Dusk, Night, Dawn: On Revival and Courage

When people know you too well, they eventually see your damage, your weirdness, carelessness, and mean streak. They see how ordinary you are after all, that whatever it was that distinguished you in the beginning is the least of who you actually are. This will turn out to be the greatest gift we can offer another person: letting them see, every so often, beneath all the trappings and pretense to the truth of us.

We are going to save the world by repeatedly busting the dread that looms over us like a blimp, by pushing back our sleeves and distracting it with the next right thing and good works.

Forgiveness, I know now, is maturity. Mercy is maturity. It's slow release, like certain medicines. It's incremental, like traveling along the spiral chambers of a nautilus.

Taking kids outside to love God and nature is just about the most Jesus-y thing we can do. Jesus was nearly always outside with his disciples, or alone with the stars. To take kids to a beach, even one that is littered, it to bring them to an altar (a big one) surrounded by the blue-grey ocean billowing outward like a skirt, flecked with sunlight, like foil or diamonds.

...this is the work of the Holy Spirit and our operating instructions, to be cooling breezes to sad or worried people, including ourselves, in this sometimes hot stuffy joint [the world].

Here is what I know of love: Love is the gas station and the fuel, the air and the water. You might as well give up on keeping the gas cap screwed on tight, keeping love at bay, staying armored or buttressed, because love will get in. It will wear you down. Love is ruthless, whether you notice this or not....It will win. It always does, at least in the long term...

We get to--have to--finally release the perfectionism and expectations, expectations being resentments under construction. We can't get bogged down in this stupid stuff. It's actually a miracle just to be here at all, with a few truly great friends, and to keep muddling through, grateful if not sometimes perplexed.

So while I do not expect to get over much, I know that my motley, beloved friends and I have only a short time together left on this merry-go-round, as it spins around the sun, rises and falls. At the same time, these friends are all sort of a marvelous mess: perfect and neurotic, driven and gentle, self-centered and crazily generous, fully alive and probably on their way out. They are chipped and slightly faded works of art, and they are the exact horse I’ve longed for, all my life.

The facts of this world will never satisfy the human heart, but what we give each other can, when it holds love.

I had forgotten how disconcerting intimacy can be, how rare and how devastating the potential for loss that's inherent in it. The old adage is that -intimacy- means 'Into me I see'--deeply, with a flashlight--and believe me, we're not trying to avoid seeing the lovely and selfless aspects of ourselves. It's not even the unlikable qualities--narcissism, fraudulence, envy. It's the really disgusting, uncooked-egg parts of us--wanting people to fail, using people, holding on to resentments, our sense of entitlement.

Look around and see whom you can serve. This will fill you.

Look around and see whom you can serve.

Whether it's Mt. Sinai, a pasture, a library, the creek down the road, a liveness, or whatever you want to call it, the song is above us, around us, within us. We transcend the incessant and wearying yammer of bullshit. Transcendence means you go from judgement, separation from life in yourself, to feeling at one-ish with the universe. We hook into something bigger than we are - truer than the self-serving stories we make up about life and ourselves.

hate to be wrong, and I hate that I am wrong so often in so many ways, that my thinking is often defensive, judgmental, and skittish. (I have a thinking disorder. I once took a 20 Questions quiz about drinking but substituted thinking and I got most of them: Do you prefer to think alone? Do you hide your thinking from loved ones? Has thinking begun to impact your health and quality of life?) Anyway,

Is the soul damaged by acne, political madness, rigid or unloving parents? I think so, damaged but not mortally so. It becomes callused, barricaded, yet it’s always there for the asking, always ready for hope. Some poet once wrote that we think we are drops in the ocean, but that we are really the ocean in drops, both minute and everything there is.

got dropped off at the airport in a better mood than I had arrived in. In the third third of life, you may become just as miserable and prickly as ever, but you cycle through more quickly. You remember other dark nights of the soul and how by dawn they always broke. You discover that everything helps you learn who you are, and that this is why we are here. You roll your eyes at yourself more gently. You sigh and go make yourself a cup of tea.

Goodness and courage are how the divine presents itself so often—whether in drag, as close friends, or as EMTs.

In recovery, they say there are no victims, only volunteers, […]

He's your friend that you get to sleep with and wake up with. That's what married life is at its most basic. A friend, your teammate, a person you trust and look forward to talking to, about anything. Someone who seems to really, really like you, who you like too.

Love is gentle if sometimes amused warmth for annoying and deeply disappointing people, especially ourselves.

Letting people know you too well is like the commercial for a telephone company with the hapless person trying to find decent reception: 'Can you hear me now?' Our bitter, hard, screwed-up places spool out over time in a marriage or intimate relationship. Our crazy inside-person shows.

Sin is not just affairs, or porn shops, or drug cartels. It is also the ignorance and brokenness of the world, extreme self-centeredness, hoarding wealth, using others as objects, not caring.

Each act of full forgiveness and even each partial act is not only a miracle, but a prize of redemption, as with books of S&H Green Stamps. But instead of a toaster, you get a unit of peace. Each act of forgiveness gives us more awareness of the beauty that surrounds us and of the friendly light inside, the tiny and usually ignored part that hasn't been faked, cheapened, or exploited. It is an infinitesimally small point of light--like when our ancient TVs were turning off--and eternity, the world in a blade of grass.

The point was to lean toward goodness, to resist less, to pray for our enemies. The point was to have a spiritual awakening of any sort that would help us live more often in kind awareness.

I would rarely be in conformity with the Divine's huge, crazy love so I just prayed, "Help me start walking in your general direction," and the greatest prayer, "Help me not be such an asshole.

Jesus is big on people evolving. And all organisms have an innate tendency to evolve toward improvement. I seem to be the outlier.

And while everyone has to make a living and show up for family, listening is optional. You have to make a conscious decision to listen harder.

Why am I here? To love this dumb old day. Ugh. If I could only remember this.

Transcendence means you go from judgment, separation from life and yourself, to feeling at one-ish with the universe. We hook into something bigger than we are, truer than the self-serving stories we make up about life and ourselves.

Adyashanti said that the part of you that sees that you are afraid isn’t afraid.