dharmatalks

Imagine yourself seated in a comfortable seat at Carnegie Hall. On the stage, a prodigious young girl performs some of the most stirring, rich and breathtaking renditions of classical music on the violin. Laying the violin down, she exits the stage, and another young child from the audience runs up to the violin, and begins making a horrible screeching sound as he rakes the bow randomly across the strings. The loud and cacophonous noise finally ends, when the child’s mother takes the instrument from his hands, and sets it back down.

How many of you thought, “Something must have been wrong with the violin!” After all, it was playing beautiful music before, and then suddenly, it just started playing noise. Right?

Of course, nothing was wrong with the violin. But it only produces beautiful music when it is played properly. Understanding the proper chord progressions, technique and fundamentals of music is essential before someone can create something beautiful by moving the bow across the violin’s strings.

Life is like that. When we master the Law of Attraction, and learn to harness our Inner Creativity, we are able to create experiences that are enriching, beautiful and pleasing. When we become distracted, we hit the “sour notes” and create experiences that may not be quite so beautiful. However, like any student of music, we can allow those moments of distraction to become our teachers, and grow in our awareness and understanding of the fundamentals of living a fuller life.

Dr. Norman Vincent Peale wrote that we should approach life with enthusiasm. “Those who are filled with an enthusiastic idea,” he wrote, “and who allow it to take hold and dominate their thoughts find that new worlds open up for them. As long as enthusiasm holds out, so will new opportunities.”

Why not do a little summer daydreaming and find that desire about which you can become genuinely enthusiastic? Perhaps it is a new job. Maybe it’s creating peace at home. It could be becoming healthier or less anxious. Whatever it is, allow yourself to become enthusiastic about getting there. Then begin contemplating the steps you can take today to move closer to accomplishing that desire.

Thoughts create things. If we learn to turn our minds from “random thinking” to “mindful thinking”, we open the door to limitless creativity and magical outcomes.

“Ask and it shall be given to you,” the Master taught, “Seek and you shall find. Knock and doors will be opened to you.” These are deliberate actions on our part, which create specific results, based on the Law of Attraction.

Central to the lives of contemplative monks and nuns is the practice of sitting in what has been called the Sacred Silence — that place where we allow ourselves to become emptied of distractions, and turn our awareness inward, to the Indwelling Source of Love.

The practice of contemplation is something each of us can make a part of our daily lives, and from which each of us can profoundly benefit.

Regardless of our particular paths, the journey toward spiritual maturity lasts a lifetime. In Eastern Thought, it is believed to be the very purpose of what we call our “life” here on earth. Norman Vincent Peale’s sage admonishment to his students was that we should “(a)sk the God who made us to keep remaking us”.

In those still, quiet moments of contemplation, when we open our hearts to the awareness of the Indwelling Spirit and Universal Mind, we allow that Divine Intelligence which created us to “keep recreating us”. We might feel the Silence is deafening and unproductive, but even in those seemingly pointless moments, a deeper awareness, greater ease, and clearer insight is being developed within us.

In the words of T.S. Elliot: “At the still point of the turning world… Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is!”

The spirituality of many people, particularly in the West, is based on “faith”. At times, we adopt the beliefs that were taught to us as children, by blindly accepting what we were told as fact. Others of us may have chosen to adopt a new faith as adults, but often, our beliefs in that faith are also informed by what we were told by the authorities and teachers of that religion. Most times, what we are told doesn’t seem to make logical sense, but we are instructed that what matters is that we believe, not that we understand.

Such a practice, in my opinion, is dangerous and unhealthy. Faith in ideas is risky at best, because our ideas can change. If tomorrow, we wake up and believe something entirely different, then yesterday’s faith will have been pointless. Spirituality was not intended to be about blind faith and superstitious beliefs. True spirituality must be experiential.

Jesus taught, “The core of my Being is the Way, the Truth and the Life.” In other words, that part of us that is connected to the Source of Life, is the Way and the Truth. Therefore, our spirituality needs to draw on the interior life, and find its substance in Divine Love.

The recurrent theme in all of my sermons and workshops has always been returning to Divine Love, and finding in the example of the Christ — the Incarnate Love — a Way of Life that centres on service to one another, forgiveness, healing, caring for the sick, feeding the hungry, loving one another and loving ourselves. It seems like a simplistic message, and it is.

For many, it seems that the things I have accomplished in my life have been significant and inspiring. But really, all I have done was try to stay focused on living from a place of connection and awareness of Divine Love. Sometimes I have been better at it than other times. There have been dark moments, uncertain emotions, grief, distractions and everything else that we all experience in our lives. But instead of finding those things burdensome or embarrassing… instead of seeing my mistakes as failures, I embrace them as part of the experiential spirituality that brought me to where I am today.

Perhaps one of my greatest frustrations has been to realise that not everyone is willing to open his or her heart to the simplicity of this message. There are those who want their superstitious, hierarchical and oppressive dogmas, doctrines and institutions. There are those who want people to believe in a literal interpretation of their religious narratives. And because those people have their own agendas and issues, they are unwilling and unready to embrace the Truth of Divine Love.

Thich Nhat Hanh writes, “You cannot talk about apple juice to someone who has not tasted it. No matter what you say, the other person will not have the true experience of apple juice. The only way is to drink it.”

In the Christian scripture, Luke 9:51-62, we read about Jesus’ encounter with the young man, who wants to follow Jesus, but “not just yet”. He wants to put off the detachment and surrender until a more convenient time. The metaphor of having to bury his father represents this idea of “deferred enlistment”. But in the story, Jesus and His disciples are on the road to Jerusalem now. The only way to follow is to surrender oneself to the experience.

The story also details how James and John want Jesus to “send fire” upon the Samaritan villages, which rejected Him. But Jesus’ focus is on the Message and the Mission — “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the Children of God.”

The journey to Jerusalem isn’t about going to a geographic place. It’s about moving toward that mindful state of existence, where we fulfill our Human and Divine Potential. It’s about a return to the place where we are One with God.

It’s not enough to talk about it. We have to experience it. We don’t need to put it off until a more convenient time, because there will never be a more convenient time than right now.

If I waited to respond to the call to serve the people of God until it was more convenient, I would have never gotten started. It wasn’t convenient to study in seminary, when the Roman Catholic Church was steeped in intolerance and homophobia. It wasn’t convenient to dedicate our ministries to the compassionate care of the sick and dying, when this new epidemic was claiming so many lives, causing panic and infected three of us, including me. It wasn’t convenient to lead a small group of my Franciscan brothers to separate from the oppression of the institutional church. It wasn’t convenient to have to endure six years of dealing with the egos, agendas and machinations of those who thought they could turn this new experience of canonical independence into a free-for-all or money-making scheme. And now, it is not convenient to focus so much effort and energy into building this grassroots movement, when I am facing extreme health challenges.

It’s never convenient… but it’s always time.