Purpose-Reality-Meaning-Life & catboxes: Encouragment

Healing Death

Fri, 07 Sep 2007 17:19:18 GMT

Healing Death

Don Ray

The meadow stream is running! …..right near the house! I do not remember seeing that before!….at least not during these

many years of extended drought.

I am taking off my wrist splint for longer periods. 'Tasha’s hair has grown back. Alice asked for a hug.

Such a miracle, healing in its many forms.

Of course sometimes we do not heal, or may only partially or imperfectly heal. Yet always, as long as life endures, the body and heart try to heal, cell by cell, breath by breath.

It is as inexorable as the pull of gravity. This drive to heal, this ongoing struggle, is surely a miracle, a constant, miraculous influence of stunning proportions.

Our lives depend on this ongoing, constant, unseen, seldom recognized, healing process. No life form can long exist without the ceaseless repair, reconstruction, and maintenance of each cell and tissue.

We seldom think of the invisible healing continuously occurring at the cellular level. And when we think of healing of our visible injuries, we mainly think of it as taking too long. But I think we would feel stunned in amazement if we could watch a time lapse movie of our cut or scrape or contusion disappearing, filling in, covering over, right before our eyes. It would appear as a special effects marvel, a trick of makeup and digital manipulation.

Real and miraculous it is, even if too slow and imperfect for our tastes.

Life wants to heal!

Living systems are driven to strive to heal, as long as life remains.

Of course equally universal is the ultimate surrender of all healing powers to inevitable mortality.

Healing..... miraculous, beautiful, and universal healing will always lose?!….surrendering in abject defeat?

What a grim and depressing end to the tale!

Or is that view too narrowly focused? Is there not more to healing than repairing physical cuts and breaks?

Hearts, souls, and spirits require healing as much as flesh, limbs, and organs.

But with healing of heart, soul, and spirit we again we face the inevitable question of ultimate outcome.

Just as cuts too deep and cancers too spread will leave our bodies scarred and disfigured, the harshest abuse and most wrenching grief will, with passing years, accrue burdens on our hearts that time cannot heal.

So is spiritual healing, like physical healing, universal but also universally doomed?

Does inevitable physical death make a cruel joke of the ceaseless healing struggle of heart and soul as well as healing processes of cell and protein?

After all, physical healing, for all its miraculous wonder that I celebrate this morning, is really only a rearguard holding action, a valiant defense of a hopelessly doomed bodily bastion

Why this prolonged defense in the face of inevitable demise? Perhaps we find the answer in the nature of that physical defense.

All that healing and repairing and curing actually involves the sacrifice of countless multitudes of living cells, blood cells white and red, collagen and epidural tissues, bone and skin, all these cells filling a momentary role, only to die and be replaced.

Such is the nature of our physical body, not a constant structure, but a form resulting from process, dynamic and vital, each cell continually in the process of being replaced.

Physical death is our constant companion, active in every cell, each cell facing imminent demise and replacement in order to sustain the ongoing dynamism of our physical life.

Yet through this all, the soul persists intact, accruing its scars and distortions, yet present still as individual identity animating that dynamic body.

Here, in sustaining spirit and soul, we find the whole purpose of all that physical healing.

The physical healing, for fleeting temporal moments, buys time for the conscious soul. The physical healing, for all its miraculous wonder, is not the purpose, but only an extension of a greater healing purpose.

It is the soul and spirit that healing ultimately serves.

But soul scarred, spirit crushed, and heart broken can only heal so far while still sustaining the assaults and insults of this worldly life.

Yet healing will not be denied the triumph due its tenacious effort. And so our bodies finally die, that our souls may be healed of their emotional scars and spiritual infirmities.

As the white blood cells die to free us from the infection, our bodies die that our souls may be freed from the compounded griefs and spiritual fractures that dim their light.

Healing is universal, and ultimately triumphant.

Inexorably the healing Spirit calls to our soul, trying to heal as best it can while in this temporal veil, beseeching us to seek those ways that bring the soul health; all the while, assuring us that spiritual scars will fade, disabled hearts can heal, and this world’s grip will soon enough be loosed.

For now, we can choose those physical therapies and life style that best heal our bodies, delaying the inevitable end, as we should.

