The Blessed Community

Recently a query was read at Meeting, the query was "what do you long for in community?"  What immediately came to my mind was "the Blessed Community".   However, I then began to realize what do I really mean by The Blessed Community?  I think we all have this very idealized notion of the Blessed Community - it is one where love is the coin of the realm.   All our welcome, we are all kind to each other.   We act in union, apparently effortlessly and we are able therefore to do much productively.   God is the center of this community - holding us and connecting us.  There is joy and deep rewards from the connections and joy we experience in this community.

As I briefly enjoyed this idea I realized "what kind of people occupy this Blessed Community?" and this is where the ideal met reality.   I realized that the Blessed Community would not be some gated community where people who are dogmatic, or domineering, or annoying, or needy, or ignorant, or you supply the adjective are barred from entrance.   So if the Blessed Community must be made up of all who show up.....then all above described personalities are part of the Blessed Community.   In fact it would not be that different from your Friends Meeting or mine.  I think it is different than secular community in that it is a community of those who are bound by their relationship to the Divine.

But it does mean it is a community in which some people speak to long in business meeting (or in worship), some people make too much noise during worship, some people push their own agendas that others do not appreciate, some people speak in grating voices or inarticulately or not loudly enough or too loudly.  Some people agree to do things and forget to do it or just don't, etc. etc.

So all that said is Blessed Community any different than what we might think of as "regular faith community"?  Yes I think there is something more we could keep striving for in our Meetings in the way of creating Blessed Community.   I do think that Blessed Community is a place of love and support for its members as well as radical truth telling   (ie loving eldering when we have fallen from our highest self and need to be called back to our greater self.)   It is a place where we hold each other in forebearance (see my Nov 2018 post) which gentles the edges on our encounters and reminds us to see that of God in each other and to speak to that spark even when we do not see it.

It also means that we are fed spirituality by our community.   That we are better off because we have this community.   That in our own dry spells that rather than sitting in thirst we are nourished from the well of our community.  That the spiritual depth of the Meeting is there to turn to and draw upon in those times of dryness or dark nights of the soul.  That we have spiritual elders, regardless of our age, to nurture and support of spiritual development.

Additionally, I hope Blessed Community is also a place of "barn rising" - that we collaborate and help each other in ways that strengthen each others lives, and that we carry this out in a spirit of joyful fellowship where a network of mutual support enriches us all.  That we have a feeling of breaking ground that is Holy Ground.

And finally I hope this creates in our community moments that feel like the "living communion" that Friends forsook the "empty ritual" of formal communion for.   That we have moments of breaking bread that feel like the sharing of the body of the Living God.   That our fellowship in general feels infused with the Divine Presence, unified and bonded by Love, enliving and renewing to our spirit and moving us forward in united action.

May we all, with deliberation, move into the Blessed Community.

Spiritual Perspective

Just like in photography we can zoom in and have one perspective on something or we can zoom way out and with a little more distance see it as just part of a larger landscape.  I am finding that this is

possible with spiritual perspective as well.  Sometimes when we focus in closely on events that are happening in the world we are overcome by the sadness, the suffering, the cruelty, etc.   But when I can step back into what I have previously described as the "River of God"... a perspective where I see at a distance the bustle of humanity, the cycle of birth, life and death...the multitude of human dramas: car accidents,falling in love, illness, small acts of kindness,evil bosses, parties, marital issues, bonuses, children squabbling, breathtaking beauty, jealousy and competition, art and creation, etc, etc.   When I can see it all swirling in one unending drama that has gone on in slightly different forms and completely unchanged forms from the beginning of human history...I am able to see that even intense suffering, in this minute or da, will pass away again.   I am able to see that even horrific
historic events occurring during this year in our society will also resolve    Photos by Fay Anderson
(for better or worse and the

next series of events will arise and also pass away.)  Even when I feel that climate change potentially carries in it the end of society as we know it, I am able to notice that the Black Plague and the nuclear arms race also felt that way...that we are not the first people to think they faced end times.  This allows me to come to a place that Buddhist teachers talk about as "this too".   It is a sort of seeing the suffering with an open heart, a heart of compassion.   None of this invalidates or makes insignificant that which the close up view can show me, but it allows me to step back, to not be totally caught in that event, or that pain.

Please understand that I cannot always do this.  There are times I am full of adrenaline or righteous indignation, or personal hurt and I am right in that close up shot and full of emotion.  This is a relatively new spiritual development that is not always there.   But I have had a glance of i,t and when I can do it I feel that I have entered the "peace that passes understanding."

