Feb. 7, 2020
God’s blessings flow perpetually into us, but we’re generally up to some kind of mischief and we don’t notice it.
The capacity of our organism to receive the simple and very direct blessing of life and its essential nature is quite powerful; yet I’m too often filled with wickedness of one kind or another that obscures that.
My wickedness, furthermore, wants me to believe that the blessing is weak. I listen; and so I don’t take the simple, easy step into Being that could dispel my falsely inspired confusion.
If I have a better attention to the inflow of the divine nature—if I cooperate with it— then the wickedness softens and I see it as the imaginary nonsense it actually is. But if I don’t form that inner relationship first—right now—it remains perpetually theoretical and my mind engages in the same self-satisfying tricks it’s usually up to.
This wickedness I speak about is tremendously creative. It seems to delight in subversion, even in the smallest details. This morning I was considering this question through the impression of my sensation and feeling as I walked from my parking garage on West 42nd street past the Port Authority—New York City’s biggest bus station and one of the seedier, if not perhaps seediest, neighborhoods in the city.
Despite the apparent squalor of my surroundings, I was struck by a deep impression of how sacred and valuable every single moment of my life has been.
Even this moment—even the squalor.
Each and every person and event has been of great value and is, objectively, a gift given to me, along with the already immense privilege of being allowed to live on this planet and participate in all it offers. The sum total of it is all an objective Grace; and each of the tiny parts is a Grace as well.
Yet part of me— a large part formed through many tiny “worms” of evil that have burrowed through the drifts of my mind throughout this lifetime—has formed negative attitudes about a great deal of what has happened to me. We all know how this operates: my psychology is predisposed towards blaming others, finding fault, being dissatisfied with what I’ve been given. All invented; yet I believe it. That is, the wickedness in me believes it.
Yet this morning, on this cold, wet morning, I could see for an instant how invalid all of that thinking is. When I engage in it, I’m an invalid: I reject the blessing of life which is flowing into me at this very moment.
And it’s this question that interests me, because everything I need to come into a relationship with the inflow of the divine is already in me at this very moment. It isn’t somewhere else, attainable at some other time or through some other method. It’s here right now. I have the option—if I can find my wish to exercise it—to honor that condition and enter it. The further I move in that direction, the more this perpetual and eternal blessing become immediately available.
All of this sounds, of course, psychological, but there’s no psychology in it. The opening to the divine is a voluntary action in this moment of the mind, the body, and the feeling, all of which participate through their own perception.
In turn, they each offer perceptions and understanding in their own language.
An organic value emerges.
And here I am.
May your heart be close to God,
and God close to your heart.
Lee
Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.
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