Aligning with Grace

Advent: Emmanuel - God is With Us (A Repost) This is a time of year when there are songs we only listen to once... I like to pull out old Advent and Christmas classics and new ones as well, and allow their rich melodies to fill all the corners of my heart and soul... A friend recently asked me what kind of music I had on my ipod. I proceeded to describe the wide variety of genres and playlists I had so carefully organized - spanning from folk rock, to classical, to jazz, and to mantras and liturgical music. My friend stopped right there - totally surprised - though in the seventies - when we were in our late teens and early twenties, she and I earned our spending money by playing liturgical music in several parishes... I love classic Advent songs of awaiting like "O Come, O Come Emmanuel," and my favorite rendition is by Mannheim Steamroller. I wait all year to hear this song and enter into the deep longing and stillness it calls me to. I also love an or...

Late last might, I read Sally Kempton's newsletter, a wonderful spiritual teacher whose works often focus on the power of meditation, and she offered beautiful insights into the Season of Love , which is indeed, every season, in every year... I have excerpted the following, which spoke to me: "A friend of mine wrote, 'I was at the DMV today. I was looking around and falling in love with faces, feeling the brokenness and listening to the seeds of hope in every conversation around me.' Reading her words reminded me how this season - the year's midnight, with its celebrations of light and grace - can often invite us into this kind of poignant, almost heart-breaking love. Of course, love is always present, ready to pour through us. And we always have the choice to see each other with the eye of love. Yes, it's always felt to me that the love force of the cosmos is present in a particularly universal way at this time of year, at least in the parts of the world that...