we go together
“Grace and gratitude belong together like heaven and earth.
Grace evokes gratitude like the voice an echo.
Gratitude follows grace as thunder follows lightening.” ~Barth
life: acoustic & amplified
poetry, quotes & thoughts about life
Archive for the category “grace”
living gratitude
Gratitude is not a passive response to something given to us, gratitude arises from paying attention, from being awake in the presence of everything that lives within and without us. Gratitude is not necessarily something that is shown after the event, it is the deep, a-priori state of attention that shows we understand and are equal to the gifted nature of life.
… to intuit inner lives beneath surface lives, to inhabit many worlds at once in this world, to be a someone amongst all other someones, and therefore to make a conversation without saying a word, is to deepen our sense of presence and therefore our natural sense of thankfulness that everything happens both with us and without us, that we are participants and witness all at once.
Thankfulness finds its full measure in generosity of presence, both through participation and witness… Thanksgiving happens when our sense of presence meets all other presences.
(©2013 David Whyte – Excerpted from ‘GRATITUDE’ From the upcoming book of essays CONSOLATIONS: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words).
Happy Thanksgiving! 👄
stay awhile
Autumn colors have settled
from Kandinsky to Rembrandt.
Trees cast down their crowns,
the ponds release their birds
bound southward, the sky
leaves its scarf in brown branches,
the round sun begins rolling up its things.
This scattering is also a drawing in.
Beds of leaves, mounds of leaves
the color of old books gather and rest.
The ground receives it all
and begins its dark, profound work
beyond my seeing, beneath my bones.
Even the leaves of childhood
and the sky’s drama of my long youth,
the naked, willing wood of trees,
and all the things piled around on my desk
like leaves when I return to the house,
are gathered in someone else’s hands,
bedded down, held close
for the long, bright winter.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
http://www.unfoldinglight.net
Ripening
You Are Being Lead
“The life and death of a human being is so exquisitely calibrated as to automatically produce union with Spirit.” —Kathleen Dowling Singh
Ripening reveals much bigger or very different horizons than we realize. The refusal to ripen leads to what T.S. Eliot spoke of in “The Hollow Men,” lives that “end not with a bang but with a whimper.” I hope that you are one of those people who will move toward your own endless horizons and not waste time in whimpering. Why else would you even read this? Perhaps these meditations may help you trust that you are, in fact, being led. Life, your life, all life, is going somewhere and somewhere good.
Ripening, at its best, is a slow, patient learning, and sometimes even a happy letting-go—a seeming emptying out to create readiness for a new kind of fullness—which we are never totally sure about. If we do not allow our own ripening, and I do believe it is somewhat a natural process, an ever-increasing resistance and denial sets in, an ever-increasing circling of the wagons around an over-defended self. At our very best, we learn how to hope as we ripen, to move outside and beyond self-created circles, which is something quite different from the hope of the young. Youthful hopes have concrete goals, whereas the hope of older years is usually aimless hope, hope without goals, even naked hope—perhaps real hope. Such stretching is the agony and the joy of our later years.
Old age, as such, is almost a complete changing of gears and engines from the first half of our lives and does not happen without slow realization, inner calming, inner resistance, denial, and eventual surrender, by God’s grace, working with our ever-deepening sense of what we really desire and who we really are. This process seems to largely operate unconsciously, although we jolt into consciousness now and then, and the awareness that you have been led, usually despite yourself, is experienced as a deep gratitude that most would call happiness. Religious people might even call it mercy.
Adapted from ‘Ripening,’ Oneing, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 11-12
Gateway to Silence:
Ripen me into fullness.
Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation
Every now and then I sit and watch the sun rise to remind myself how it’s done – peacefully, steadily, warmly and in beautiful color. – Richelle E. Goodrich
If I write a love poem
you will read it.
If I say my lover’s eyes are oceans, or galaxies
you will understand.
If I say I long for the feel of the curve of her waist
your hands will feel empty.
If I say her comfort is my earth
you will smile to yourself.
If I say she is larger than the world
you will grow confused.
If I say she is older than music
you will become wary.
If I say she is God
you will sigh and put the book down.
What can I do but sing of my love,
her hands like fields of wheat?
So I will not tell you the secret part,
only that her mouth is a river I kneel and drink from,
her love makes dawn arise in me,
her voice is like rain.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
http://www.unfoldinglight.net
Thank you, Ann Voskamp, just what I needed today 💌
Dear Self and me and you and us,
Really, it’s all going to be okay.
You’re going to be okay.
Promise.
Remember when you were 16 with that ridiculous hair?
And how you’d thought that by the time you got to here, to now, it was going to be good? That by now everything would be all good.
That by now you’d know down in the very marrow of your bones, what it’s like to really live loved. That you’d be known. Fully known. And wholly embraced.
That the Big Dream would have happened, that the peace and the purpose and the Big Point would be under your skin, that the awkward would be gone and that you’d finally fit and that your life made a real difference, you’d made a real mark, and that you really mattered.
You don’t have to worry: We all get to make one unforgettable mark. And every day, with every word, we get to decide: Do we mar the world, or mark the world?
Why in the world disdain the small? It’s always the smallest strokes that add up to the greatest masterpieces.
Because the thing really is: Do we ever really know which mark we make — that will matter the most? The extraordinary things happen nowhere else but in the everyday and today can always be the beginning:
That card you signed and sealed and put in the mail, the way you smiled and nodded to the white-crowned woman bent over the still-green bananas, the way you dug around in the dirt and and left that seed or that gift of the knees and that prayer whispered for a stranger or that glass of water you handed to someone and winked because you just knew — You’ve got to remember: we don’t know when and how we are leaving the greatest marks on the world. It all matters.
