Devotional reading 170211

Dear brothers and sisters,
Good morning. This is a wet day for nature. Hopefully it is a cleansing day for us from inside out. Nature regenerates itself from season to season. Wet winter is for roots to deepen and absorb as much moisture as possible for budding in spring. Wet weather slows down our activities so that we can spend more time to meditate and deepen our relationship with God. I will run out of my battery if I don’t charge my phone at night. We do not have any significant contribution like love, to offer this world, if we do not have “charging” time in Christ daily.

The most basic premise for giving love is knowing the person one loves. Before there can be any real love, one must find out what the other person is like. One has to become aware, conscious of that person’s true being, in order to love that very person and not some image of one’s own that one projects upon the other. It is altogether too easy to believe that I really love someone when all I am doing is enjoying my own ideal of what I would like that person to be. And probably the surest way of finding out the difference is by listening to the other person, allowing oneself to be open and sensitive to that person s real reactions.

Listening to others is an art that can be learned. Leaning to listen to God helps, but it also works both ways. We listen better to God and the beings of the spiritual world when we allow ourselves to be open to human beings and their deeper reactions. At the depth of every human being is a shy, timid spirit like a beautiful bird. As long as one judges or throws out personal opinions, that depth, that spirit remains hidden and afraid. To discover what it is there, one must learn to be quiet and wait with openness, expecting a response. This is the first step in Christian living with one another. Christian fellowship and community do not begin until we have learned to listen to other people just as they are. Only then can most of us begin to discover this essence of our souls.

Takes real security within oneself to be open to the t totality of another human being. In this listening we give neither approval nor disapproval. We accept the other’s ground of being and the other’s system of values just as they are…Listening with this kind of openness means allowing one’s whole e being to become involved without worrying about whether it is accepted or not. One reason most people are unable to do this is that they are unable to love themselves. In listening to people, one finds that below the surface very few of them can really abide themselves. It is because of this that solitary confinement is so painful; when one is shut off from the outside world, one comes face to face with oneself. Yet how can we pass love on to others, as Jesus asked of us, unless we can accept that love and understanding for ourselves?

If one can realize that there is need for love close at home, growth can begin right there, with the healthiest kind of groundwork to build on. We do not have to worry too much about our own feelings at the time; what matters is doing something that makes the other person feel loved. The test is not just whether we feel loving; it is more whether or not the other person feels loved by us. Christian love is not complete until the other person feels loved through contact with us… Any of us can develop this means of expressing love if we will take the trouble to think about the needs of others and to commune deeply with the source of love. In all kinds of less intimate situations—at work, or at play, and particularly in the classroom—one can bring love to the people one encounters by giving them room or space in which to live and grow. Or at times we may find that love requires us to support another person when events are forcing growth or change on that person. Some individuals need stability in order to grow, and sometimes they simply need the confidence to stay put when change does not mean growth.

There is one difficulty we usually escape when it comes to loving our enemies. Generally we have no trouble noticing either the people who cannot stand us or the unpleasant ones we cannot stand, particularly if we have never tried to forgive them or relate to them. If we avoid those who seem to be enemies, however, and do not try to accept them into our lives, we become stunted both in personal growth and in finding reality in our devotional live. Love implies forgiveness. It is hard for us to realize, but actually the only requirement the loving Father places on us, once we come to know Him in meditation, is that we forgive as we have been forgiven. Our first task is not so much to make contact with these people, but simply to stop our unkind actions toward them. Most often this means simply to stop our chatter about them, laying aside our almost unconscious backbiting reaction to them…Then, when we are making a real effort not to hurt people no matter h much we dislike them, we can begin to pray honestly for them, and we can expect some surprising results, especially in ourselves…By looking for the creative or positive in another person, and seeking other elements in that individual to which I can reach out, new capacities to love and to respond are born in both of us.

The warmth that is provided by our capacity to love is as necessary for the soul’s growth as any other part of the meditational way. It radiates from our efforts to express love to those both at home and farther away…Steadily the warmth that is given by this kind of action draws the soul toward the reality of the loving God. Step by step the soul’s reach grows, so that it becomes easier to find the One who is love through meditation and to carry more of His love out actively to others. P65-69

I appreciate Kelsey’s sharing about this subject of love and meditation. I found it to be true in my own growth. The more we draw close to God the more we develop His love within us. It takes encourage and security to love others, especially your “enemies.” Only when you find the reality of love in God and learn about yourselves in the light of His love, we can reach out to others with love. Love is not an easy action that involves acceptance, forgiveness, sacrificial giving and making other people feel loved (not that you have expressed love). These activities begin from the intimate walk with God through meditation and prayer on a daily basis. We love because He first loves us. People cannot give love if they have never experienced the genuine love from above. It is easy to preach a sermon on love and run some religious activities in the name of the gospel – god’s forgiving love; it is hard to truly love God and others. We are low on this kind of love. We love in expecting to receive something in return. We love in order to make us feel great. There is nothing wrong to love with the above expectation. But love does not remain on that level. We love because when we draw close to the Lover of our soul, we just cannot stop expressing His love to others as our act of worship (Romans 12:1).

