Thursday Thoughts

This has been a quiet day for me as Audrey sleeps here during the day and Chuck is resting and readying himself for a colonoscopy tomorrow.  It has rained on and off today and I find myself reading and reflecting on many things.

Without a doubt movies have always been important to me.   It has been my practice in retirement to try to see a movie a week which I have not kept to this summer.  However in the last 10 days I have seen three movies: Crazy Rich Asians, BlacKkKlansman, and Operation Finale.  They were each very good in their own way.  And even though Craxy Rich Asians was a rom com and BlacKkKlansman was a police move and Operation Finale was a suspense film, they all had something in common - the divisions that people make between others.  In Crazy Rich Asians, it was a mother who did not want her son to marry a woman from America because of her wanting to cling to the familiar life of Singapore.  It's a rom com and just a hurdle for the couple to overcome.  The truth is that there are famlies that are divided because a parent could not or would not accept the partner of their child.The other two moves were powerful reminders of the racism and the anti semitism that is part of our national and world history and still continues today.

 I think in some ways, I go to the moves - not to escape - but to stay awake to the reality of life as it is lived.  Historical movies remind us of the hateful ways humans can treat each other and all we have to do is read the newspaper and see that it continues.  It is easy to live in our own bubble and comfort zone.

I  have recently started reading a book by Mark Nepo The One Life We're Given. It is one of those books that has to be read - really, savored - slowly.  He writes about the twin callings of "enlivening our soul and enlivening the world."

He starts the book with these words:

"Each person is born with a gift.  Our call is to find it and care for it.  The ultimate purpose of the gift is to exercise the heart into inhabiting its aliveness. For the covenant of life is not just to stay alive, but to stay in our aliveness.  And staying in our aliveness depends on opening the heart and keeping it open."

I know I will be quoting from this book in the future posts on this blog, but just this thought is a good one.  We open our heart to feel - not only our pain - but the pain of our brothers and sisters who live in this world where too often there are divisions and injustice.  When I sit with people in spiritual direction, often I hear about the painful places of their lives and the wounds that they continue to carry.  It is not easy to keep our hearts open but that is the only way to really share this amazing journey of being a human being on earth.

I will end with this blessing by Maxine Shonk who says it better than me.

May the God of COMPASSION be with you,
embracing you when you are alone or worried or confused;
when your heart is besieged with pain.
May the wellspring of compassion flow deep within you until you know the enfolding of God's love
and can taste the tears of your brothers and sisters who suffer.
May you be the warm hands and the warm eyes of compassion for those who reach out to you.
May the blessing of COMPASSION be on you.