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God asks of us only ongoing spiritual growth. We should be as lenient with each other.
Conversation with an angel
Copyright 2020 Don Ray
Fear not? Are you flippin' crazy?! Fear not?! Have you not seen what has happened, what is happening, and what is bound to happen?!
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SILKEN TIDE excerpt
The earth and this valley welcome the sun, eternal cycles embraced once again, the brief celebration of life and creation quickly pirouetting through the columns of light and shadow before the noise of traffic and the din of vapid conversation send Life into hiding for another too busy day.
full text of SILKEN TIDE
Excerpt from Storm of Creation Click to read all.
Copyright 2020 Don Ray
....This world is merely a storm,
all existence is storm,
a rude disruption of the eternal status quo.
Creation does not unfold as a gentle ripple across the shimmering surface of space-time.
Creation, of a universe or your soul,
explodes at the sharp end of the lightning bolt,
expands through the concussion of the thunder.
Turn and face it,
let it disrupt your life,
this thunder of ongoing Creation......
INDEFENSIBLE HOPE
Copyright 2021 Don Ray
Take heart. Take no faith in this world, but take heart in its moments of beauty. It is after all God’s Creation, and its residents God’s children.
Take heart, though there be no worldly reason to hope. All worldly reasons to hope will pass, leaving those who rely on them with no hope at all.
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Question Revealing Truth
Christos….we long for it, always mistaking other things for it. We grab at whatever first image of it we saw in childhood, whether Ganesh or science or UFO's or gold. We imprint on that first view, remaining fixated on it usually for the rest of our worldly life.
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Combat and Compassion
People are generally as programmed in their behavior as any cat or dog. Acknowledging that fact makes forgiveness a little easier. Perhaps the role of spiritual practice and well-practiced religion is to liberate people from their programming. The fear and anger and lust and stupidity abide, but we are empowered to at least slightly temper them, to take some nominal responsibility for our actions, or better said, to submit our course of action to a higher influence, something more noble than genetic programming and parental abuse.
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Accept What You Want
We want detailed instructions and answers when we want them, and we want to be left alone and independent the rest of the time. Instead, we face crises without unambiguous worldly answers that we can understand in our terms and we get pesky irritating reminders of rules and regulations when we least want them.
Welcome to spiritual childhood, or maybe it's adolescence. Welcome to freedom, including freedom of belief, and most terrifying, freedom with consequences.
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Read all of Heaven With a Little Help From Me Friends
Copyright 2018 - 2020 Don Ray
………..Will we really change, really be zapped into some different way of being?....and if so, will the resulting entities even still be us?.....…..or will we find in Heaven that in fact the real us, the pure us, the essence of the children of God, that quanta of universal Consciousness, was present all along, and it was only the pain and fear and blindness of this temporal birth into Eternity that deceived us into thinking we had to employ the costumes and masks and shields and barriers and walls and pikes and halberds to isolate ourselves from each other?
Do we have to change at all to enter Heaven? Or must we simply be liberated from the pain and fear and blindness, allowing each child of God to emerge into the Light?
Powerless Triumph
We give power to another not when we follow their orders, but when we compromise the essence of our being, our values, allowing that scowling boss or spouse or despot to shape some aspect of our soul.
Read all of Defiant-Subversive-Seditious Christmas
Copyright 2018 - 2021 Don Ray
…………... The Love that radiates from highest heights of Heaven is pale and wan, with nothing over which to triumph.
No, the glory of the Christmas Love arises out of the dung and blood - the fear and pain - the conflict and combat. This is Love triumphant, Love so bright it can shine through the rubble and debris of the human world.
We do not need the pale suffusing Light of the angels in their perfect realms. We need a Light sharp and penetrating, a Light insistent and demanding, a Light that can undo even our stubborn clinging to darkness.
Let there be Light, Light unquenchable, Light that can illuminate even battlefields and boardrooms.
Let there be Light that even the marketers and manipulators, that even politicians and presidents, that even the priests and pugilists cannot extinguish.
Let there be Light, Light bright and startling and arresting, Light unafraid to speak Truth and assault the darkness, Light in a baby’s eyes in the cold and dark and dung of real life.
Let there be Christmas, defiantly merry Christmas, seditiously accepting Christmas, subversively embracing Christmas.
Read all of Knowledge of Good and Evil
Copyright 2018 - 2020 Don Ray
(Reference: the Biblical tale of the Garden of Eden)
……………. Our experience of good and evil must be thorough. No book-learning or instructional video, this carnal life…...these are lessons for eternity, lessons to be deeply absorbed and integrated into the core of the soul.
Live on. Learn. Accept the invitation and inheritance as the children who fell to earth that with their resulting knowledge of good and evil they could rise to Heaven.
Read all of Worship
Copyright 2018,2020 Don Ray
It is worship intensely alone,
excruciatingly individual.
No convenient totems and trinkets,
mandalas and statues,
idols and altars,
none of that for this worship.
This is worship without rules and regulations,
without dogma and dictates.
This is worship without preconception,
worship without expectation.
This is worship by the soul that understands nothing.
This is worship immune to liturgy and lecture.
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This is worship alternately steely eyed and teary eyed.
This is worship lived out in life.
This is worship honest and stripped,
honest with the self and honest with that unseen Greater beyond the self.
This is worship perplexed and angry and grieving and despairing.
No wishful thinking, this worship.
No blind acceptance, this faith.
This is worship in abject doubt underlain by immutable certainty.
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Palm Sunday Anti-Climax
........that Palm Sunday anti-climax, endlessly repeated since, gives not a lesson in discouragement and hopelessness. It tells us to add our praise when the Spirit of Christ enters before us in whatever form. It teaches us that while the world may briefly glance at the latest procession of God’s Love, by the next day that Love may be hung on a cross.
Following the Unseeable
....the greatest faith is forged not by following unambiguous instructions written in flaming letters pointing down a well-lit path. The greatest faith is forged and polished in the dark and noise and ambiguity and uncertainty that is real life, life demanding we participate in ongoing Creation not by following specific instructions to accomplish a dictated design, but by making the free choices incumbent on the children of God in playing their role in creating that design..... Read more of Following the Unseeable
Role of a Life in the Purpose of Life (click to read more)
Copyright 2019-2020 Don Ray
How are we to understand our roles in the unfolding Purpose and ongoing Creation? Surely I have no important role in something so grand and infinite!
Do Not Cling to the Light
Not having a clue, what will be next, what salvation will supplant the present horror, events too fast for comprehension, until in a quiet moment in the presence of fresh death we are given a glimpse, a glimpse of Light, and told to not cling,
So we run, run in bewilderment and confusion and tell someone who doesn't believe us,
sending them in turn to run their bewildered, uncomprehending path.
"Don't cling to me", though how we want to cling! There, in the briefest flash of a moment, the darkness of world's horrors filled with a wondrous impossible Light…...that leaves us with memory…...as we return to the world that needs that Light, as we return to the path we cannot see, knowing we must go, must tell, go we know not where, tell that which we do not comprehend.
Ontological Meaning of Salvation
We all experience awareness of our aloneness, the ultimate isolation of our conscious being, this individual soul experiencing the pangs of separation and isolation associated with its gestation and birth. In those moments dark and frightening, do we collapse into the self, furthering our isolation within newly discerned Void that surrounds us? Or do we reach out, like the newborn child with eyes still closed grasping for touch, accepting the hand of Source and Father and Mother and Savior that give us birth.