For now, we can also choose those ways of being and believing that will best heal our hearts and spirits, but in this case not buying time before inevitable ending, but preparing for promised new beginning.

Copyright 2008

Don Ray, S.D.G.

Buddha's desires

Tue, 28 Aug 2007 14:32:14 GMT

Buddha, Elliminating Desire, and Desiring Tranquility

Don Ray

No sooner do I sit down outside than ‘Tasha Ängelchen kitty hops into my lap and begins to purr and purr and purr.

Finally, she gets a moment of satisfaction from her life of maunzing dissatisfaction.

We sit here together on this morning, ‘Tasha purring, squirrels, robins, and a host of others filling the surrounding trees, low angle light of still rising sun illuminating the thick display of lilacs that in turn fill the entire yard with a fragrance sublime and intoxicating.

The visual, aural, and aromatic blessings are so extreme, so glorious, so encompassing, that for a moment ‘Tasha kitty and I both experience satisfaction, blessed satisfaction.

For a moment, on this still, cool morning, I think not of money worries, the job opportunity I never heard back from, the group of soporific students I must teach in a few minutes, and the lesson I have not yet prepared.

‘Tasha does not think about the fact she remains on a line, she does not get to hunt for her food, and her lifelong companion PC kitty is gone.

I scruff her soft coat and she purrs. We both feel momentary satisfaction.

As just elaborated, innumerable needs remain unmet, innumerable wants unfulfilled. Yet the sensory inputs of this world, the contact that ‘Tasha receives, and the fulfillment for me of pursuing this writing, leave us momentarily satisfied.

I say momentarily because soon enough the world will provide ample reminders of all that we do miss and need, and obligations to that world will pull us from this blessed moment of morning perfection.

‘Tasha has taught me much about dissatisfaction, as she yowls about the house, even when fed and full and played with.

She knows what she is made for, to be outside stalking, hunting, and exploring.

She knows something critical is missing from her life.

And occasionally, for what would look like no reason to anyone not closely attuned to the needs of kitties, she inconsolably yowls about the house in tragic despair and perennial dissatisfaction, in spite of having just received all my best efforts to feed and play.

She will sit at the door to the file storage room. She will look up at it yowling, as if thinking that perhaps behind that mysterious door resides that which will finally fulfill and satisfy her.

Occasionally I will open that door, allowing her to wander among the rubble of my filing system. She gracefully navigates the openings between boxes and stacks of file drawers, puts her nose into the pile of climbing gear, and finally comes back out into the hallway, her yowling only momentarily abated.

As in recent months I have each day read a verse from Buddhist wisdom, I find the quotes often address the subject of satisfaction, and the need to divorce one’s self from the desires and passions and wants of our worldly existence.

Indeed, for the sake of inner peace and tranquility, eschewing desires and wants would in principle remove the very source of dissatisfaction.

But ‘Tasha kitty (still curled up against my right forearm, head turning so bright yellow eyes can see the source of that crunching sound in the grass) demonstrates how natural is dissatisfaction. All my counseling to put away her desires and wants and instead seek the tranquility of inner satisfaction go unheeded.

‘Tasha is now satisfied because she is putting my right arm to sleep and because hosts of birds and squirrels provide her surround-sound, 3D sensory, interactive entertainment, while my lap keeps her warm.

Maybe ‘Tasha in her kitty wisdom declares that transcendental states of satisfaction are just not natural. She is irritatingly honest in her prowling-yowlings about the house when I won’t let her outside, as she is delightfully honest in her purring and cuddling when lap-time suits her fancy.

(Boy, something in the woods sure has her attention!)

I have come to find that in almost everything in life “balance” is the watchword. I say almost everything because surely there are some redeeming qualities: holiness, compassion, love, honesty, for which excess is a good thing. But most of us are in little danger of even attaining balance of those attributes, much less excess.

But for everything else, I maintain balance is the optimum to be sought. I suspect that is even true of satisfaction.

Surely an excess of satisfaction might risk lethargy and chronic ambivalence. How can one passionately campaign for justice, or tirelessly work on cures, if one is satisfied?

More personally, how can one personally grow and progress and spiritually mature if one is satisfied?

I feel ‘Tasha has carried dissatisfaction a little too far. Her focused and amplified misery makes me miserable as her mournful yowls fill the house. Heaven knows I know many people that do the same thing, cruelly yowling through their days about each and every inconvenience to any poor victim within earshot.

