A Fool's Errand?

The round-trip drive was 568 miles.  The gasoline came to $125.00.  I started at 6 a.m. and got home by 6 p.m.  I had gone to fetch a 10 week old apricot miniature poodle.  I knew my client loved the original dog that was lost to her, but she was so debilitated  now that I could hardly see the benefit...............until this afternoon.  When I put that dog in her arms, I saw that hard-nosed, shrewd, demented little old lady soften and become affectionate and loving.  A pretty large miracle for a really tiny dog.

Are there are heroes in the seaweed?

Good question.  Your approval matters to me.  Reassurances from you can change the course of history and totally change my point of view on everything.  No..that does not mean you tell me what to think.  You never do that.  However, you are the one person on the face of the planet who, if all else fails, can reason with me and successfully persuade me to another point of view.  This would not be because I love you, but because I respect and trust you.  I appreciate your mind, recognize your intelligence and the ethics of your reasoning.  I understand your character, acknowledge your fairness and objectivity. In this life (or any other) and for nearly forty years, you have been, are, and always will be, my hero.

The Path to Enlightenment

I heard it best put by a young woman in a public service announcement, "I believe there are many paths to God."  My friends and acquaintances follow different ones.  This morning I awoke to a program about the Buddha, who existed historically five hundred years before Jesus Christ.  It would seem to me that religion is essentially about providing us with skill sets to help us cope with the concepts of aging, illness, and death.  The gift to sentient beings is the awareness that at some point existence will terminate and that the event, if not traumatically painful and immediate, will be a process, ugly, painful and drawn-out.

I have been a practicing Roman Catholicism after a fashion for forty years.  According to the tales upon which Christianity is based, the first man and woman would have remained immortal and living in the Garden if it weren't for the sin of ignorance....no, I have that wrong.  Adam and Eve WERE ignorant.  It was the serpent who lead them to knowledge, thereby inciting God to cast them out of paradise.  And God has been pissed at us ever since.
Talk about holding grudge.  Why would God punish thousands of generations of his favorite creation who weren't even there when it all happened?  He is a jealous god and a vengeful one and it strikes me as more than a little coincidental that God is frequently identified as an internal deity.  Religion then becomes a form of self-delusion to engender acceptance of our end.  I think there is probably more to it than that, but this is what happens when I wake up at three in the morning and cannot go back to sleep.

The Side-effects of Loving

Just like medication there are side-effects to giving and receiving love.

In giving love we take all the tenderness, understanding and compassion out of ourselves where we have been hoarding them and lavish them over someone outside ourselves....a little like slathering jam on bread. Most of us are not terribly sure how to apply it elegantly, so we just smear it all over hoping not miss any critical area.  We are so enamored of the object of our love that we cannot do too much for them.  You know it is really serious when you realize you would be willing to donate a kidney (or your own heart) to them or take a bullet for them.  Those things are kind of risky, but there is nothing too foolish, too dangerous, or too terrible to endure for the sake of your love.  Your own well-being takes a backseat to the well-being of your love.  We are brave, expansive, generous and forgiving.

In receiving love we learn we have value greater than we ever imagined.  We become confident and bold, become risk-takers, feel ourselves capable of achieving anything simply because we are important to someone else.  We can feel the love pour over us like warm honey........sweet and comforting.  We are brave and expansive and generous and forgiving. 
We are lifted up by both the giving and receiving of love.  Our internal manifestation of the deity is closer to realization because God IS love.

Yes, indeed.  There are side-effects to love.

The work of being myself

Do you think being yourself is an easy thing?  I'm here to tell you it isn't.  Being yourself necessitates never hiding who you are......exposing your most vulnerable feelings to everyone.  That leaves you open to injury from people who may hate you or just not care a nickle for you.  The alternative is never being yourself.  Never exposing yourself to potential injury.  It is like being onstage under a spotlight twenty-four hours a day.  Being closely and continuous scrutinized is exhausting.  Actually, you can do it part-time both ways, but that tends to create false impressions and misapprehension about who and what we are.  Maybe there is no satisfactory answer.

Sometimes we don't get close enough to ourselves to understand

I know what you are thinking.  How is that possible?  We live with ourselves intimately.  That is not true for a lot of us.  Many of us....and I mean many......do not want to examine carefully how we feel about some things....some of us don't want to even be in the same room with those things.  We invent really clever (or so we think) avoidance behaviors.  You know it is possible to ignore the most blatant symptoms of a heart attack by simply thinking about something else.  Yes, you can ignore yourself to death.

My favorite example of not getting close enough to yourself appears in The Runaway Bride.
It had to do with how the bride liked her eggs.  Each of her fiances liked their eggs differently: one scrambled, one fried, one poached, another an omelet.  When it was pointed out to the bride that she appeared to like her eggs the way the whoever she was engaged to liked them, she had to admit that she really did not know how she like them.  Near the end of the movie, she admits to the reporter that after fixing eggs every way she could think of, the only way she liked eggs was in Eggs Benedict.

The point is that in order to really know ourselves, we have to do the work.  It is about knowing how you feel and why you feel that way.

Palm Sunday

I was at church today.  Not unusual.  I sing in the choir and today is Palm Sunday.  The priest, the lector, the congregation and one other voice recite the passion according to Luke.  We go through the triumphal entrance into Jerusalem just before Passover to his burial in a borrowed tomb.  The crucifixion is where I got my revelation.   It was while he was on the cross as two thieves were also being executed.  One guy says to Jesus that if he is who he says he is, why doesn't he save himself and them.  The other thief (We call him the Good Thief) rebukes the man and reminds him that they both deserve their death sentences, but that Jesus had done nothing.  Then the Good Thief says to Jesus, "Lord, remember me when you come unto your kingdom."  The son of God and man says directly to him, "I promise you that this day you shall be with me in Paradise."  In spite of all my research, I have found NO reference to any other individual who got such a commitment.  The rest of us got the criteria we have to meet to get into heaven, but he got a guarantee,