Awake
Genuinely New
“Each succeeding moment is fresh, is genuinely new, is not a rerun. We tend to greet every moment as a repeat of the general forms of the past, or even to assume that we are existing in the midst of a great “still,” not a moving picture at all. There is a sense in which we do not realize that we are alive. We spend our days among the dead, recording the inscriptions on the tombstones. The spiritual teachers try to break us out of this limited consciousness into a new world that they call being Awake.”
Beatrice Bruteau, The Grand Option
Joanna ES Campbell Santa Fe Window
Richard Rohr as well writes often on his daily email blog about becoming this less anxious presence, being alert or awake, but not pulled down by the emotional noise that sometimes slowly creeps into our life or more often suddenly announces its presence with a loud bugle call. Rohr suggests trying to observe ourselves from a distance as if we were someone else, trying not to let the mask we wear in the world rule our lives. Rohr believes this is what Jesus is talking about when he says we must “lose oneself to find oneself.” (Luke 9:24)
Centering prayer, chanting, yoga, walking a labyrinth, saying a Catholic or Anglican rosary, praying with icons, and many more spiritual tools are all time-tested spiritual practices to help us come to this place of living in the present, becoming awake, where we reconnect to the God within who was there all along. It is like opening a window to let our stale claustrophobic air out and feeling a breeze come in from a new world only a thin glass plate away.
Richard Rohr, The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See, The Crossroad Publishing Company: 2009, 134-136. Thursday 9, 2017, Richard Rohr Daily online meditations
Joanna joannaseibert.com