“They shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees and no one shall make them afraid.” Micah 4:4
A few days ago, my sweet 13-year-old niece wrote me that she wants to change the world for women and girls. Specifically, she intends to stop rape and sexual trafficking. I’m glad she’s on the case: recently I read of the horrific rape of girls, some just two or four years old, in post-earthquake Haiti.
“…And no one shall make them afraid.” It’s too late; someone has already made these girls afraid.
My niece asked for my help in creating her world-saving plan. In awe of her commitment and humbled by her request, I put what I’ve learned as a Girl Action Team coach to work and suggested a few questions that can help her begin: What strengths can she bring to creating change? What are the personal assets she can draw upon to help her? How would she complete the Girls For a Change phrase, “This world needs me because…?”
They are powerful questions to explore: Why does this world need me? What does God need me to do and become while I’m here? As I grow and the stability of the world seems to change on a daily basis, asking God these questions and listening for answers is an ongoing practice.
Why does this world need you? What is God asking you to do for the sake of your own soul and for the care of your fellow man? What role are you to play in the healing and further development of the world?
Yesterday was Palm Sunday, commemorating the day that Jesus rode humbly into Jerusalem to shake up an unjust world order. Even before I had any spiritual understanding of Jesus, he was, and remains, my social justice hero. He was a man of courage, integrity, humble confidence, conviction and deep regard for the dignity of all human beings, especially those who have neither vine nor fig tree to sit under.
Of course, he and his work were infused by a power far greater than his mortal form. He was both man and God. My understanding is that we are too. No, we may not possess the level of enlightenment, selflessness and pure connection to the Divine that Jesus did, yet we are “made in the image of God.” We, too, have the power of God inside us and supporting us. We, too, are here to create a more just world. I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure Jesus was frustrated with his disciples for not realizing that they, also, were capable of doing what he did and dying for what they believed in. They had a choice, though – whether to acknowledge and use this power, or not.
From the beginning of humanity, the world has needed people – like Jesus, like my niece – who are willing and ready to create a far better place than one in which young girls are raped and tossed aside like trash. I believe God needs all of us to help Him and has equipped us with divine might to do so.
Archive for March, 2010
Using Our Divine Might
March 29, 2010Being Sure
March 22, 2010I attended my first 12-step program meeting at the age of 26 because I was consumed with fear of the future. I was desperate for more surety about how my life was going to work out. The potential for disappointment controlled me. Having just moved to the gorgeous and playful mountains of Colorado in my mid-twenties, I knew I wasn’t supposed to be feeling terrorized.
This was a significant step on my spiritual journey. In the years since, I’ve been on a quest to lessen my attachment to surety, and at the same time figure out whatI can place my trust in. I set aside my hope for an illustrated how-to guide to the future, and instead developed a deep trust that no matter what happened, I would not be alone in figuring it out.
I also worked with a life coach who helped me grow beyond needing surety before acting. I so feared doing the wrong thing and bringing ruin – financial, emotional or professional – upon myself or others.
I finally let this fear go when I surrendered to God’s will for my life – a practice I repeat daily. And wouldn’t you know it? Lately, at the most unexpected moments, I’ve been struck by a feeling of certainty.
While sitting at a stoplight, something opens in my heart and fills my eyes with tears of awareness. It feels like the most precious grace. My priest described grace as “the unasked for, unearned love of God.” When the tears come, it is because I recognize that God is leading me to touching, and at times astonishing, surety about pieces of my life.
As I take alternatingly bold and baby steps into a new and unknown career, people, to my amazement, are saying yes, and doors are opening in places where I did not expect to find them. As I commit to loving and being myself in a new relationship, a calm, heart-opening surety I’ve never felt before grows daily.
Then there is surety about infinitely smaller things. For instance, this morning I wanted to buy two plastic Adirondack chairs to make my deck more hospitable for my visiting boyfriend (and to finally feel like an adult with real deck furniture.) I debated it, though:
“Maybe I should get just one. He can sit in that. I’ll sit in the rotting, 6-year old beach chair and save $24.99,” said the more frugal part of my brain.
“But you really feel like crap sitting in that rotting beach chair,” the part of me that loves myself replied. “And you refrained from buying the cute Liberty of London bra and panty set. That’s $24.99 saved right there!”
I debated this all the way to the check-out line. Still unsure, I let the cashier ring up both chairs and announce the total. It was unexpectedly low – they were on sale! Debate closed. Ahhhh, surety.
Is God present in small, rather insignificant decisions like this one? I think so. I think God is available for consult whenever and wherever I invite Him in. Actually, I think God is present whether I invite Him or not. I debate with myself, ask for help, take a step in further, ask again, wait, meditate, write, plead, listen, and act again. And so it goes. Sometimes with an onslaught of tears at a stoplight, sometimes gleefully at the cash register, and sometimes after years of contemplation, clarity comes.
What are the signs of surety for you? What inspires you to act with when there’s no guarantee? If you care to, please share your thoughts here.
Tree Lessons
March 16, 2010This weekend a friend and I went for a walk through Hollywood Cemetery. Normally, as I amble past the markers of people’s lives, I’m observing dates and calculating the lengths of lives lived. On Saturday, however, the trees consumed my attention – especially the enormous oaks with roots visibly growing out of the stone embankments of the cemetery.