This is also not to imply that from this farther out perspective one is able to just say:  "Oh well".   There is a beautiful passage in the bible where Jesus is looking down on Bethlehem from a hill and he sees the condition of mankind, and in the shortest sentence in the Bible it says of God incarnate:  "Jesus wept."    So there is a feeling of both love and compassion.   Even God who has given us free will, is not completely in charge of what happens, but does care about it all.

Amidst all that human drama I described above there is still the possibility at every moment to use the evolving events for spiritual growth, and always the possibility to reach out to God and learn what God has for us to learn, to grow into a more profound relationship with God, and that is an even more profound spiritual shift!

Spiritual but not Religious - the "none's and Quakerism.

I am aware as a therapist that many people consider themselves spiritual, but not religious.   I in fact have listened to people long for a spiritual home, but feel thwarted as to how to find such a thing.  In asking them questions about what it is they want, I often privately feel that they are describing Quakerism (and of course as their therapist it is not appropriate to try to present that to them.)  But they will say things like “I want community with other people who believe in God”.  “I want a place without dogma – where you can believe, but not be told what to think.”  “I want a place that takes action for social justice.”  And so forth.

Because of my feeling that Quakers need to learn how to do outreach to just such people, I got last year the book: Belief without Borders: Inside the Minds of the Spiritual but not Religious by Linda Mercadante.  She presents to us the fairly well know truth that the religion in America hit its high point in the 1950s with only 3% not affiliated with a religion, but that a huge decline began in the 60’s and 70’s.  Until by 2010  46 million Americans, or 1/5^th of all Americans had no religious affiliation.  (This is not across the board, some religions with immigration are actually growing in the US, as are evangelical religions.) Estimates vary from 1/3 to ¾ of young adults not choosing a church.  Increasingly young adults have not been raised with any religion, decreasing the likelihood of their choosing a church in adulthood.  65% of young adults have never attended a church service.  And there is more change of affiliation (2 or 3 times) for adults who are in religion than in previous generations.  And yet 90% of Americans, Gallop polls show still believe in God.

Certainly for many, many centuries of human history religion was the only game in town in terms of explaining why the world was the way it was.  With the rise of science there is another game in town for explaining the world.  But this also loosed the grip of superstition and the use of fear to keep people in churches.   The idea that one would fail or be outcast or die in hell all have loosened as religion became less prominent.   So if we assume that it is good that people who previously belonged to religions for those bad reasons no longer do, that still does not address the huge number of people who do not belong to a church because the obvious ones they know about are a wrong fit and they don’t have a good way of finding the right religion.  More Americans describe themselves are spiritual but not religious (SBNR) than ever. They are the "nones" the ones who write none on the checkbox that ask for religious affiliation. If they are seeing themselves as seekers, Quakerism as the original faith of seekers should be a good home for them.

Mercandante’s research shows that the SBNR very much reject dogma and see it as harmful.  If one reviews the history of religion, such chapters as the Inquistion and the many religious wars, the persecution of or discrimination against individuals for religious beliefs; it is no surprise that people would come to this conclusion.  Again it would seem that Quakerism offers a helpful stance here saying that we have no dogma or doctrine but that we engage in a lifelong search for the truth and can offer what we have found so far in the form of testimonies.  SBNR’s similarly believe that all religions have found the same core truths, and they see mystics of all traditions as transcending the specific practices they utilized.  SBNR folks tend to reject the title of religious, which they see as entangled in the downsides of churches, and favor the term spiritual instead.

Mercandante's interviewees she divided into 5 generational groups: the Great Generation (born 1901-1924), the Silent Generation (1925-1945), Baby Boomers (1946-1964), Gen X (1965-1981), and the Millennials born after 1981..  Both the Great Gen and the Silent Gen were pretty universally raised in some sort of church and would choose some sort of church because it was fairly unheard of to not do so.  The Silent Gen was more capable of leaving religion for spirituality - integrating what they had found.  Baby boomers were the largest group interviewed and where the largest percent of those who identified as SBNR.  They also tended to have been raised in a church and to remember that fondly. Their generations general tendency to question authority and to explore ideas and possibilities which made them spiritual seekers.  