With love to you in Christ,
Lawrence

Devotional Reading 140211

Dear brothers and sisters,
Good morning. Thank God for the blessings of rain and moistures. We may complain about the inconvenience. But without the seasonal rain we suffer a lot of consequences. Sometimes life is full of this kind of experiences. We complain about some “bad or inconvenient” encounters like rain on Valentine Day that seems to ruin the festivity. But rain is properly the loving gift that God has given to us who need it for our survival. “We need it but we don’t like it” is a common kind of contradiction in life that we learn to deal with from time to time. It also causes us to meditate on the kind of God we deal with not only just temporarily but eternally.

Christian meditation is based on a view of the world that finds each individual important, both in the material realm and in the nonmaterial or spiritual realm. In this practice of meditation one expects to meet someone, and the encounter is usually experienced as a relationship with a person. Even to talk about it one must generally resort to images. Sometimes the encounter itself is experienced in vivid inner images. Christian meditation is not a way of escaping from one’s condition. Rather it is something we undertake in order to bring the totality of our being into relationship with a person, an Other to whom we can relate. Before anything else this means stepping out in trust, experimenting to see if one does find such a reality of the loving Father or the Risen Christ.

Through meditating we explore in order to know more and more of God. But before He is discovered, a person only believes; through experiencing a relationship one comes to know. Believing is a stage on the way to knowing. Consequently one of the main conditions for effective meditation is to gain some idea of the reality we are seeking. This is found in the Christian story. It is the Good News of Christianity; it asserts that God is like Jesus, that at the heart and core of reality is the same loving, forgiving concern expressed in the life and teachings of Jesus and in His story of the prodigal…The reality of love revealed by Jesus demands real relationship and, as I have tried to suggest, this is difficult for us. Most of us are quite willing to be cared for, to be coddled and protected, but it takes great courage for men and women to relate, even to each other. Real relationship is not often found among human beings.

Whenever real love and relationship develop between human beings, they face the demanding task of coming to terms with the less pleasant elements of themselves. God offers us a far more accepting love than any human relationship, and we actually shy away from it because of the deepening honesty and growth it requires, both of which involve shedding one’s skin time after time. This is difficult and demanding.

Yet Jesus of Nazareth tells us to approach God by addressing Hin “Abba.” This is one of His unique contributions to religious thought and I practice. Christians are told to turn to the very force that moves the sun and other stars and speak like small children who need their father and call out “Daddy!” knowing that they will be answered. In other religions, and even among many “Christians,” there is a very different idea of God.

Most of the world pictures the ruler of the universe like an Oriental potentate who must be approached almost crawling on one’s belly. His justice is not questioned. He is feared, because He is infinitely distant, infinitely just, and He administers the justice with a heavy hand. Often He appears very much like an almighty steamroller whose majestic will and wrath and judgment must be accepted with resignation, without hope. There are even people to whom God appears to be an unreasonable tyrant who strikes out angrily one moment and comforts and heals the next. No wonder people have little desire to relate to such a God and prefer to leave prayer to the professionals. Those who hold such ideas of God deep within themselves cannot help but pray very differently from Christians who find the love of a father for a child at the heart of their most central experiences.

This is indeed our privilege to be introduced to God as our Abba Father by our Lord Jesus. We don’t need to worry about how the owner of this universe may punish us because of our sins. Yes, we deserve the ultimate punishment of eternal death, yet God accepts and forgives us just like the father of the prodigal son. The prodigal son rebelled against his father. He wasted all his gifts (money, time and talents) which were meant for him to invest in life for his selfish desires. Nevertheless, as he returned to his father with a repentant heart he was embraced with loving forgiveness. We questioned this kind of love and condemned it as “spoiling” and “unfair” just as the elder son in the story protested. This kind of unconditional love is truly beyond human being can comprehend. However, this is the kind of love that God wants us to learn from Him and apply to one another. Only God can provide love of this kind for building real relationship.

With full conviction or faith in such a loving God, we are taught to pray to Him…Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your Kingdom comes. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us of our trespasses as we forgive those who trespassed against us. Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil…We believe He receives our prayer and our whole being wholeheartedly and lovingly. Praise the Lord!!!

