It's Sunday - theology time!

Yes, I am reading theology this Sunday morning.  I do it every Sunday morning.  I am reading "Everything Belongs" by Richard Rohr on the gift of contemplative prayer.   He has given two quotes that I am pondering  --stripping them mentally into smaller, more digestible parts.  His basic premise is that we all live on the perimeters of what could be more fulfilling lives but we never really step into the circumference of the real life we could lead.  He says:  "We do not think ourselves into new ways of living.  We live ourselves into new ways of thinking."   Or as the vernacular of the day says:  we settle.   Sometimes we settle because we don't think we have options and sometimes we settle because the options are scary and it is easier to do what we have always done.  Do we miss living at its fullness?   Who knows?   We won't ever know what it would have entailed or meant!. 

The Hasidic masters taught their students:  "Rake the muck this way.  Rake the muck that way.It will still be muck.  In the time you are brooding, you could be stringing pearls for the delight of heaven."   I tell myself every day, "Okay, you are seventy-five!   Life is not over for you until you draw your last breath.  No one has a guarantee.   Yesterday I attended a funeral for a soldier who was 27.  There are no guarantees.  If you get up in the morning, use the day.  Stop whining and bitching about family conflicts and old wars!  Take the love you have in your heart and spread it around...with meaning and kindness.   Make a difference -- let someone know that he/she counts in your life....and mean what you say!  Forgive the people who have wronged you and move on.  Quickly.   When you find out that someone thinks you have wronged them, tell them you are sorry and move on.  None too quickly.  Repair what you can repair and move on to other relationships and cement them. " 

You can't begin to string one pearl if you choose to brood in the muck.