Believe it: Every tremor of kindness might erupt in a miracle on the other side of the world.
And the only way to ever leave beauty marks on the world is with bits of yourself — and this will hurt. Things of realest beauty don’t bring us glory — but Him glory.
Dear you, and self, and me, and us, — Just For Today — take these words, words of Dag Hammarskjold,
Secretary-General of the United Nations, words that you can take to the bank, take to eternity: “It is more noble to give yourself completely to one individual than to labor diligently for … the masses.” Christ left the ninety-nine for the one.
Where you are, with that one child, that one street, that one call, it is a noble, Christ-called thing. It only takes one person to change the world — and one individual, one soul, can be all your world.
Really, beautiful You: The most exquisite marks anyone makes with their life — are the marks done in secret. The mark that no one — but One — will ever see.
And tell yourself this when you feel forgotten and invisible and unimportant: So the celebrities get their celebration here.
But the wise are the hidden who hold out for heaven — and the applause that comes from God. This is to choose the far greater.
I know you’re brave … and you’re scared. Because you keep doing big things that seems so small and you wonder where all this is really going and you only get one life here —
And though you’re weary, you do hard things and you keep getting out of bed and this is always the hardest part — and you keep believing that Christ didn’t leave this world until he showed us His scars — and He won’t ever let you leave this world until you leave your most beautiful mark. To show Him.
So Just For Today — listen: you’ve got to keep going.
His Kingdom is Upside Down and in Him your part is large and lovely and needed and art.
So go get the milk and take out the trash and throw in the laundry and wave giddy to the neighbors because there is a plan and there is a purpose and there is a God in heaven who didn’t just ink you onto the palm of His hands but etched your name right into Himself with nails and He’s hasn’t just got your number, He’s got your heart.
He sees you, hidden in Him, and you aren’t ever forgotten because God can’t forget those right in Him. You’ve never missed the boat when you’re holding onto the Cross.
So really — you’ve got to believe it for your 16 year-old-self and 56 year-old-self and for yourself right now: really, it’s all working out okay.
Because God’s writing your story and He never leaves you alone in your story, and His perfect love absorbs all your fear and His perfect grace carries all your burdens, and your story is a happily ever after because Christ bought your happily ever after so you always know how this story ends:
You’re going to be okay.
Dear Self, tuck this away to read again whenever you need to know it again — and promise me, you’ll laugh and sing and dance a bit today?
Heaven and His Kingdom and The Feast is coming! — so go ahead and pass down the fudge brownies.
Love,
Me
– Ann Voskamp
http://www.aholyexperience.com
Spirit Prayers
Above all temples
You chiefly prefer
Oh Spirit
The heart upright
and pure.
Instruct me
You who know
For You were present
from the first.
You sat
dove like
With might
and outspread wings
Brooding over
the vast abyss
And made
it pregnant.
Oh Spirit
what in me
is dark
Illumine.
The prayer of John Milton as he took up his pen to write Paradise Lost
if there is light it will find you – Charles Bukowski
In “Farewell to Arms” Ernest Hemingway wrote, “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”
– Ocean Palmer quotes EH
Grace, that miracle which even the darkest night can’t consume — grace that miracle that can only consume you.
Light can pry through the dark. A shaft can come through a window like a lifeline.
The birds on a wire can someday sing —
We have heard them.
– Ann Voskamp
http://www.aholywxperience.com
if not?
“Faith is not trusting God to get something; faith is trusting God when there seems to be nothing left. When everything is gone, with no hope of restoration; when there is nothing on which to base one’s faith; then, can you still trust God?” If the answer is ‘yes’, then you have the victory! because faith IS the victory!!
– Buell Kazee
Faith is the Victory
Silence
Into the deepest darkness
Into the belly of hell
Within the circle of silence
Far inside my soul
Places I’ve never seen before
Didn’t know existed
The mystery of the spirit
Where death resides
Fearful places
Cracking open
So secret I want to flee
Afraid of this place
Am I here alone?
Am I still breathing?
Now I cry with Christ,
‘My God, My God,
Why have You forsaken me?’
What if I can’t escape?
What if death wins?
I know how weak I am without You
Weeks later I begin to see
The victory is already Yours
You were there
You were always there
The stone is slowly rolling
Hope rises
As darkness trembles
I kneel at the tomb door
My own borrowed tomb
Wisdom I was sure of
I leave
bound tightly,
discarded on the pile
to be burned
those old grave clothes I shed
gladly
creating space
for this unnamable, devastating grace
Trembling as I rise
I notice my limp
I am forever changed
AL 12/23/12
every little thing
We have to go the “second mile” with God. Some of us get played out in the first ten yards, because God compels us to go where we cannot see the way, and we say – “I will wait till I get nearer the big crisis.” If we do not do the running steadily in the little ways, we shall do nothing in the crisis.
– Oswald Chambers
only grace
Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.
T’was Grace that taught my heart to fear.
And Grace, my fears relieved.
How precious did that Grace appear
The hour I first believed.
Through many dangers, toils and snares
I have already come;
‘Tis Grace that brought me safe thus far
and Grace will lead me home.
When we’ve been there ten thousand years
Bright shining as the sun.
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise
Than when we’ve first begun.
– John Newton
And I have no idea why all of us keep holding each other to a standard of perfection instead of letting us all be held by the arms of grace.
We are not here to be perfect. We are here to be real – to let Christ be real in us.
– Ann Voskamp
http://www.aholyexperience.com
life: acoustic & amplified 