Aligning with Grace

Sometimes, messages come to you in the most unexpected ways... Sometimes, you ignore the message the first time, and it keeps coming back to you again and again - a second, and a third, and maybe a fourth time... Yesterday was one of those days filled with unacknowledged or partially understood messages, and this morning seemed merely a continuation and extension of those lessons... Yesterday, as I waited in the doctor's office for a routine check up, I read a sermon written by Barbara Brown Taylor , from her book, Home by Another Way . Since we are partly into Holy Week , nearing the conclusion of Lent , I am choosing to read material that is relevant to the liturgical season, or is, at very least, spiritual in nature. The section I read in Taylor's book was based on a passage from St Paul's Second Letter to the Corinthians , where he described a particularly challenging experience in his life, without actually identifying what it was. He describes it as "a thorn in t...

There are days you feel lost, perhaps confused, and you might be moving with no sense of direction, and even feeling a lack of purpose... There are times you pray for insights to shake you out of the emotional or spiritual chaos you are experiencing or the perceived turpitude you may be regretting... And the needed insights come, often, from very unexpected places. Perhaps a friend says the right thing or points you in the right direction... Or perhaps, you receive the desired message from a perfect stranger - by simply being in the right place at the right time... Or, maybe you go to a yoga class, like I did today, and your teacher talks about samskaras , imprints that you've created, which leave you feeling like you are stuck in a rut, in more ways than one. And then, all of a sudden you realize, you went to that class to receive the perfect message for you in that moment! I find that many of the greatest insights I now receive, arrive from almost perfect strangers, on Twitter, ...

The New Year has dawned... I sense a shift in the energies... I meditate in the quiet, and silently ask for simple things, so reminiscent of prayers offered during the Winter Solstice : "Let me see what I must see. Let me hear what I must hear. Let me be what I must be. Let me know what I must know. Let me be more compassionate. Let me love more deeply..." On a day that is the Solemnity of Mary , I entrust so many to her care, loved ones, departed ones, and those in need... Paramahansa Yogananda offers this reminder from the first entry for the year in his Spiritual Diary: "With the opening of the New Year, all the closed portals of limitations will be thrown open and I shall move through them to vaster fields, where my worthwhile dreams of life will be fulfilled." I settle down with a cup of coffee to see what my Facebook friends have to say, and I come across this Old English Prayer, that one soul has posted, and it seems a dedication that is as good as any for...