A Beginner’s Mind : always we begin again
Buddhists talk a lot about having a beginner’s mind. Having a beginner’s mind means doing things as if you were doing them for the first time. So when you eat, eat as if you were eating for the first time, when you pray, pray as if you were praying for the first time. Paul Coutinho
Hand me a disaster, and I am rock solid. Drop me into a dark night of the soul and I am good to wait and watch and pray for years. Update my smart phone and I not only lose my peace, I may well lose my temper. It is humiliating and it is true. The ordinary things of life are what set me tripping all over my self and forgetting I AM. Thankfully, according to two giants in the world of Christian spirituality, St. Augustine in the 4th and the Cistercian Monk, Fr. Thomas Keating in 20–21st centuries, there is good news. The two luminaries agree: Life is a spiritual journey that progresses through a series of humiliations toward intimacy with God. Always we begin again.
That being the case, there is no doubt, I am on the journey of serial humiliation. Remember, forget, fall down, eat dirt, repeat. My belly is full of the dirt I have swallowed. I like to think of it as grit. Always I begin again.
In stillness meet vitality
where I AM holy is.
In silence hear windless chimes
song of peerless bliss.
In fullness feel the pangs of life
plunder virgin ground.
In emptiness find fullness
and so it goes around.
Thunder scatters rousing rain
to quench earth’s dusty brow.
Ocean’s salted waters
give rise to heaven’s prow.
Life suffuses darkness
obscurity is bright.
Where earth and heaven tie their hands
there I AM comes to light.
Words through Debra Asis, by the grace of Infinite Generativity
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Paul Coutinho’s quote is found in today’s selection in An Ignatian Book of Days by Jim Manney is a series of daily reflections from the Spiritual Wisdom of St. Ignatius of Loyola. Throughout the book we hear the voices of St. Ignatius as well as many great thinkers and writers, long gone and present day, each uniquely revealing the way of finding God in all things. And that is my intention; to find God/Divine Presence/Ultimate Reality in whatever presents itself to me each day in 2024.
Each day I read, reflect and write on the selection, hoping to articulate the ways in which I come to know God/Divine Presence/Ultimate Reality via personal experience, impelled by the leading of my inner life.
INVITATION
Would you like to join me? The book is accessible on Amazon. Let me know in the comments to this post and sign up to get an email whenever I post. I would love to read your reflections too, public or private messages welcome!
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All words are generated by grace and the grit of a real human being,
Debra Asis writing challenge