The Gen X's were born into this cultural revolution and their parents tended not to raise them in churches - (less than half had formal religious upbringing) or to the expose them to a potpourri of possibilities which they found confusing.  They were left to make their own decisions and affiliations and most simply did not.  This generation is much less likely to feel a lack of religion and is also concerned for intellectual integrity in what they believed.  They can also come to religions with an open mind and with less preconceived notions.  Mercandante interviewed the smallest number of Millennials because she notes they were the least interested even in the idea of her project.  More than half had grown up with divorced parents which seemed to contribute to their not having been brought to church - even less of them had been raised in a Church than the Gen X folks.  She says:  "For this generation, they took for granted that they could affiliate or not, believe or practice whatever they wanted, or nothing at all, with little or not repercussions."  They seem however to have less theological concepts to even guide a search for religion.

Mercandante wound up categorizing all her participants (regardless of generation) into 5 categories: 1)Dissenters - those who either in protest, drifting or conscientious objection left the church.

2)Casuals - those who engage spirituality on a casual or "as needed" basis.  They taste or dabble across a wide spectrum and are not concerned about theological mismatch.  Half of all Millennials fell into this category.

3) Explorers- those with spiritual wanderlust - driven by spiritual curiosity and the desire for novelty.  She sees them as spiritual tourists who enjoy the journey but do not plan to settle anywhere.

4) Seekers are those she sees as actually seeking a spiritual home- these are the church shoppers (and whose stance most closely align with the Quaker belief that the Truth must be sought.)  She says "I heard a spiritual longing they could just barely define or articulate."   However she also says: "Religious leaders often assume that everyone experiencing with spiritual practices is a seeker.  In my work, I found fewer seekers than religious leaders hope for, but more than some research might predict".  She also points out that the highest percentage of seekers are Baby Boomers (1 in 4) or Gen Exers (1 in 5).  They are often looking for "believable" beliefs, rituals that consistently provide 'liminality', a trustworthy group, and good personal 'fit'.  

5) Immigrants are her final group: those who actually convert to a new religion.  She comments on how difficult most found this path to be.

A future post will again pick up on insights from Mercandante's work, but it clearly serves as a useful reference point for Meetings trying to do outreach.  It is helpful for us to put in perspective that we are part of the "Protestant mainstream decline" in church going folks and that the very obvious decline in Quaker membership is not specific to Quakers, but is part of an overall trend in the US where 25% of people do not have any church affiliation and where increasingly young people are being raised without church.  It is also probably noteworthy (but not particularly encouraging) to realize that Baby Boomer and Gen X's are the ones most likely to be actually seeking a Friends Meeting.   But bottom line it is important to realize that for those who are seeking we do in fact have that which they describe to be the picture they are seeking.

Let Your Life Speak: a Book Review

Strange to review an almost 14 year old book; but this is a timeless book and worth knowing about.  Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation is a short book by Quaker theologian Parker Palmer.  I picked up to give to my niece, started peeking in it and wound up reading the whole 109 pages (i.e. it is a quick read).  While good for anyone looking at vocation issues, I found it just a very lovely description of the life struggle to live in faithfulness to the Divine.  One of the things I most appreciated is his own very sincere and humble sharing of his own struggles with vocation, confrontations with his own ego and public acknowledgment of struggles with clinical depression (which I think few well known people are willing to do.)

In the first chapter on Listening to Life, he describes the process of listening to the events of our life as a way of hearing God’s whispering to us.  In the 2^nd chapter he explores the idea of our true self and leaving behind pretense or the strivings of the ego for attention and releasing false selves.   The third chapter, the Way Closes, is one of my favorite as he here puts forth the idea of discernment that it is not all doors opening that show us directions, but also some that close behind us (with a thump)!  A nice quote from this chapter:  “If we are to live our lives fully and well, we must learn to embrace the opposites, to live in a creative tension between our limits and our potentials.  We must honor our limitations in ways that do not distort our nature, and we must trust and use our gifts in ways that fulfill the potentials God gave us.  We must take the no of the way that closes and find the guidance it has to offer – and take the yes of the way that opens and respond with the yes of our lives.”  P. 55

Chapter IV however, is my favorite because as a therapist I have a deep appreciation for how he talks about depression and his attempt to get others to understand what is helpful and what is not in another’s response to depression.  He helpfully lists the following as not useful: 1)sympathy 2)efforts to “cheer one up” – alienating because the depressed person cannot get there 3)Being told what a good person one is or all the good one has done (alienating because it has no bearing on the present suffering) 4) saying one knows exactly how the other feels (as he points out we never really do and so it simply rings false all that follows afterwards, and potentially invalidates what ones friend is experiencing 5) advising giving (which he adds sets the giver free not the receiver)  He argues for the rejecting of simplistic solutions and for the embracing of mystery.  He describes responses that were helpful saying: ”It is a love in which we represent God’s love to a suffering person, a God who does not ‘fix’ us but gives us strength by suffering with us. By standing respectfully and faithfully at the borders of another’s solitude, we may mediate the love of God to a person who needs something deeper than any human being can give.”  P. 64  He also argues for seeing depression as a path down, but to understand that as a path to “the Ground of Our Being”…meaning a path to God.

