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.

 

A Challenge for the New Year

This morning I was finally re-connecting with the computer, having had a few days away from it over the Christmas period, and catching up with the daily meditations from Richard Rohr's Center for Action and Contemplation, which usually give me a nice, spiritual start to my day.

And I came across this passage, from The Sacred Art of Lovingkindness: Preparing to Practice, by Rabbi Rami Shapiro, which Richard Rohr quotes, and which has really resonated with me, as a challenge for the coming year:

"Will you engage this moment with kindness or with cruelty, with love or with fear, with generosity or scarcity, with a joyous heart or an embittered one? This is your choice, and no-one can make it for you. If you choose kindness, love, generosity, and joy, then you will discover in that choice the Kingdom of God, heaven, nirvana, this-worldly salvation. If you choose cruelty, fear, scarcity, and bitterness, then you will discover in that choice the hellish states of which so many religions speak. These are not ontological realities tucked away somewhere in space - these are existential realities playing out in your own mind. Heaven and hell are both inside of you. It is your choice that determines just where you will reside."

"Heaven and hell are both inside you. It is your choice that determines just where you will reside." Wow. For 2018, I resolve to try to engage with the world, with each moment, with kindness, love, generosity and joy.