Goofus and Gallant

In "How it works" it states how our stories explain how we used to be and how things are now. Well my story reads more like a "Goofus and Gallant" comic from the old Highlights magazine.

Prayer and Action

I have often appreciated the power of prayer and awed in the stories of others positive experiences. Still, in my fallible human journey, it is often only after fact that I recognize my actions as being Godless, selfish, fear-based and driven by self will. It is often the consequences that result that make this evident and clear, but sometimes days later I will see how my actions may have affected others and I see how selfish I have been. Or in the case of my children, I see how my miss-guided works are establishing a poor model for them to base their behavior.
In contrast, I often will pray and meditate on a problem and ask for guidance, yet I will not take any action. True, sometimes no action is the best coarse action I am capable of; but, those times are not the times that trouble me when I reflect back on my day. It is the times that God makes clear the coarse I should take and I delay, postpone, or busy myself in other "good-works" to justify my inaction on what is truly pressing and most important.
In an ideal model of behavior, I should start each day with this sort of prayerful consideration and take the appropriate actions when necessary. And stay in this spiritual awareness mode as each new task is undertaken throughout the day. If only I had some type of buzzer that would sound to alert me that I am veering off the "spiritual beam". If it was obvious, this buzzer would not be needed, but too often, it is a gradual coarse adjustment which seems prudent in each of its small steps. As these adjustments accumulate, a simple correction in my daily flight path is not always clear or possible, At times like these, I am forced to either scrap several hours of progress and backtrack to get back in line with where I should be. My other option is to stop all together, regroup, and start on a new coarse to get back on track. This new coarse may hold great difficulties in rough terrain, foul weather, or navigating through uncharted waters. Too often I find myself unwittingly in this very predicament.

How Does God Love Thee...

. . . Let me count the ways. I was asked this question recently and was perplexed to come up with a clear way in which to give a succinct answer. In prayer and meditation, I ask God for guidance and assistance, and while I don't always receive the guidance and assistance that I am hoping for, time and reflection plus further meditation will reveal how God's grace was afforded me in the way God intended. It isn't always my first thought to thank God when things go favorably; more often I implore him for his gudance and assistance when things go poorly. The question posed to me that was so perplexing was simply how do I express my love of God ? Certainly doing what I beleive to be God's will and working towards a greater good shows my desire to serve and please God. But how would I describe my actual Love for god as an emotion, rather than an action.

Several examples came to mind from this past weeks experience. First, it is Spring and my Redbud tree has bloomed and looks Glorious. I love the way the bright purple flowers are in contrast to the dark wood of its branches. I love the irregular pattern of the trunk and branches. And once its blossoms are gone, its leaves hold equal granduer to the precursors blossom. When I see these things, I pause to point it out to my children, explain my appreciation to anyone who will listen. This is just a single example of the earthly creations that makes me aware of my Love for God.

The inner reaches and outer Space also hold great senses of awe and wonderment as I contemplate them. Too often, my mind as it learns new topics of Science starts to expand its conceptual understanding at a much greater rate than my brain can formulate words to explain its burgeoning grasp. As a result, my mind floats in a sea of mystical serenity. Knowing not how exactly to grasp and relate a new idea, but still able to revel in a breif but satisfying unity with a greater truth than my consious mind enjoys.

Great music, be it performed or just listened to, can bring a similar mystical serenity to me. I hear a particular classic, like Mozarts "Ave Verum Corpus" and something wells up inside that can be expressed no other way than a sensing of mans inspiration from God. In the right setting, this experience evokes a communion of self, man, and God that is truly awesome.

Yet another and possibly most tangible way that I am aware of my Love of God is witnessing the growth of my own children. Recently I was overwhelmed by the satisfaction my son received from being of service to others. In our world, most all of the kids are being raised by "me generation" parents or more commonly,a parent. So it is nice to see that a person whose extent of adult interaction has been his own parents and school teachers (with an occassional path crossing with an adult voice on X-box live) can discover the joy of being helpful to another human being, moreover, a stranger. Seeing my son express the novelty he experienced as a great satisfaction while assisting a fellow soul in their human experience was, for me, a novelty in parenting and yet another example of how I am aware of my Love of God. In summary, if a cool experience brings a joyful tear to my eye, I know that I am expressing and experiencing my Love for God.

A Model for Reality

Rebuilding a model of my reality
I hear a lot of ideas during the week. Many of these will catch my ear and start me off on a string of tangent thoughts that leave me several minutes later, realizing that I am no longer part of a group discussion, or have lost the speakers subject entirely. I thought if I could write down some of these ideas, I would have both a record of them as well as serve to formulate these thoughts into actual ideas that could be communicated.

Too often my understanding of a subject leaps way ahead of my working knowledge of an idea. Therefore, my novel understanding (which brings a serenity and unity with God like few other time) is fleeting and soon is lost to traffic, screaming kids , or business matters that continually pull me back into the here and now.

The here and now, or reality to many; has been at the forfront of my quiet thoughts this week. Over the past several months I have enjoyed coming to understand my limited exposure to string theory and metaphysics of this sort. I have often felt that my understanding of God could be discovered in these obscure dimensions. But like my understanding of so many things, the actual idea is clear and beautiful in only short glimpses in my mind. I haven't the vocabulary to express what I am feeling or seeing within my head, only that it defies conventional understanding and explanation in terms that I am familiar.

So my journey is to seek out this understanding and to build a set of models to help me explain my understanding of God in order to better explain it to anyone interested or to help others who perhaps have the limited understanding of these things as I do.This week I heard a fascinating statement that sent me off trying to grasp how it plays into my model of God and myself. The statement was from a deacon James Keating, PhD, from creighton Univerity theology department and was as follows, "The only true reality is our reality before God." This immediatly struck me as my starting point in building my proposed model of God as I understand him inclusive of my existence.

Earlier I touched on how I would get lost in thought only to later be pulled back into the here in now. To many, that here and now IS reality, but how much simpler can reality be except in terms of God and the individual. This reality has neither here nor now. Time and space would both have no meaning in the simplest form of reality. It is only our admitting self awareness that we are able to function as spiritual beings in the world we are familiar with, a world of time and space.

Welcome to your blog, Danny.