In the fifth chapter on Leadings from Within, he discusses what leadership really is (as leadership is a critical part of his life path)  He also shares somewhat humorously a time he learned the real meaning of the Outward Bound motto:  “If you can’t get out of it, get into it!” and the usefulness of applying this to certain spots in life.  In talking about certain dark truths that leaders must face I especially appreciated the third that he named “functional atheism, the belief that ultimate responsibility for everything rests with us”.  This I recognize as an aspect of my own “God who” disease brought on by fear, followed by the rapid forgetting that there is a Divine Creator of  this universe!  He also makes a lovely argument for bringing the work of the spiritual life into the public realm.

I must confess the last chapter is my least favorite (maybe it is last for a reason?).  He attempts to use the movement thru the seasons: fall, winter, spring and summer as a metaphor for the movement of our lives on a spiritual journey.  But somehow I simply did not find what was said in this chapter to be very enlightening.

Overall this book with personal examples and vulnerable honesty helps us understand the journey to find and to change vocation as an ultimately spiritual journey and gives us the encouragement to face the journey as mystical journey.

God is not Done Speaking Yet

Over a year ago the UCC church down the street from my Meeting had a big banner which said:  "God is not done speaking yet".  At first I thought rather smugly "Well Quakers know that the Truth is evolving, that is why we have testimonys and not creedal statements."  But I eventually came to just appreciate the sign as a good reminder that we have to keep listening to hear and know God.

The summer issue of Friends Journal is on Testimonys and has challenged us throughout the issue to not put a rich deep history, most of which was lived without any such concept of testimony's, into neat little boxes.  It challenges to keep living in the Root of those testimonys and not in their fruit.  It demands of us that we not make them things and as such creedal statements instead of living testimonies.

Parker Palmer, the well known Quaker theologian, many years ago wrote of the cross that it is the intersection between the vertical now of God, and the horizontal here and now of our lives as we live them on this plain.  It is a powerful intersection.

Both that cross and that issue of FJ ask us, as the Peace testiomny does "to live in that Life and Power"....yes the one that takes away the occasion for all war, but also the one that can invade our being and reorder it, that can center us in a second, that can fill us with Love, and give us the courage for powerful action.  There is a decision I have made throughout my life, over and over again, that I want to live in that center...and yet over and over again I find myself somewhere else and having to return to the attempt to live in that center.

I can bring my body to Meeting for Worship, and I can sit and think about my problems.  But when I do that I am doing that out of the old habit that I am author of my life.  It is an entirely different thing to bring those problems to The Holy One, to ask for guidance, to submit them in prayer, and to sit still wait listening to hear the answers from a God who is still Speaking.

Is There a God?

I was 12 years old and I was sitting on a bench in Meeting for Worship and I was wondering: "Is there a God?"  This seemed like an important question to which it was not clear how one could get an answer to this question.  As I sat there I looked at a purple Iris outside the window with a huge dew drop on the petal.  The sun was hitting it refracting a rainbow within the dew drop.  I rejoiced in the beauty and majesty of all this!

I reflected upon what we had just been studying in biology: about how flowers reproduce, about how light is refracted, about how water evaporates and goes up in the air and is held in clouds and then is released in rain, and the whole rather perfect cycle of nature there, and in reproduction of plants, and of birth and death and rebirth of plants and animals, etc.  "It is all perfect", I thought.  And suddenly I knew; I knew there is a God.  Because I realized nothing could accidentally or randomly occur that was this perfect.  I saw there was an intelligence in the universe.  I felt an energy that could be turned to for guidance and wisdom.

As I got older I would contend with questions like: Why does God allow suffering? What does God want me to do and how do I know?  How do I pray?  And what is the correct name of God?  But for then, for 12, it was just good to know there is a God.

When I was much older I had a long argument with a friend who identifies himself as an Atheist.  I told him that while I could understand someone being Agnostic, not knowing if there is a God that I did not know how he could claim to know conclusively that there is not a God when others say they have experienced God directly.  He made various arguments and asked me several times to what my experience of God was.  I described it and he said he had not had that experience. I acknowledged that but said I still did not think he could dismiss others experience. 

