Author: rkcdlitt

Sleep Holds Us

From time to time, I come across a phrase in a book I am reading that jumps our at me and demands my attention. I read a lot; and I mean a real lot. I read many books in many genres and love them all. I am a member of two book groups, one is based on spirituality and one on all else. The members of the second group were speaking about the book: Hamnet: a Novel of the Plague by Maggie O’Farrell. I highly recommend this book.

Anyway, as Maggie is telling the story, I read a fascinating and mind-clutching phrase: “sleep holds us in its plumes.” Six simple words placed in an order that fascinatingly describes how sleep hold us. I am enthralled by this word picture.

I dream of comfort, the comfort of a warm blanket keeping me warm at night. This is a pleasure that many people in our world cannot experience; they are too poor to own a blanket, or they may be homeless, shivering on a park bench or in an alley with winds howling by them, picking up speed, making it colder, more miserable. I sometimes dream of these brothers and sisters, suffering as I have never done.

I dream of companionship; I am married, and for 55 years I have shared a bed with my wife. There is something about sleeping with arms and legs tangled such that it is impossible to say who belongs to what. This is a gift from God that I cannot believe I have lived my life with such a marvelous and caring person. This companionship gives me hope and love, but it also gives me security.

I dream of security. Because I am in my own home, which I am fortunate to have, hiding from the world’s problems, hiding behind locked doors that keep out unwanted fears and trials that I cannot and will not face when I sleep. Is this a false sense of security? My answer is that God secures my safety and comfort and companionship. When I sleep, I have not a care.

Yes, no matter what I dream, sleep holds me in its plumes of several layers of intrigue, and several layers of happiness.

©Russell Kendall Carter

Lessons of Stone Soup

I love the fable of the stone soup. It was first put in print in the early 18^th century, but nobody really knows haw long it was an oral folktale before this time. Timing does not matter, because this fable and its moral are as relevant today as it was three hundred years ago.

The folktale tells of visitors who do not share; nor do the people of the village. Has anything truly changed? Let us face it, as humans we are greedy. We do not share; and, if we do, it is merely the scraps that fall from the dinner table, the sharing is meager, and we are miserly. We do not place our assets with those we share life with. Being greedy, we never have enough, or so we believe.

Although this story is told in other areas of the Gospels, I love the version John shares with us. In the search for food to feed the multitudes, a small boy steps up: “Here is a boy with five small barley loaves and two small fish, but how far will they go among so many?” John 6: 9. This age-old parable reminds us that there is always enough to share; there is always enough to give to those in need.

Love, like the bread in the parable, keeps on giving. When we share Love, when we share ourselves and gifts, we live forever; they live forever. This is God’s way and promise. The stone soup spirituality invites us to invest our assets in other. Then all will prosper and live.

 ©Russell Kendall Carter

Let us praise our mothers and sisters. Let us praise all women. Women are the gift that God gives all humanity. They are the beloved of God. To often we use women as servants of all of our needs. This is not in favor with God. Women hold great wisdom in their very beings; the Goddess Wisdom, the feminine side of our God, blesses women with great intelligence and great love. God has us the gifts of women that we are meant to share our joy.

I see the beauty of their hearts, the core of their reality, the person that is in God’s heart. I pray that they could all see themselves as God sees them. I pray that we could see each other the way God sees us all the time. We all live within the embrace of God, whose arms surround us always. We are awakened by God’s energy, the that holds us His presence within us.

Our very humanity is born with Divine Love, the key to existence, the basis of God’s Grace for us. We share this with all; we especially share this with women. Women birth us; women raise us from infants; women care for us; women love and nurture us. We are blessed to return each of these with our presence, with our attention, with our Love.

Heavenly Father, help us reflect Your love to each of Your children. Help us to return tender nurture and counselling You give and share with us. You are the strength and love that women are always ready to share with all humanity.

Amen.

 ©Russell Kendall Carter

Mountain haze rising,

A golden rust blooming,

beautiful rusts, golden arbors

pleasing to noontime eyes.

