Wednesday, March 9, 2011

show me the light


Jesus is the Way, the Truth and the Light

Dear God,

Show me the light at the center of my brothers.
Show me the light at the center of myself.
Show me the light at the center of the world.
Where I see guilt, show me innocence.
Where I focus on mistakes, show me how to focus on efforts at good.
Help me have faith in goodness of others.
Help me have faith in Your spirit within me.
Thus may darkness be cast out.
May I cleave to the light that is my heart.
This is my prayer.
May I see the light in everyone.

Praying for someone is a gracious act.  It gives blessing to the one who prays, as well to the person who is prayed for.  Imagine life to be a camera:  the amount of light in the picture is determined by the size of the aperture at the time the picture is taken.  For most of us, most of the time, our experience of life and its potential for joy is severely limited by the constriction of our own hearts.  It is as though an aperture is shut, at least partially, that could be completely open.  The joy we seek lies less in something new happening and more in our opening our hearts more fully to the love in our lives already.  Only love can make us happy, and only we ourselves can determine its presence or absence inside our hearts.  To acknowledge love is to increase its capacity to heal us; to ignore love is to let it slip away.

Look around you while you are in public somewhere or gathered with loved ones.  Look into the faces of the people you see, and silently say:  The light of God in me salutes the light of God in you.  Do it for five minutes minimum, each day, and happiness will be yours. 

Wherever we picked up judgmental attitudes, they do not serve us now.  They do not serve God or the creation of a new world, and serving God is our only goal.  To serve God is to think with love.  Let us search our minds for the judgments we still hold, for the unforgivenesses, the places where we do not love.  The ego is sly and insidious.  It takes discipline and vigilance to do the mental work necessary to purify our hearts.  Honesty with ourselves and God, and the willingness to be healed by Him, form the crux of our journey.
Dear God,

I surrender to You my thoughts of judgment.
Please heal me of my temptation to blame Your children whom You adore.
Teach me to love as You do.
Teach me to see the reality behind the superficial masks, the truth in the hearts of all Your children.
May I see the innocence in all humanity, that I may see the world of Your creation, the world anew, the world that shall be.
I relinquish my miscreations.
I surrender my belief in guilt.
Bring me home to the truth at last.
May all God's children be innocent in my eyes for they are all my brothers.
May I see this that the world might heal.
Dear God, give me new eyes, Your eyes.  Amen.

Thank you Marianne Williamson, for Illuminata.
Hold them in the light with love and bless them to their highest good. xo