He did acknowledge that there is a principle of intelligence within the Universe, but then said crossly that he did not understand why I was calling that God.  I said that I did not understand why he would refuse to call it God.  He talked over and over again about the evils of the church throughout history.  I acknowledged that the organized churches have done many evil things and that that is the doing of humans while hiding behind the cloak of the church.  I said that you could not throw God out with the churches.  He eventually said that if I was calling the Mind of the Universe God that he agreed that it existed, but found it unnecessary to call it God.

We were young then.  I have not asked him where he turns for comfort when the world looks dark?  Or where he finds strengthen when he has to do the hard things? Or what helps him to find connection to all people around him even the crappy ones?  But these are reasons why I have discovered there is a God not just a Mind of the Universe.

The Unnameable One

For some time I have been struggling in my spiritual life with how to call out to the Infinite Holy One. For me the term God has not evoked a male presence, but it is not an intimate enough term for me in prayer, for heart-to-heart discourse. For years my prayers had begun "Dear Lord", and for many recent years I've tried to tell myself that while that term historically refereed to the adult, male owner of the manor, it wasn't a male term. I told myself it was a term for grandeur, vastness, and powerfulness. But i had to admit to myself that an above me/below me quality and a "taskmaster" quality were sneaking into my intimate Divine relationship. This was not how I really thought the Nurturer is. So aware also that some of my sisters find the term God alienating when used in verbal ministry, I set out to seek a new name.

I wanted a name that I could call out to or speak of, that Ground of My Being, that would work in all instances. That is where I got stuck for several years. I tried out terms like Goddess, Creator, Comforter, etc. Nothing felt right. Goddess just put a different gender on a Being I find genderless. Creator wasn't the one I could pray to in grief. Comforter is not the One who made the Universe... and it went on and one. My whole prayer life seemed adrift. I was trying to change how I prayed to reflect more my feeling of calling on the Inner Light and the Outer Light to move in concert in my life. But how does one form a prayer without words?

Finally, in one of those divine ironies where one gives in order to get, I was leading a workshop on personal theology at the Friends General Conference Gathering and the answer was opened to me. The workshop was on theologies we construct for ourselves, and I had invited people that morning in small groups to look at how they conceptualized and called out to the Divine. As I visited the groups and as they reported back to the large group, I again heard the familiar struggle. Many names were put forth: Yahweh, the Light, God, Ground of my Being, Goddess, Abba, etc. But either the speaker or the listeners always expressed frustration with the terms. Nothing was ultimately the right fit.

Then we went into silent worship. The quite bouncy, joyful music of a Cris Williamson song ("Song of the Soul") came into my head. I heard two fragments of lines: "Love of my Life, I'm.." and "Spirit Divine." For the first time ever, I realized that the first line referred not to a human lover, but to the Ultimate Lover. As I thought about what beautiful phrases both were for the Dancer of my Heart, suddenly all the other names I'd heard that day came spilling in, sung to the same melody, and I saw a lovely patchwork with the many names of the Unnameable One. In a flash, I realized that the difficulty of my task had been its impossibility. I remembered only then that the ancient Hebrews had a name which meant: "that which I refer to in order to refer to that which in unnameable." They recognized the egotism and impossibility (and sin?) of trying to reduce to a mere word the name of the Infinite One. The impossibility of our finite consciousness trying to embrace both eternal, infinite, and mysterious! I had to laugh at myself because I'd been trying to carry out this same impossible task.

But what joy! What liberation to realize I was free to use any name, to use all the names. Suddenly the whole vastness and powerfulness of the Infinite Horizon seemed to wash over me, no longer blocked off by worlds that limited or confined by relationship to and experience of the Divine. I felt the multi-level connectedness to My Mother that I had sought so long in "the right name". As I lived the next minutes, hours, days and years with this new insight, several other things have became apparent to me. One is that I use the name God when my head is talking about Spirit. I use it when I am reducing the Infinite to a concept, or when I wish to communicate to another by a familiar and acceptable term. It is a term I sue when I'm in my head, not when I am in the Presence.

The other side of that is if I listen in my soul, if I listen to "the Still Small Voice Within", then the name I will call will be my immediate and genuine experience of Spirit this moment of my existence. Such practice makes my prayer life far more powerful and makes my vocal ministry evocative. I now have a much deeper understanding of my the journals of early Friends are full of such phrases for the One who Covers Us since they worshipped in a Living Presence who was the programmer of every Meeting. When I first read Thomas Kelly's Testament of Devotion, I loved the phrases he uses such as "the Hound of Heaven," which he uses throughout his book. But I thought of them as marks of good writing, not as ways to call out to the Maker.