With love from our Father,
Lawrence

Devotional reading 100111

Dear brothers and sisters,
Good morning. It is a blessing to have quiet time before the Lord and be ministered by the presence of the Holy Spirit. God cares about His children and wants to always nourish us like mother to a baby. And when we are contented with the fact that He is the Shepherd of our lives, we can rest to know that He will provide us with green pastures and still waters. As I meditated on Psalm 131 this morning, I was reminded of the importance of being as calm as a weaned child, “I have stilled and quieted my soul; like a weaned child with its mother, like a weaned child is my soul within me” (Psalm 131:2). A weaned child is not restless and cry out for his or her own needs from time to time. A soul rests in the assurance of God’s love finds inner strength to deal with uncertainty of life and complexity in human relationship. A rested soul seeks not his or her needs being met, but how he or she can be blessing to others. Contemplative prayer is to focus on the inner voice of the Holy Spirit, who whispers His love to my soul from day to day.

It is easy enough to say that God is seeking us, and even to stress how central this understanding is to Christianity. But it is harder to realize that we have to prepare so that God can break through to us. Meditation is simply the way we prepare, setting up the conditions that can help to make this possible. It includes various practices, even quite diverse ones, all aimed at making experiences of God as available as possible…bat meditation does mean is a way for us to unlock the door and come out from the places where most of us have been hiding. It is the process of opening ourselves to the realm of nonphysical reality in which God can touch us far more directly than in the physical world. It is that kind of prayer in which we seek relationship with God, and in this sense meditation is the preparation and foundation for prayer.

In meditation, there is a fresh emphasis on prayer as one and learning what God wants of us become far more important than what we want of God. Yet the amazing thing is that when we pray in this way, we often receive better than we would have dared to ask on our own. This is also the way Jesus taught His followers to pray. In the Lord’s Prayer we are told to begin by speaking directly to the Father and hallowing His name, putting the first emphasis on meeting God and expressing appreciation for what we have found. We then direct our attention to His kingdom and His will, showing our readiness to relate to His ways and wishes. Only then do we go on to ask for ourselves.

Today most of us are so caught up in the outer, material world that we forget that there is a nonmaterial inner or spiritual realm of existence. Our task is to come to know that realm again, and to realize that in it one can find sustaining and fulfilling experiences of God that give direction to the whole of life. Unless there is some such reality that can be reached, how can prayer itself make much sense? Why pray, if one is only calling out blindly into the void! Yet through meditation and the images that are evoked, one can touch and come to know the reality of the Other who is actually there.

Yet the masters of the devotional life and the depth psychologists need each other. They have each discovered something of the reality of the human soul, and each discipline has something important to say to the other. There is a burning need for us to see meditation in this new light. So many modern Christians have trouble with praying because they do not see how it can make sense in this complex modem world. Some psychological thought has made the complexity more understandable for us. The work of C.G. Jung and his followers has led farther than that. Their thinking and practice have helped many people to become aware of a need for prayer today. When the discussion of prayer leaves their discoveries out, it cuts off much of the sophisticated reading public and these people have as much right to prayer as anyone.

One of the great weaknesses among even the most religious depth psychologists is simply that their findings have not been tempered with the experience of those men and women who have plunged deepest into their relationship with God. These psychologists have not grasped the range and depth and richness of that experience, and so they can offer guidance only part of the way toward it. They often do not realize how common these experiences are to the ordinary “normal” person. Then there are psycho- legists who mistrust the entire experience of prayer and religious meditation, and these psychologists leave a great gap just where most of us need some direction and assurances that the road ahead leads somewhere worthwhile.

On the other hand, devotional writings, even down to the present day, have often left much to be desired. Some manuals insist upon the idea that we cannot grow in relationship with God without developing contempt for our emotional lives, our bodies and the physical world in general. Many of the classical Western writers have neglected the immanence or ever-present quality of God and the ways of finding Him within this world as well as beyond it. The result has often been practices so ascetic, one-sided and rejective of the world that they even caused emotional disturbance in some followers. It is difficult for the even average reader, lay or clerical, to sift the wheat from the chaff in this writing, even though popular devotional works of the last fifty years have sometimes suggested practices quite foreign to the total message of Jesus of Nazareth. Through the best of psychological understanding, however, we can find balance in our devotional lives and a return to His wisdom and practical directions.

I agree with Kelsey that we need a balanced view in our understanding of our practice of meditation. After all, it is God who created within us a mind to interact with Him. This mind exists within our soul which can be analyzed by a psychological approach. Of course, an atheist psychologist will not be able to understand the dynamics that go on within our soul in terms of our interaction with the Deity, until they humble themselves to accept the reality of God’s presence in the life of His faithful.

With the presence of His love,
Lawrence