to know they are there. We cannot heal a trait that we do not recognize. As the psalmist says, we try to hide our iniquities from God. In reality, God is omniscient and so we have really only tried to hide our sins from ourselves.