I now see them as guideposts for all of us of the intimacy possible with the Author of Living, when we seek to know Spirit minute by minute. What came to me in worship felt like a genuine opening, a glimpse of Truth that my mind did not figure out, but was revealed to me as a gift of grace. I am aware of the battle that rages in many Meeting houses over God language. In this battle many feel oppressed and disregard, others feel the Most Sacred is attacked and denigrated. Each side reels their most personal experience of the Parent is devalued. I offer, most humbly, that perhaps in my opining as an answer for us as a Society of Friends: that we will not find consensus on a "right name", that we cannot argue each other into compliance or a new or old orthodoxy of semantics.

All of the names we call are correct and spirit filled. But if we embrace this as an answer, it must be one of the highest common denominator, not other lowest. By this I mean that all parties not simply "accept" the names others call their Beloved , and not routinely continue to use the same name they have sued for years. Instead, let all of listen to the Still Small Voice to know by what name we will call out at this moment, and that we hear the Divine Whisperer in each message given at Meeting. I wish to share with others the infinite richness I have found in such worship.

This article is reprinted from Friends Journal June 1994

Balance and Spaces

The worship sharing I sat in asked us queries about our relationships: family, friends, work, community, nature, self, spirit, etc.  and if our relationships were in balance.  As friends shared it became apparent that balance wax and wanes in life with both predictable and unpredictable events: the birth of triplets, the loss of a job, a sudden health situation, changes for others in our life.  Some events allow us to grow in areas of our lives, others complicate things.  We ebb and we flow.

Later one man spoke of the role of grief in our process and spoke about grieving for some trees lost out of his yard after a storm.  I thought of trees that were cut out the 2nd Growth grove of trees around my Meeting when we did our remodel and also one big one that just fell in a windstorm.  The man commented that when trees leave they leave a space for light to come through.  That I thought was an interesting way to think about it.  At our Meeting when the tree fell some member asked if the "other trees had noticed" (and in fact grove trees our connected by their roots.  The sense then was of a space left that was grieved by the other trees, but now his comment suggested to me that with a new space, a place for light to come what also is now possible? 

I realized there are always little seedlings working year by year on becoming bigger trees, but we tend to ignore them because they seem so small and relatively insignificant compared to the bigger trees.  I realized though with more light they would grow more quickly.   We would notice the loss of the big trees and worry that there were "less" and "cannot be replaced", have a scarcity thought.  But in fact their replacement is already on its way and in the seasons of the woods there are always big trees and medium trees and small trees - in balance (unless messed with by humans.)   This Quarterly the adults were all pleased that half our attenders were children.  Long I have worried about the big gap of Quakers in their 40's, but somehow despite this....the children are now coming.  The promise of possibility is always there.

And so in our lives also where things maybe off balance and we cannot anticipate the next thing, the next change or the next possibility or the next lost.  Somehow it all does flow exactly as it needs to.

Growing Towards the Light

Yesterday was a beautiful first day of spring.  I went outside to survey the garden.  In the fall my husband and son had replaced some logs that held a bank in place.  They had dropped cut pieces on the ground were months before flowers had been.  However, now in spring those same bulbs had tried to come forth, only to find their tender buds under boards.  I moved the offending boards to find that the plants, sensing a small crack of Light, had grown sideways till they reached the edge of the board and then up - in a sort of backwards L.

Hmmm,  I thought: Life is kind of like that.  We sense the Light, even when it is only a small glint of it, and we grow towards the Light.

Recently for our anniversary my husband and I were looking at the photoes from our wedding 4 years ago.  Everyone is familiar, but older.  In the kids cases, they are a foot taller now and more "mature" looking, but for most of us, it means more grey hair and more wrinkles.  Yes, I thought, the slow march towards death.  Huh, how does that fit with my previous thought that all life grows towards the Light?

Then I realized - oh yes, it is the same.  Our slow march towards death is also the path back to the Eternal Light.  It seems some of us will live shorter lives than we thought we would and others will live much longer than they thought they would.  So what of the march - does it matter if all our days our numbered, how we spend those days? How do we make our days count?  I think it is not some "productive doing", but rather have we lived those days with Love and with Light?  Have you grown towards the Light today?