Morning chill teasing runny noses

with breezes boldly beckoning sweaters

to warm awakening souls.

Fields of onion flowers streaming,

rivulets of magenta alive with motion.

Eagles soaring, floating with the currents,

eying tiny morsels for dinner.

©Russell Kendall Carter

When I meditate on my spiritual life, I realize the perfection of what God created. This is my true existence; the existence God gives me; it is a joyful comfort coming from God’s Love. As with all men and women, I am the offspring of the Holy Spirit who guides me every step of my journey in this mortal life I live. The presence of this Spirit within me always, lifts both my spiritual and human consciousness to the realm of the eternal Truth, which is God.

I love that with the presence of the Holy Spirit, I am spirit; I am the likeness of my Maker, Love we call God. I know this is Truth because Jesus brought to us the power of the Spirit. He showed us how to attain the power, the progress of God’s presence and Love on Earth. God’s Love is a fire, a fire that cannot be extinguished, a fire that does not destroy but builds inside of us burning to be shared.

I became Love. My horizons broadened to recognize that all people and all living things are brothers and sisters to me. God creates all of His creation for our benefit. God creates a path for us to follow that glorifies all of His creation. This path is shown by the footprints of those who preceded us. They also walked the path in troubling times, but their actions show us the way from any awaiting apocalypse. In God’s world of Love, there is no apocalypse.

God’s world is perfect; man’s world is flawed. It is our duty to ourselves and others to recognize that any awaiting apocalyptic actions can be circumvented and eliminated by bringing our world into God’s realm of eternal Love. Our mistakes are thinking that God has created our difficulties, which is wrong. Recognizing the perfection in God’s Holy Creation can only be realized by living a loving, spiritual life.  This brings Love into our very existence and brings the desire and the need to share this Love. And only then can we direct our material life to accept God’s perfection of Love.

©Russell Kendall Carter

Love is just that: Love. I take time to listen for God’s words; see the work He does in my heart. . . listen, listen. A light comes out of the darkness of the wilderness that enfolds me, making me shine as a loving example of how God is ministering, not only to me, but to the entire world and universe. Love flows from me because I trust that God fills me with goodness and grace. I have hope that Love will prevail. I sing!

John reminds us of Jesus’s promise: “I am the light of the world; he who follows me will not walk in darkness but will have the light of life (8:12).” This light is God’s Love and is a prayer to participate in God’s true universe, the universe where all are love and acceptance is universal. Loving one another is not a task or an inconvenience; it is the holy, realistic presence of God within us and within the community. When Jesus promised the He would be with us when two or more join in His name, ask Him to join when meeting the stranger. See the face of Jesus in all whom we meet.

Each of us is loved; each of us is defined by the inner beauty of the natural gifts that God gives us. All we must do is recognize these gifts and we will indeed see the face of Jesus in everyone we meet. I know that when I accept the stranger as an equal member of God’s family, when I give him or her the love that God so freely gives, this love comes back to me a hundred times greater, a thousand times greater. Such is winning the lottery!

When I love, I earn companionship. When I love, I earn comfort and grace. When I love, I feel God within me. Such is Love!

©Russell Kendall Carter

Mysticism is Alive and Well and Dwells within Me.

We search for true spiritual action in our everyday lives but are unable to find it. I have always written that we can only find this in our relationship with God. I look to mysticism to discover my relationship with our Holy Father.

The dictionary defines mysticism as “a doctrine of an immediate spiritual intuition of truths believed to transcend ordinary understanding, or of a direct, intimate union of the soul with God through contemplation.” What does this mean?

Simple! We meditate. We meditate on the only perfect human to walk the earth, Jesus who was all that we can never be. But we can emulate. To attain true spirituality, we must, I repeat, we must undergo a radical transformation to leave behind any idea of physical perfection and physical superiority. There are no such things. If I really meditate on true spiritual awakening, I know that I experience a very radical transformation to reflect God’s Love and Truth.

