You do send me messages of comfort. Today include Substack sermon on praying by Peter Trajan Haas. I subscribed. One take away ACTS: Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication
Indeed. thank you, Lord. There is meaning and growth in pain and suffering.
I told A I don’t want her to travel to anybody else’s house again! I think I mean it. Be that as may be.
Thank you for my playful little dog and a beautiful autumn day Sunshine and Cool Air
And thank you for the McDonald employee yesterday who may have been another one of your angels. A middle-aged, friendly Mainer who looked like she’d seen a thing or two and smiled even wider, saying, “I like my job” when I complimented her. TNJ again.
More to remember from Lee van Laer, A constant joy, Inner Christianity Substack yesterday
I come here to my life now in my 70’s with the twin burdens of conscience and remorse, which are hard enough to earn— and harder to carry—that one wonders why one would even bother to acquire them, seeing as so many folk live out their whole lives without the inconveniences and nuisances of either.
I carry them in the rightful cosmological sorrow a being of substance ought to absorb and become responsible for, although I always question whether or not I have done enough in this area to become worthy—almost certainly, I have not. Yet another stone to add to the bag.
Yet despite all this, I can assure you, there is a constant joy that flows into being.
It is a strange thing; for, it turns out—at least as far as I understand it—that that joy would never be here but for the suffering I’ve endured, and which even now must always—as is ever the case— form the true foundation of Being in this cosmos.
This is an objective fact that can only be appreciated with age; here, one begins at last to know what Gurdjieff meant when he spoke of these things. They are serious matters, matters for men and women of a certain age who have worked, so to speak, “with blinders on” for many years, struggling to understand ideas no one, objectively, will ever understand, and confidently asserting countless falsehoods on the way to actual humility. For those of us fortunate enough to taste it—many fall by the wayside and refuse the gift— this seasoning is ultimately conferred both from the distances and the close proximities of our memory and life.
It comes, in the end, only to help us.
Yes, they are serious matters, and as I put it to myself this morning, it stands thus:
We’re put here on the surface of this planet to receive God’s Grace. Why God has done this is inscrutable and will ever remain so. Indeed, as we judge from dimly lit interiors, the fortresses of our tiny little lives, it even appears to be a folly of some kind on His part.
Yet here it is; and the Grace keeps flowing.
Knowing, then, that this strange and wondrous Grace is ever present, flowing into Being everywhere to make birds sing, and worms crawl, and clouds enshrine the glory of the sky:
knowing this, why do I forsake the Grace and replace it with the dark words, and darker worlds, of man’s construction?
I could turn my face towards the light; and yet I forget, until that gentle hand that always hold the soul turns me back towards it—and always with a love that cannot be measured.
I am aware I’m being abused by a loved one who believes I’m abusing her. I am tolerating and even documenting it as an attempt to save her life (Lost post; rewrite)
I realized lying awake here at 4am that l might die in the attempt from my heart disease
Ironic to think I could pass in this old house, in A’s old bed!! Even my FIL was brought to our house from whence he passed, not alone, not in squalor.
A says we’ll get through it together but I must say it’s hard to see any togetherness , which requires compromise and forgiveness as part of that unconditional love ideal guess that is what confuses me about the big L that even Lee says is the basis of God good flowing and composing life, being. These devastating behaviors of people who supposedly love one another. Of course I may be conflating the sacred and mundane Wouldn’t be the first time Help me, Jesus and thank you for your angel in the waiting room yesterday
Psalm 23 (KJV)
I cannot reconcile what has been, or where I am, or what will be.
I cannot gather my past into manageable folds or piece it together into what will hide my shame, or keep me warm and cool enough.
But I know that with God’s grace flowing into being, I can and must go forward. This is the only thing I can rely on; and so I turn my heart in that direction, to this unknown place, here and now, where Grace doth enter.
To be in Christ.
It is, in fact, safer than the known way
