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_outlineDesire is so fundamental to our nature that we often overlook its significance. Its guiding force. We are created - designed - to desire and to be satisfied.
Desire and satisfaction were part of Paradise before the fall. When God created the world and saw that it was good, he rested. When Adam and Eve worked the garden each day, they would stop in the evening and walk in the cool of the day beside the divine God of the Universe. And when they were hungry, they found satisfaction from taking the fruit of any tree in the garden.
Except one, of course.
The serpent injected venom into Eve's desires and bent them toward the forbidden. Forget God and what He said, the serpent suggested, and become like him by eating from this tree.
Eve, having then entertained the idea of going against God's guidance, looked at the fruit of the tree. The Scriptures say she saw three things that she desired: she saw that the tree was good for food, pleasing to the eye, and desirable for gaining wisdom.
And so, in an attempt to satisfy those desires, she took the forbidden fruit. And ate it. And then gave some to Adam, who was standing next to her.
Adam and Eve abandoned their natural, divine provisions that would naturally meet their desires and grasped for something outside the realm of God's desire.
And yet, though we call this event the Fall - or Paradise Lost - what we find is God's desire only beginning to reveal itself. God came to the garden in the cool of the day to find Adam and Eve, desiring to walk with them. He called to them when he could not find them, desiring their presence. And once they confessed their sin, He covered their shame with animal skins that he sacrificed, desiring to relieve their shame. He handed down discipline and ejected them from the garden, but left them alive and well, desiring to continue to be a part of their lives. And the rest of Scripture is the story of God's divine pursuit - his holy desire - to win us back from doing the same thing over and over again - trying to gratify our desires with anything other than Him and His provision.
God's desire is us. And when we loosen our grip on the forbidden fruit and take our eyes off its deceptive appearances, we find that what we really desire ourselves is God. And when God's desires and ours converge, Paradise is regained.
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