Every molecule of my spiritual structure contains all the good that mankind has accomplished to bring God into our midst. This is a true gift that only all those who preceded us bring into our bearing. I am truly touched and supported by the angels God sends to me guiding me to Truth through my mystical being. The eternal me is not flesh and blood. I am spirit; I am love; I am truth. I am the spiritual creation of God, perfect and eternal.

©Russell Kendall Carter

By the time we become adults, we have sworn allegiance to many things, and then immediately broke them. We are always too proud of ourselves and too anxious to succeed to care about keeping those small promises and oaths we adopted when young.

This, unfortunately, includes those we make in church. We bow down to God, confess our sins, and in community pray to an invisible God who seems to ignore what we want (not need). We are dissatisfied always. We own a false humility and are proud of it, particularly when before others. We are proud of our material wealth and standing in society. We shun the command to have no other gods to worship. We ignore the blessings of the commandments and the beatitudes. Pride is our God.

But there is hope for us; all is not lost; all is not bad. There are times when we are truly on our knees, praying to God who is always faithful to us. We hear the name YHWH, which can mean that God will be who He will be. And that my brother is loving and caring father. In our persecutions, both personal and public, we are guaranteed the kingdom of heaven. This is God’s promise to us. This is a key part of the covenant that God made with the Israelites thousands of years ago. We clearly seed the seed of love and grace growing within us. We return to His child. We forgives us and loves us.

Let us love one another as God loves us.

©Russell Kendall Carter

Our imaginations are mired deep within community. This may be a wonderful time filled with a diversity of voices promising spiritual gifts. This gives us the false promise of comfort, ease, and security that eases our minds. Our society has taught and trained us to be very selfish and protective of our privacy, forgetting about the stranger at our door. Early Christians, what I call original Christians opened their doors to all as taught by Jesus.

But somewhere along the way, our Christian faith changed; now we shun these people and leave the hospitality to the church or the government, and both of these do a less than terrible job of welcoming the stranger in need. This means that we are vulnerable to misguided solutions and promises; it is at this time that we must open our hearts to the word of God, allowing the brilliance of His lighted path for us to follow.

This path is a promise from God who loves us as His children, and the selfish covetous world cannot deprive us of it. As we walk this lighted path, the gift of life given by God is eternal, for us and our children. Remember, Jesus did not hobnob with the wealthy and privileged; he lived and worked with the poor and forgotten, the sinner and the outsider. And for this and His teachings, they killed Him.

If we want to be as faithful as God, accepting God’s grace and forgiveness, we have to resist the temptation to keep God and His promises at a distance and allow God to truly be a part of our lives. It is time for us to leave our comfort zones and do the difficult things that God asks. This begins with loving our neighbor as ourselves. We are the stranger.

Each morning, I ask myself if I walk the lighted path of grace that God provides for me. I ask if I have helped enough; I ask if I have loved enough. Have I taken God’s values as my own; have I adopted His Spirit in my life; is my attitude toward others anyway similar to what Jesus modelled. And I have failed; but I have tried.

©Russell Kendall Carter

When Fear Tries to Take Hold

We all have moments of fear that sometimes terrify us. I had such an incident last night that shook me out of my comfort zone casing me to rise at about four AM. I actually feared getting back in bed and stayed up for the day to begin.

Fortunately, dreams do not govern my world. I live a comfortable life with my wife of 55 years, separated from our children but in contact with them that we are never lonely. But we are never lonely for God is within our home every day of our lives. There is no place in my home that is not filled with the Love of God.

As mortal men we are tormented and divided from God’s Truth. This causes loneliness of a kind that nobody can fill for us. Only God can remove this loneliness. When Saint Paul writes that we are to pray constantly, we are close to God all day. I try to live a life of prayer, so I am constantly hearing from God in many, many ways.

While I was in conflict over the dream I had, I was sitting alone and one of my cats jumped into my lap. God answered my prayer with comfort; I knew I was safe. The change I make in my life to allow God in denies fear the opportunity to take hold of my life. Join me praying constantly, or as I say, live a life of prayer and allow God into your existence.

©Russell Kendall Carter