A World Within

 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the 18th/19th century German poet, playwright and novelist, wrote, "I return to myself and find a world."

The part of that quotation which fascinates me is "I return to myself." It reminded me how often we are so lost in our minds that we reduce ourselves to walking heads. We walk around unaware of all else that is going on, in our hearts, in our guts, in our bodies and in our souls. And by gut, I mean that part of us that works on intuiton. The part of us that reacts to experiences with physical sensations. That part of us which we so often ignore, but which actually, we should spend a lot more time with, because it can always be trusted.

If we can genuinely "return to myself" (ourselves) and be fully present to the world from every part of us, I believe that we would interact with the rest of the world in a profoundly different way. Because it would surely be easier to see people and events truly and with integrity and compassion when we are present to ourselves as well.

Because everyone and everything is sacred and should be treated with the utmost respect. And I think we can only appreciate that if we are fully present ourselves.

Trust Uplifts the Soul

 The title of this blogpost is a quotation by Jean Jacques Rousseau, the 18th century Genevan philosopher and writer. "Trust uplifts the soul."

And yes, of course it does, but my goodness! It can be hard to trust at times. I have written before about trust and betrayal here. And I wrote, once we feel betrayed, "it can take a lot of time to build up sufficient faith to make the world seem trustable again."

I am naturally a fairly trusting person, but a couple of weeks ago, this trust was betrayed, which resulted in a good friend of mine being defrauded of a lot of money. The banks are now dealing with it and they are going to get their money back, but it has left a nasty taste in my mouth. Was I stupidly naive? Yes, probably. Has my faith in the essential goodness of humankind been shaken? Yes, a little.

But I know that if I am to live in faith, I need to try to trust again. Otherwise, my soul will shrivel in my body and I will turn into a suspicious, armoured-up person who trusts no-one.  I would not be "me" any more. 

And so I am going to take a deep breath and try to put this incident behind me. I have well and truly learned my lesson and will be far more cautious about anything involving money in future. But I will try not to let this unpleasant incident warp my life. 

Salvation in This Life

 This week's quotation is from Psalm 27 of the Hebrew Bible: "The LORD is my light and my salvation: whom shall I fear?"

I have come to interpret the words of Jesus, when he spoke of the Kingdom of God being now, here, literally. In other words, heaven is not something we go to when we die. It is something we do our best to live up to during our lives.

In his reflection Salvation, from Carnival of Lamps, Unitarian minister Cliff Reed reminds us that "to be saved is to live abundantly, following as best we can in the footsteps of the great souls, blessed with courage to take hard roads." I wonder whether salvation is, as he writes, living "free from hatred, vengefulness, and resentment, free from hypocrisy and self-righteousness, free from selfishness, jealousy and greed: To 'take no thought for the morrow', because God's Kingdom is here, now, and we are called to enter it today, as living souls in living bodies - not free from mortality, but free from its dread."

I believe that if we live the best lives we can, striving to do the best that we can, for ourselves and others, using the gifts we have been given, we are already on the road to salvation. This is not to say we can pull ourselves up by our own boot straps, as the saying goes, but that through the grace of the Divine, here, now, we can make a positive difference in the world. 

Unitarian Universalist, Jay Abernathy, wrote, "We are all blessings to this world. Our work of building bridges of connection by finding and naming and affirming those blessings we are is the work of nurturing our spirits and healing our world."

May it be so.

 

The Nature of Time

 The 17th century French dramatist, Pierre Corneille, once wrote, "Time is a great master, it orders many things."

Hm. I'm not sure about that. In one sense, time is a human construct - or at least the way we measure it is. It is human beings who have divided each day into 24 hours, each hour into 60 minutes, each minute into 60 seconds. I understand that this obsession with what the exact time is, is a relatively recent human thing - it came in with the Industrial Revolution. Before then, most people rose with the sun and retired to bed when it set. And measured time by the movement of the sun in the sky.

But in another sense, time is beyond all human control. It just is. We move through time at a constant rate and have no ability to pause it, or skip over it. We can only live through it, one day, one hour, one minute, one second at a time. And that can be easy, or it can be the hardest thing in the world. Sometimes, something happens which changes our lives forever, and we look back and realise that our world has been divided into Before and After. For Christians, this was the death and resurrection of Jesus. Another, more contemporary example, is the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US. For an individual, it might be the birth of a child, or the death of a loved one, or any other "life-changing" event. Before it happened, we were different people to who we are now. 

In that sense, I guess, time is "a great master".  

The way in which season follows season is something else over which we have no control - Spring will follow Winter, then Summer, then Autumn. Although in this age of global warming, the start of each individual season may happen earlier or later than we expect.

Our perceptions of time passing can vary greatly. I'm sure many of us will be familiar of occasions when time has simply "flown by" and others in which it has "crawled". Another sign that we have no control over it. I have posted about this odd flexibility in our perceptions here,  But this at least, is something over which we do have some control - our own perceptions of how time is passing. If we can strive to be aware of each moment as it passes, or at least remember that time passes at a constant rate, we can change our perception of *how* it is passing for us, at that given time. Or so I believe.