Several months ago, when I invited an attorney to help me create a current trust, she noticed the book Barking to the Choir, The Power of Radical Kinship on my desk. She had previously read Gregory Boyle’s first book, Tattoos on the Heart, so I loaned her my book. The process of creating a Trust or Will takes some time, especially when one of the documents has to travel to Canada and back. She returned the book to me today and told me that she loved this book. She read it three times!
I remembered how moved I had been when I read the book and started reading it again. One of the first ideas that caught my attention was this paragraph:
“Human beings are settlers, but not in the pioneer sense. It is our human occupational hazard to settle for little. We settle for purity and piety when we are being invited to an exquisite holiness. We settle for fear-driven when love longs to be our engine. We settle for a puny, vindictive God when we are being nudged always closer to this wildly larger-than-life God. We allow our sense of God to atrophy. We settle for illusion of separation when we are endlessly asked to enter into kinship with all. The Choir has settled for a little…and the “barking,” like a protective sheepdog, wants to guide us back to the expansiveness of God’s own longing.”
I love the book. I have not met Gregory Boyle, but I know he is a kindred spirit even if he is a Jesuit priest working with former gang members, who are learning to release their old lives and create a future filled with hope and freedom.
Those of us who have been part of our spiritual community for any length of time, know that we don’t really believe in a judgmental God. We believe in a God that is pure Love.
We also come to believe that the best way we can access this “exquisite holiness” is through our own consciousness.
Many of you have heard me say that God can only work for us by working through us. The easiest aspect of God to understand is the nature of Law or Principle. This Law is exacting. It is devoid of feelings or emotions. The Law is a Principle that works like all principles — all the time! It is as reliable as gravity, working with precision and accuracy in all situations. That aspect of God can be compared to a computer. The computer can do only what the programmer programs.
This aspect of the Divine is impersonal but still highly responsive and forever creating for us out of our beliefs.
But there is also the greater Mind. Let’s keep principle and passion.
Do you know that God loves you? Can you feel it?
When I catch a glimpse of the amazing power of the Source of all, I am awe-struck. When I feel this unconditional love, I know I am blessed.
There is a current song that moves me. It is by Lauren Daigle.
It is this same theme, reflecting on how God knows us and how we have settled for much, much less.
You might be wondering why I am including a song that seems to celebrate God completely outside of oneself. I believe in those still moments of silence, God speaks to us. And what could God possibly say? It has to be some version of I know you. You are perfect, whole and complete. There is nothing that needs to be changed. There is only something to know.
Let’s give up settling and decide to imagine a world filled with joy!