With a continuously alternating mix of success and failure I strive to relieve myself of the burdens of desires for material possessions and money and security and social relationship and title and honor. Unloading those burdens of desire is what makes moments like this one so sublimely beautiful, and what allows me to savor the embrace of the infinite when I go to bed each night.

But as for satisfaction with my spiritual state, and my efforts to help and give and care, I pray I never entertain the thought of becoming satisfied.

Likewise, though painful in its experience, I hope I can continue to feel pain upon seeing a bulldozer destroying a forest, and I hope I continue to feel tears upon reading about another school shooting.

To remove desire, to bask in self-imposed satisfaction, seems terribly dishonest, or at least terribly selfish, albeit it pleasant and convenient.

If one is to optimize one’s impact in the world, and maximize personal growth; in other words, if one tries to love to the greatest degree possible, one must neither sink into bitter despair caused by dwelling on all that is wrong and missing, nor float away on a transcendental cloud by blinding one’s self to even compassionate desires.

At this point in the morning ‘Tasha hops off my lap, being true to her oft dissatisfied self, allowing my right forearm to begin to tingle with returning feeling, and telling me I need to bring this epistle to a close and get to work.

I pray that in the coming hour, self-satisfaction with my teaching will allow me to not freeze up in insecurity as the students stare blankly at me. And I pray that my self-satisfaction will be balanced by dissatisfaction driving me to further improve my efforts to impart some modicum of knowledge. I don’t think the Buddha would disapprove.

Don Ray

Gifts that don't fit

Mon, 26 Mar 2007 17:29:00 GMT

Gifts That Don’t Fit

Don Ray

Copyright 2007

I put up the last of the Christmas gifts and “care package” food from my 96 year old mother. I note the aluminum foil carefully wrapped around the edge of a lidless container, wrapped with hands twisted and stiffened by arthritis. I taste from the jar of salsa, loyally branded with my alma mater’s label, and filled with arguably the worst salsa ever to grace a gift shop shelf.

It dawns on me that perhaps it is all the many futile, clumsy, incompetent attempts to love that are the most endearing.

Love well scripted, gifts guaranteed to fit, outcomes assured to be positive, well understood needs appropriately and effectively addressed, of course we wish our love were always so accurately targeted.

But perhaps it is in the guesswork gift, the blind stab gesture, the token act of useless generosity, the misplaced effort and the unnoticed and unappreciated offer of help that love truly shines. For this is love given without certainty of outcome, gifts given in innocent sincerity purely for the sake of love, given in spite of not knowing if they will fit or they are needed or even remotely desired.

Such gifts are a statement of determination to give, to love, to help, love refusing to be held back by practical considerations, love insistently reaching out into darkness, and thereby casting light and warmth into cold shadows.

Copyright

Don Ray

S.D.G.

Unbowed

Tue, 20 Feb 2007 02:25:14 GMT

Unbowed

Don Ray

Such a world.

Thunder approaches.

Fear dominates, especially among our leaders.

Cruelty multiplies, especially among our leaders.

Sirens wail, and Nature is bulldozed.

Cover-ups serve the interests of those in power.

Loyalty to political organizations compromises judgments and principles.

Economic trends worsen, and political leaders pretend otherwise.

Ethnic cleansing and genocide run rampant in places in the news and in places carefully hidden, while nations invest money and their young people in bludgeoning other nations’ peoples.

A Pandora’s box of freak weather patterns leave the two thirds world starving, while our leaders insist no evidence exists for global warming.

Yet mountains still stand, beckoning us to grow our souls by climbing them.

Compassionate people still travel to harsh lands out of a passion to share and give.

Somewhere an artist still creates out of desire to bless the observer, or audience, or reader, or listener.

Somewhere a teenager resists temptation and pressure.

Somewhere a soldier doesn’t pull a trigger.

Kitties still give themselves baths, songbirds still sing in the morning, and around the world in peace and in war, parents continue the struggle to support their children.

Like the flower blooming in the draught stricken desert, life, love, and the human spirit stand brazenly defiant in the face of the leaders that would instill fear, the marketers that would own our souls, and the media that would crush our hopes.

