Lost No More
Awestruck
Garish, your caricature Perish the fair at your Ceaseless libations and Peace-less privations Absent, your poets While present - all-know-its Whose knowing is depth-less Ne'er sensing the breathless All wonders surceasing Misunders e’er fleecing You of your true nature For what? Nomenclature Flatlander, look up. Definitions took up And away founts of splendor Until counts surrender Beyond all reduction A grand introduction To your ground of being To laughter - to seeing Let truth and spirit meld Transcendent joy beheld Reverie, mystery Every bliss for...
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The Sound of Music
Awestruck
You brought music back into the house. I had forgotten. These are the words spoken by Captain Von Trapp in the 1965 musical The Sound of Music. He utters them to Fralein Maria moments after his miraculous transformation from angry and militant to warm and joyous. And it all happened because he heard his children singing in the house - singing he had silenced with insatiable demands for order and obedience. Our deepest desires call us to the transcendent, and yet we too often conflate the fulfillment of those desires with earthly trappings in which the futile search for them exists on a...
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The Age of Exploration
Awestruck
Discovery begets truth. Begets transformation. And discovery begins with exploration. The impulse to explore has largely been stunted in our time by the erroneous assumption nothing remains to explore. We’ve mapped the earth. We have GPS systems to tell us exactly where we are at any given time. We’ve been to the moon. We’ve sent probes to Mars and even beyond the edge of our solar system. Our telescopes now give us glimpses of the furthest shores of the Universe. Microscopes have deconstructed the atom and beyond. We have relinquished real exploration to the experts, and we wait...
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Know Doubt
Awestruck
Doubt is mostly viewed as a negative trait or as even as the opposite of faith. We think this way largely because we imagine doubt and faith in still life, or rigidly defined - devoid of motion. Such attempts at crystallization lose sight of the inner dynamics and play when we struggle with doubt. When we doubt, a number of forces arise within us: curiosity, fear, urgency, to name only a few. These forces compel us to know - to experience - and to do so we act. We move. We seek answers. We position ourselves to see with our own eyes and hear with our own ears. Doubt drives the struggle -...
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Welcome Back to Wonder
Awestruck
We have unwittingly exchanged the active experience of being alive in the present for living in a dank library filled with atomized facts that we read not with just our eyes, but with our whole physical bodies. We willingly plug ourselves into a matrix of technology and information that, given the right combination, can summon fleeting fulfillment of our selfish desires: popularity, prosperity, pleasure, and power. These four pillars serve as the supports that bear the table of lifeless and soul-less reductionism where we spend our lives attempting to put together the one-million piece puzzle...
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The Real Ones
Awestruck
Heaven doth with us as we with torches do, not light them for themselves; for if our virtues did not go forth of us, 'twere all alike as if we had them not. William Shakespeare Such words capture the essence of a latent power within us, awaiting the spark of purpose to ignite. From our first breath, we are cradled in potential, but our world orbits around primal needs, each cry a beacon of dependence. Yet, as the veil of infancy lifts, the tender choreography of growth and guidance train us to wield the sword of power. And once trained, we are free to choose how to fulfill our potential. ...
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I See You
Awestruck
To see is to discern with clarity what is… C.S. Lewis addressed what he saw as the oncoming blindness to what is in his book The Abolition of Man. Plato before him had said the same. The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting and hateful. In the Republic, the well-nurtured youth is one ‘who would see most clearly whatever was amiss in ill-made works of man or ill-grown works of nature, and with a just distaste would blame and hate...
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Axis Mundi
Awestruck
Acceptance - we yearn for it in our inmost being. We long for others to accept us as we are, and yet we are terrified that who we are - which includes our shortcomings, our fears, our secret stories of horror, the terrible things we have thought and done - will repel others and deny us the very acceptance we seek. And so we don costumes, adapting some role that isn't us, hoping to finally earn acceptance. But is it really acceptance if we gain it as someone other than our true self? Maintaining the false self requires exerting so much effort that we then collapse when in solitude and wonder...
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It's Time to Strike Out
Awestruck
Our modern way of thinking has created a false dichotomy between truth and experience. We have become obsessed with the reduction of truth into facts: atomic sentences and numbers and equations that we can use as a periodic table of elements. But this obsession holds no real power. No matter how well you know that two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen combine to form water, this fact will not help you when you are on your knees in the desert and dying of thirst. Water is life, and your experience of consuming it is vital. Spiritual truths exemplify this need for active participation even more...
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The Ground of Being
Awestruck
Our quest for peace - contentment, rest, fulfillment - is, paradoxically, most often filled with frustration, anger, exhaustion, and even rage. Make more money, acquire necessary things, secure fulfilling relationships, and fulfill sensual desires. Over and over again, great obstacles present themselves. Storms arise. Obstacles roll over us. People thwart us. Disasters destroy all that we have worked for and take away those that we love. And when we find ourselves naked and afraid - when all is lost except loss itself - where do we go? What do we do? We could, like the great phoenix, resolve...
info_outlineOne of the most harmful and yet least examined impulses of human nature is that of judgement. In silent milliseconds, we can observe a fellow human being and decide if he is worthy or unworthy, right or wrong, good or bad.
And with that judgement, just as quietly but more deadly, we condemn. We From our judge's chair while draped in our robes of black, we pass one of the many sentences available to us in our play book.
Rather than turn the other cheek, we turn our back. Rather than go the extra mile, we force them to. We hurl insults. We raise our hands in obscene gestures. We steal back what is supposedly ours. We open the floodgates of rage into our hearts and with our minds we justify the mental, verbal, emotional, and physical abuse that we heap on our accused.
And as we pass judgement and condemnation on the other, we silently and often unknowingly hold up our get-out-of-jail-free card - the one we earned by being right, righteous, good, better. We choose to be our own judge, and we always find ourselves innocent.
At stake here is not who is right and who is wrong. What is at stake is you - your state of being. The desire to set the world right is a God-given desire implanted in us. It is etched in the imago dei of our souls.
But the fulfillment of that holy desire does not and cannot come from judgement. Judgement arises from egoistic pride, arrogance, entitlement, and a withering connection to the sacred.
It is time to bring the oft-overlooked act of judgement into the light and let it be judged for what it is. It is time to acknowledge and take the beam out of our own eye. The good news is that we have a Judge who is willing to both forgive us and to teach us his way of forgiveness - freeing us to walk this earth in peace and love.
To err is human, to forgive divine.
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