Food for Thought ~ Tasty Tidbits!

Here's an offering of spiritual appetizers ... morsels I've tasted and enjoyed, from my readings this morning. Too good to not share! So, taste and see what nurtures & fulfills you. Just as your body knows how to digest -- what to absorb and what to pass on and release, so too does your spirit know. You can trust the process ... eating meat, and spitting out bones, as you go.

I've discovered that I can even consider the challenging concepts to be akin to roughage - that which cleans out the old (& even toxic) build-up, enabling me to better absorb the new...

Perhaps this is yet another meaning of Jesus invitation to feast on Him...?

Without further ado, here's what tasted delicious to me this morning:

- Information is not necessarily transformation...

- We have made the Bible into a bunch of ideas - about which we can be right or wrong - rather than an invitation to see with new eyes...

- God is much different than we thought -- and much better than we feared!

- Outside of a personal experience of a God who is merciful, gracious, faithful, forgiving and steadfast in love, religion will remain merely ritualistic, moralistic, doctrinaire, and largely unhappy.

- It does not help to give people quick conclusions before they have made any inner journeys.

- The Bible doesn't give us the conclusions -- it offers us a process of getting there.

- Without an inner experience of how God works in our own life, we will just substitute the text for the real inner Spirit.

- God doesn't change, but our readiness for the true God takes a long time to change (it takes time to move beyond our need to be dualistic, judgmental, accusatory, fearful, blaming egocentric, and earning).

- God is always both totally hidden and perfectly revealed -- we see what we're open to see.

- God is manifest in the ordinary, in the actual, in the daily, in the now, in the concrete incarnateness of life.

- God comes to us disguised as our life -- this disappoints the religious who would prefer church services...!

- The principle of Incarnation shows us that spiritual and material have never been separate.

- We must experience the negative side of the actual, along with the positive.

- Ideologues replace real experiences with their predetermined conclusions.

- Pain teaches a most counter-intuitive thing: that we must go down before we can even know what up is. Suffering is necessary - in that, suffering is defined as "whenever I am not in control."

- If we do not transform our pain, we will assuredly transmit it.

- We can learn to read the Bible with both a healthy head and a happy heart at the same time - to read it both critically and spiritually.

- Our family of origin is divine -- our core is original blessing, not original sin.

- The biblical narrative is about awakening - not accomplishing.

- The ego makes the Scriptures all about achievement and attainment - religion thus becomes a worthiness-contest, in which everybody loses.

- It is not that if I am moral, then I will be loved by God -- it's that I must first experience God's love, and then I will - almost naturally - be moral.

- We have never been separate from God -- it's sin (our egoic nature) which *thinks* we've been separate from God.

- It's not a "those who believe/do it right go to heaven" thing, as much as it is a "those who live like me [Jesus] are in heaven now" thing!

- The ego always wants to settle the dust quickly, and have the answers now.

- When God warns them/us to not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, He's wanting to keep us from the lust for certitude - an undue need for explanation, resolution and answers.

- Not knowing, and not needing to know, is a deeper form of knowing - and a deeper form of compassion.

- False moral certitude (insisting we know what is good, what is evil) is the original sin ... missing the mark.

- "First the fall, and then the recovery from the fall, and both are the mercy of God." (Julian of Norwich)

- Salvation is only secondarily assuring us of eternal life - it is first of all giving us life here and now, and saying, "if now, then also later."

- God's chosenness is for the purpose of communicating that chosenness to everybody else! (The ego insists upon the illusion of exclusivity ... this chosenness is for the inclusion of all.)

- Only beloved people can pass on belovedness.

- One day my gaze will match God's gaze - at that time I will find God lovable and myself lovable at the same time.

- We can't always be correct - but we can always be connected.

- If I am not trained in a trust of mystery and some degree of tolerance for ambiguity, I will not proceed very far in the spiritual journey.

- Love is the true goal, but faith is the process of getting there, and hope is the willingness to live without resolution or closure (& the journey, I have discovered, is within - to discover who I really AM, and what I already possess).

Bon appetit!

Shalom, Dena