Everything changes

The process of conversion begins with genuine openness to change--to be open to the possibility that just as natural life evolves, so our spiritual life is evolving.... Each time you consent to an enhancement of faith, your world changes and all your relationship have to be adjusted to the new perspective and the new light that has been given you. Our relationship to ourselves, to Christ, to our neighbor, to the Church--to God--all change. It is the end of the world we have previously known and lived in.

Source: Thomas Keating Contemplative Outreach News (Winter 1988)

via: inward/outward 

Lie back and the sea will hold you

Lie back, daughter, let your head be tipped back in the cup of my hand.  Gently, and I will hold you.
Spread your arms wide, lie out on the stream, and look up, laugh at the gulls.  A dead man's float is face down.  You will dive and swim soon enough where this tidewater ebbs to the sea.

Daughter, believe that when you tire on the long thrash to the island, lie up, and survive.
As you float now, where I held you and let go,
Remember when fear cramps your heart what I told you:  Lie gently and wide to the light-year stars,
Lie back and the sea will hold you. ~Phillip Booth

It talks to me in tiptoes

"All This And Heaven Too"

And the heart is hard to translate
It has a language of its own
It talks and turns and courts sighs and present proclamations
In the grand days of great men and the smallest of gestures
And short shallow gasps

But with all my education I can’t seem to command it
And the words are all skipping and coming back all damaged
And I will put them back in poetry if I only knew how
I can’t seem to understand it

And I would give all this and heaven too
I would give it all if only for a moment
That I could just understand the meaning of the word you see
‘Cause I’ve been scrawling it forever but it never makes sense to me at all

And it talks to me in tiptoes
And sings to me inside
It cries out in the darkest night and breaks in morning light

But with all my education I can’t seem to command it
And the words are all skipping and coming back all damaged
And I will put them back in poetry if I only knew how
I can’t seem to understand it

And I would give all this and heaven too
I would give it all if only for a moment
That I could just understand the meaning of the word you see
‘Cause I’ve been scrawling it forever but it never makes sense to me at all

And I would give all this and heaven too
I would give it all if only for a moment
That I could just understand the meaning of the word you see
‘Cause I’ve been scrawling it forever but it never makes sense to me at all

No, words are a language that doesn’t deserve such treatment
That all of my stumbling phrases never amounted to anything worth this feeling

All this heaven never could describe such a feeling as I’m here

Words were never so useful ‘til I was screaming out a language that I never knew existed before

Still driven to try

"In order to arrive at the second half of life, one has to realize there is an incurable wound at the heart of everything. Much of the conflict from the age of twenty-five to sixty-five is just trying to figure this out and then to truly accept it. A Swiss theologian, Hans Urs Von Balthasar (1905-1988), said toward the end of his life: “All great thought springs from a conflict between two eventual insights: 1) The wound which we find at the heart of everything is finally incurable. 2) Yet we are necessarily and still driven to try.” (Think about that for an hour or so!)

Our largely unsuccessful efforts of the first half of life are themselves the training ground for all virtue and growth in holiness. This “wound at the heart of life” shows itself in many ways, but your holding and “suffering” of this tragic wound, your persistent but failed attempts to heal it, your final surrender to it, will ironically make you into a wise and holy person. It will make you patient, loving, hopeful, expansive, faithful, and compassionate—which is precisely the second half of life wisdom."

Adapted from Loving the Two Halves of Life: The Further Journey
(CD/DVD/MP3). See also Fr. Richard’s latest book,
Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

Starter Prayer:
Help me grow up by going down.