Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Today’s text

John 6:63

‘It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh has nothing to offer. The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life.’

Reflection

Moments of awareness come when you least expect them, but they come more often when you put yourself on the road they travel. Mine travel in books I read sitting on the back patio. So I sit there on sunny Mondays, basking in gentle suns of late summer.

I listen as voices rise from the pages, awakening an inner voice of love that invites me to sink into my deep inner self. There I find an awareness that this love is in me, waiting always for me to come home and know that this is my true being and my home.

This is who I really am, stripped for the moment of any thoughts of history or accomplishment, failures or frustrations. My being is this love, and for the moment I am one with this awareness; … I know this completely.

I know the Love who loves, and there is no doubt and certainly no fear in me. I am well through and through.

I do not know how or why the words on the page elicited this awareness, however fleeting it may be. Perhaps the writer shared an experience so close to my own that I knew I was not strange or alone. Perhaps her embrace of her life experiences, both jubilant and mundane, spoke a love for life that allowed me to love mine, too.

I simply know there is a spirit of love awakened within that heals and makes whole, stirred perhaps by the action of that same spirit in another human heart and mind.

When Jesus spoke his words flowed from his consciousness of oneness with Love. The Spirit of the All-Loving One filled him, inviting all who heard to know what he knew, to feel what he felt so they might enter the land he inhabited--the land of the knowing oneness with Love that can happen on back patios or wherever Spirit catches up with you.

His words offended many. He told them to eat his flesh, drink his blood, and he wasn’t necessarily talking about taking communion at church. He was inviting them to hear the spirit of his words, the Spirit that filled his conscious awareness, so this awareness might fill them, too.

He seeks to give the life of oneness he lived that we, too, might live.

So we listen to love that is in him, the love that loves his own and this broken world and our broken selves, loving them completely, to the end, leaving nothing out.

And maybe, if you go to places where awareness finds you, you may sink deeply into the Spirit that is in him, knowing what he knows, feeling what he feels that wholeness may come, and you may discover who you really are.

Pr. David L. Miller