Which do you choose, the front row or the third?
This picture tickles me, that's the reason I am posting in again.
Think of a man who wants to win the favors of his lady love. He attempts to improve his appearance. He builds up his body. He changes his behavior and practices techniques to charm the object of his intention. And so, it is with spirituality. It is not what you do that brings it to you. What matters is what you are and what you become.
Anthony De Mello tells us, “Those things within you that you struggle to fix just need to be understood. If you understood them, they would change.”
Easier said than done, my good man.
No wonder people ask the age-old question, “What’s the meaning of life?”
My daughter asked that question recently, and it made me wonder why people ask it. Wondering about the meaning of life infers that they see no purpose in it, and it prompts such books as “Man’s Search for Meaning,” which usually happens in the face of suffering.
Frolicking people rarely stop laughing to ask that question. They are having too much fun.
Back up a bit. We know too much. We know that life comes and goes. We know that happiness comes in spurts. We know that what brings us happiness one minute can be gone the next. People come into our lives and leave. Pets die. People die. Diseases come. Sickness happens. We know there is suffering.
And we know that there is joy.
Perhaps that is what we signed up for when we came here, all of it. Maybe we did come here for a reason. We joined the playground hoping to play and got hit in the head by a flying baseball.
Remember Grandma in the movie Parenthood? She told of a carnival ride that traveled up then down, and she was thrilled by it. “Oh, what fun,” she proclaimed, “we went up, we went down.”
“Nice story Grandma,” said the Steve Martin character.
His wife got it. Grandma was talking about the roller coaster of life.
.
What if?
What if our religion was each other?
If our practice was our life?
If prayer was our words?
What if the Temple was the Earth?
If holy water—the rivers, lakes and oceans?
What if meditation was our relationships?
If the Teacher was life?
If wisdom was self-knowledge.?
If love was the center of our being?
--Ganga White