I love that trees in winter, especially these grand old trees, feel no need to prove themselves. “Here I am” they seem to say, “naked, proud, and knowing.” Through them, I learn to trust nature’s cycle – even when they look dead, life is simply resting inside, waiting to reemerge.
A teacher once told me that the yoga involved in tree pose isn’t necessarily about holding perfect balance. Instead, it is about getting back in the posture with grace, patience and commitment, each time I fall out.
On occasion in my coaching and women’s circle, I ask participants to practice grounding and taking up their rightful space in this world by embodying their favorite tree. They usually look at me a bit sideways. After some gentle coaxing, they set their skepticism aside that this could be at all illuminating. I ask them to feel their roots growing deep into the Earth and their branches reaching wide open, sky high or perhaps, in the case of willow, draping gently and gorgeously. “Breathe as your tree, let the wind and weather move you, feel your strength and your beauty.” Sometimes it works for them in the moment, sometimes not. It always works for me. Becoming a live oak centers me, calms me, and opens my heart.
In the brochure “The Method of Centering Prayer: The Prayer of Consent“, Thomas Keating writes, “The principal fruits of centering prayer are experienced in daily life and not during the prayer period.” I hope that even if women feel a bit silly and self-conscious embodying a tree for three minutes, the effect is felt out in the world – in them and by others. I hope they are reminded of their own dignity, especially in the presence of “their” tree.
Wrestling With It
March 9, 2010My priest recently told me I didn’t have to be an expert in Christian scripture to begin incorporating it into my writing and workshops when I feel doing so would deepen the experience. He told me to “just get in there and wrestle with it”. His advice came as a huge relief, because I’ve been feeling uneasy about bringing in passages from the Bible – the whole of which I’ve not read. I don’t even fully understand the literal interpretations of what I have read. However, some of its words have been speaking to me at a deeper level and I’m using my weekly writings to work out their meaning in relation to my life and soul.
For the past 13 months, I’ve been on a journey with this platform. What started as a marketing tool transformed into an offering. I decided to start giving what I had to give. I believe God asks us to share the resources we have – money, food, inspiration, courage or care – whatever our wealth of the moment may be. The intent of this blog is to share what is opening my mind, body and spirit, in case something I’ve experienced could be of value to your heart. And vice versa: for you to share your wisdom and questioning with me.
Because God has played a central role in every significant growth period of my life, I want to acknowledge what I believe is the golden ticket to personal and spiritual development. I’d like to explore not only my understanding of God, but yours as well.
I’m scared, though. I’m afraid you (and my family) will think I’ve become a crazed evangelist. Even worse, I fear sounding like an amateur evangelist because of my lack of expertise in the teachings of Jesus and God’s other messengers. I’m considering attending divinity school to be able to base my work upon a vast history of knowledge and inquiry, yet for now, I’m simply diving in and “wrestling with it.”
My heart and thinking will continue to be influenced by meditation, yoga, innumerable books, the moving worship traditions of other religions, and the Divine Feminine. For me, God is everywhere.
The Jesus I believe in is anything but limiting. I’m beginning to think he was and is far deeper and more magical and mystical than usually portrayed. One of my girlfriends said the other night, “What’s the point of it all without the magic?” I love that perspective.
That is what I’d like to explore with you, going forward. Where is the magic of God found in your life?
A Mother’s Love
March 2, 2010“In the earthly realm, what kind of trust most approximates your trust in God?” That was a question put to me this week. My answer was that I have never once doubted my mother’s love.
It has astounded me that through all the hard work of raising my four sisters and me, and all the grief we gave her (she raised five opinionated girls!), my Mom’s love for us remains, at its core, unwavering and limitless. My trust in the steadfastness of her love grew over time and repeated experience. By my adolescence, I was sure that it would always be there no matter what. I believe that if a child receives nothing else from a parent, trustworthy love is a rock upon which she can build a life.
When I ask teenage girls from challenging circumstances to name the most important person in their lives, almost all of them answer, “My Mom. Because she takes care of me.”
Their calm and grateful trust in their mothers’ care and my own experience illuminate my understanding of God’s motherly love – a constant, deep, and forgiving love that can be trusted despite my disappointing Her, turning my back on Her, judging Her, telling Her what to do, or rudely asserting my independence from Her.
My Mom recently wrote me about her experience as a young mother of five girls and how the women’s movement saved her. “I finally felt I had a right to my own life, and I redoubled my efforts to raise each of you girls to understand that you were as deserving of your place on earth as anyone, to have a backbone, and to have a sense of your own innate worth and strength.”
I believe that is what Mother God wants for all of Her daughters as well – to know that each of us is deserving of our place on Earth and to trust our innate worth and strength.
Even as an adult, my mother’s hug is still enormously comforting to me. Her embrace creates a feeling that is aptly described by the words of Julian of Norwich, the fourteenth-century mystic known for her theology of God as Mother:
“But all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”
To be able to trust in that kind of love, whether from God or one’s own mother, is what I wish for everyone.