Through millennia of changing names, titles, boundaries and institutions, it has remained so and will remain so. Take heart, take courage, and celebrate the tenacious God given Spirit of human Life that possesses such strength that it has withstood millennia upon millennia of assault and siege, and rises still unbowed before despots and demagogues, politicians and priests, CEO’s and celebrities.

Copyright 2007

Don Ray

S.D.G.

Creation of the self

Tue, 09 Jan 2007 02:00:05 GMT

Thoughts on creation of the self

Don Ray

I keep saying that we are empowered to create our eternal selves. But what does creation always entail?

If we create a house, a business, a work of art, a football team, all of those creations entail effort, will, and work. You don’t just sit in your lounger, think about it, and “poof”, there’s your custom car, barbequed steak, or new porch. “Creation” means making something happen that would not have happened otherwise, and that means investing some energy to change the direction of the universe in some small way.

Should we expect any less in the creation of our souls?

We’re handed all the clay. Someone else created the raw materials of our bodies, our conscious minds, and the world that sustains us. But that clay, the clay of our soul, will sit there as a lump unless we invest some effort to do something with it.

That’s why effort, if not out and out struggle, is involved in any act of personal growth.

All the autopilot, programmed behaviors just happen. The sex, the eating, the striving for money, all these reflect necessities of survival. Everything we do because it’s natural or necessary is the spiritual equivalent of the lump of clay sitting on the table and just being, well, a lump of clay. All the behaviors associated with lusts and desires and wishes are nothing more than our minds obeying their natural law programming just like the lump of clay obeys the law of gravity.

When God breathed life into the lump of clay, that did not entail merely giving a pulse to the clay. That giving of holy life, that creating by God in the image of God, did not mean simply shaping the clay into a more complex form and adding laws of survival to the law of gravity the clay had to obey.

The clay, you, was gifted with the essence of life itself, the ability to create itself.

This personal creation, as all creation, entails the conscious, chosen, freewill application of effort to make the Youniverse move in a slightly different direction from what it would otherwise.

The cruising, easy, comfortable, and natural paths are the paths of the clay lying on the table, obedient to gravity, passively unchanging. The struggles, temptations, setbacks, and challenges of life are the stuff of self Creation, opportunities for the Choice.

The wood provides the raw material to serve the carpenter’s will, and through his/her work and sweat to become creation. The paint provides the raw material to serve the artist’s eye, and through invested time and training to become beauty. The challenges, difficulties, and opportunities of life lie on the shop floor and easel of your life, the raw materials ready for the toil of your conscious free will to create your soul.

Don Ray

S.D.G.

Leper's wisdom

Tue, 09 Jan 2007 01:38:38 GMT

Leper’s Wisdom

Don Ray

Of course before I can write, ‘Tasha kitty has to get settled back in after I disturbed her repose on her throne by the door. Across my shoulders she crawls, then finally alights her fuzzy warm softness on my left forearm, as usual, little toes grasping over the far edge of my arm.

From the two giant black Cadillacs parked on the street, it appears the Jehovah’s Witnesses are again assaulting our neighborhood. I sit here dreading the inevitable ring on the doorbell. It will probably be the same sweet gentleman in his heavy, black, winter coat that has visited in years past on wintry mornings.

God bless ‘em, but they do drive me nuts. I have tremendous respect for them, for their courage, for their commitment, dedication, and sincerity, but they drive me nuts.

But that’s a small price for me to pay if their methods manage to bring some light, truth, and meaning into someone’s life in this neighborhood.

I always wonder if they do have any success, but I don’t want to ask them the question for fear of discouraging them, and also because I wouldn’t expect a straight answer.

In the past I’ve often tried to have a conversation with them, but their unbending adherence to a defined script always precluded any meaningful exchange. (Mind you, I speak only of the guys that circle my neighborhood. I can’t speak about Jehovah’s Witnesses in general. )

What would they think of the book I now read, The God Who Would Be Known by John Templeton and Robert Herrmann.

What wondrous thought it offers, about the depths of the cosmos, the marvels of scientific discoveries, and how they all point to a Creator that is present, part of all and all part of the Creator.

