Saying For Today: We never know the extension of influence from one loving thought or act. We do not need to know, we need to trust and act.
LOTUS OF THE HEART
Living in LOVE beyond Beliefs
We Share One Life, We Are One Life
Wisdom Saying
Love is very complicated, and we show our love in ways we don't even realize. ... Subtle and mysterious are the ways of love.
*Lama Surya Das. Awakening to the Sacred.
Wisdom Story
The following story Lama Surya Das, Dozgchen Master, shares in Awakening to the Sacred:
Last year my friend Kathy traveled to Indiana in order to attend the memorial service of a woman named Mary Davis. Mrs. Davis, who was eighty-nine when she died, was the much beloved mother of four loving children. At the service, my friend Kathy was sitting in the row behind Mary's daughter, Margi, and one of Mary's grandsons, Jonathan, who was giving a eulogy.
When Jonathan, now a confidant and successful man, stood up to speak, he told the congregants about some of his experiences growing up. He said that as a child he had learning disabilities that made him very discouraged. He said that he remembered days when he felt as though he couldn't get anything right, and he hated school. He said that one of the most inspiring, meaningful, and confidence-building things in his growing up was a family prayer taught by his grandmother, Mary, to his mother, Margi, who in turn taught it to him. Every morning before Jonathan went to school, his mother would take his hands, look him in the eye, and repeat this prayer. This was Mary's legacy to her family. I never knew Mary, but I often think of her and her prayer of love.
MARY'S PRAYER
I am the place that God shines through. He and I are one not two. He needs me where and as I am. I need not doubt, not fear, nor plan. If I but be relaxed and free, He'll work his plan of love through me.
Comments
Therevada Buddhist Master, Ajahn Chah (1919-1992), in Being Dharma, taught the three gates of spiritual transformation: body, mind, and speech. He taught, "Don't keep the knowledge in your brain or in your mouth. Make the gates of body, speech, and mind consistent in Dharma [i.e., Teaching, Truth, Reality]."
Chah reminds us our bodies, mouths, and brains ~ our whole selves ~ are to be consistent with our spiritual teaching. A spiritual path has energy to transmute bodily faculties into the life of Dharma, or Truth, or Sacredness.
And the essence of Sacredness is Love. This Love is not emotional, though emotion of varied nature arises from this nonpersonal Love. Love expresses as connection, availability, and openness. Love is a center of meek force, everywhere and no where. Love seeks to pull all things into its orb, that all things might enjoy meaning in connection with all other beings. As Martin Buber remarks of community unbound by time but existing through time, in I and Thou, "And thus the genuine guarantee of spatial constancy consists in this that men's relations are true to their You, being radii that lead from all I-points to the center, create a circle. Not the periphery, not the community comes first, but the radii, the common relation to the center. That alone assures the genuine existence of a community."
Love is subtle and a mystery. We never know the extension of influence from one loving thought or act. We do not need to know, we need to trust and act. We find connection arising from and returning to a Center. We act to manifest connection. Connection is the source of loving action. The connection moves through us, and as we act, in the action of the connection, the Center moves us and we move more fully into the Center. The pulling of Love ~ which is the sacramental act of Life in Creation ~ and our choice to move by action toward the Center, by moving outward and incarnating Love in the world, in and by Love, is one act. This act is, so prior to any acclamation of its veracity by religion or society, and this act is prior to morality, neither moral nor immoral, in Truth.
This is certain, then, no life is insignificant that offers even one act of Love. And, likewise, no one has failed to offer Grace to the world who has done one act of caring for another being, regardless of nature of the being.
To move more outward in offering Love among creatures and, thereby, move more into union with the Center, we maintain a transforming spiritual path. This will address making body, mind, and speech means of Grace, agents of the Mystery, sacramental openings from the Center to the world and the world to the Center.
In a real sense, by loving we bring the Center into the world and the world we carry with us into the Center. For while the absence of loving is separation, Love is connection. Love, then, is Holy Communion, Graceful Intimacy, the Eucharistic offering of Life by Life to others.
