What do you think Jesus meant when he said we have to lose our selves before we find our selves? To begin to work with this central paradox, we have to somehow engage the wisdom that knows the difference.
What do we value most deeply? Is the life we're choosing moving us more and more in that direction? How do we get better in moving in that direction, in fulfilling both the hope and promise of our own lives?
Lectio for this week:
Modern neuroscience tells us that our past reactions are engraved on the synapses that send messages from one neuron to another, making them more likely to send the same message in the future. Paying attention, we recognize how often a moment's experience is followed by an immediate reaction. It can be shocking to realize how impersonal and habitual our responses are. But gradually we realize that mindfulness gives us the option to choose a healthier response. --Jack Kornfield
Emptiness is not something sacred in which to believe. It is an emptying: a letting go of the fixations and compulsions that lock one into a tight cell of self that seems to exist in detached isolation from the turbulent flux of life. This emptying leads to a falling away of constrictive and obstructive habits of mind that--as in removing a barrier across a river--allows the damned-up torrent to life to flow freely.
Rather than an absence of meaning or value, emptiness is an absence of what limits and confines one's capacity to realize what a human life can potentially become. --Stephen Batchelor
The Bright Field
R. S. Thomas
I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
on to a receeding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.