That book’s commentary goes well with the fifth chapter in the Book of John that I read yesterday ( the chapter, not the whole book ). Yeshu ( Jesus ) spoke of Himself, of how the Father gave him the power to judge because He was the Son of Man. On the verses went, mysterious and complex?….or simple and direct….I’m not sure which. Of course for a couple of millennia the most educated theologians have debated the nature of Yeshu. I certainly cannot invoke the quotations and scholarly research of the experts. Yet somehow I feel that fifth chapter of the Book of John ties in very nicely with the science based commentary in The God Who Would Be Known.

Somehow the holy is present in all, in every atom, in every vibrating quantum string, in every geometric twist of space, time, and almost a dozen other dimensions.

But wait! What of the suffering, the harshness of Nature, the abiding cruelty of humanity. Where is the holy in that maelstrom of gnashing teeth, slashing claws, and targeted munitions?

Like I say, complex questions. They are questions that seldom arise at the company Christmas party, though ironically somehow, in ways our minds do not quite comprehend, it is that moment of Christmas in which all the mystery of the holy embedded within the carnal, the perfect revealed in the blood and violence and pain, the presence of Creator’s Spirit in the midst of dirt, mud, and dung, finally comes into focus.

Our mind cannot quite comprehend the wonder of it. It’s as if it lies there just beyond our mental grasp. At least it lies beyond my mental grasp. But in certain moments it does not lie beyond the understanding of our hearts. There are moments of sublime musical beauty at a Christmas concert, moments of desperate rescue in the disaster, moments of exhausted giving of just a little more to the sick or injured or simply small and young….there are moments when in our hearts, even if not expressible in mere words or volumes, that John 5, and the underlying reason those Jehovah’s Witnesses are out on this cold day, and “immanent Spirit”, and the “Word was God”, all these things become momentarily clear to our heart.

It is perhaps to be celebrated that our heart, soul, and essence can experience something of such profound depth and meaning that words fail, and even the Holy Scriptures only tantalize us with their attempt at expressing this meaning.

Surely that is a far more desirable circumstance than the opposite, to not feel in depths of heart and soul anything deeper and more powerful than that which the mind can dissect and comprehend.

I suspect that latter condition is a great underlying source of the misery of modern society. In pursuit of the material and scientific, people have perhaps amputated that ability to personally feel the deep and profound secrets of the self, the universe, the Creator.

Certainly many of the most dissatisfied and saddest acquaintances I’ve known have been those that effectively applied their logical, practical, intellectual scalpels to the mysteries of life, but did not admit entry to feelings of deeper portent that might challenge their mental construct of reality and its foundations.

So we are blessed to wonder in perplexity at concepts of God present in all, of God present in human form, or is God present in all humans, but what about the mass murderer, but didn’t God create everything?…but surely we’re not separated from God, or did God just set it all in motion and leave us to our own devices, but isn’t God Him/Herself revealed in our telescopes and microscopes…..and then in our confusion we feel a hand in ours, or we call to someone as lonely as we, or we volunteer a seemingly pointless service, or we hear an out of tune rendition of a Christmas carol, and though our mind remains as confused as ever, our heart glimpses that Truth bathed in light white and welcoming.

In university lecture halls, Sunday School classes, and prayer filled mosques, confusion and contradiction will reign. In King James and Quran, words will remain perplexing and mysterious.

“All His fullness in Him”…”making peace through His blood shed on the cross”…(Colossians) and countless other lines of verse, script, and scripture will leave us struggling to understand, and leave those that think they understand struggling to convey it to the rest of us, who will nod in knowing agreement while listening to the sermon, then promptly forget it so we won’t have to face our abject confusion.

But there will always be the other moments, a newborn’s first cry, a child’s excited surprise, a friend’s unconditional acceptance, a sending or receiving of a shipment of relief supplies, a rustle of fresh breeze through brilliant fall leaves, moments when all the words, theology, and philosophical posturing become trite and irrelevant.

In those moments mystery is dissipated, scattered before the distilled essence of all existence, Purpose, meaning, and Source. In the bright, pure gold of deeply shared tear or laugh, the human wisdom of the ages appears as mere dross.

In such a moment two thousand years ago a leper, shunned by everyone through all his adult years, banishes theological confusions and intellectual controversies when in amazement he sobs “He touched me!”

Don Ray

(Thanks to Reverend Steve Baxter for having years ago planted that image of the leper in my memory.)