Aren’t we all? How has your journey been these days? I offer you the following quote, attributed to Ram Dass:
The spiritual journey is individual, highly personal. It can’t be organized or regulated. It isn’t true that everyone should follow one path. Listen to your own truth.
It seems to me that on one level, this has a lot of truth to it in my experience. The Spirit of God leads each of us in unique, sometimes surprising ways. If I am really open to the Spirit, my life will unfold in ways I cannot predict, and the important thing for me is to stand in the truth of who I am as God’s beloved, and that truth is often very different than your or another’s truth.
On the other hand, I do not believe that my spiritual growth occurs separate from that of my fellow seekers on the journey. The journey is at once intensely personal and truly communal. What a delicious paradox! As a Catholic Christian, I am part of a tradition that seems at times to place great emphasis on orthodoxy and stasis. And while I struggle when I witness or experience what may seem to me to be an abuse of power within the Church, I have to remember that part of the gift of my faith tradition is that it is a truly communal expression of God’s faithfulness to all of humankind.
We are all in this together, and the more we can lean into our interdependence across boundaries of race, geography, gender, national origin, sexuality, politics, religion, etc., the better chance we have of working together to save the world from our past and continuing actions that have poisoned so much of creation and fractured so many relationships. God, help us!
I feel and celebrate your ‘leaning into interdependence’ from that still and truest core of orthodoxy today so willingly abandoned. Our energetic partnership with one another deserves so much more attention than it receives from an individualized faithful. I wonder where you imagine your web journey will guide your voice?? namaste pierre
Thank you for your remarks, Pierre! Call me a dreamer, but I’d like to imagine God gracing us by helping us to transform our relationships with each other on all levels from domination/submission to true mutuality, and from suspicion to genuine curiosity. There is far too much vitriol coming from both sides of the liberal/conservative split, and it really gets us nowhere.
I love that phrase you used, “energetic partnership.” I believe that true mutuality leaves all involved feeling more energized. It demands much, but is worth it if it can be pulled off.
As to where I imagine this web journey will guide my voice…hmmm, that’s a good question. My hope is that I do a halfway decent job getting out of God’s way, so that what I share here and how I share it might be helpful to others who are seeking to follow a spiritual path, whether that path is the Gospel of Jesus, the 12 Steps of AA, or any of a multitude of ways of touching the divine…
Welcome to this little community!
Just thought i’d say hello! I hope and pray you are well. Happy Jubilee!!!
Enjoy all of the celebrating!
Hi Sandy,
I just discovered you. Happy Jubilee..Silver? Golden? Blessings. I am the Advancement Director for a CSJ sponsored ministry. I would like to be much more of a “techie” than I am. I have visions of a great interactive website w/ content that changes relatively frequently…but alas, I am not the web master…nor do I have the necessary skills. So, we have the website that was created about 1 1/2 years ago…
I love what I have read here so far. You are having quite a reach!
I’ll check back! Peace.
Welcome, Denise!
Your vision of a great interactive website is not so far beyond your reach…you just need your web designer to set it up so that you can change the content without having to be a “techie” kind of person.
In my experience as a web designer, the problem is getting the people to actually update their content. I think a lot of folks don’t get that to get people coming back to a website, they have to keep the content fresh…
(…this coming from me, who have not not written a new post in about a week.)