learning to trust god's grace: i'm on the right track, baby, i was born this way

The late William Burroughs - wealthy child of the bourgeoisie turned Beat poet,

true beautiful loser, and thoroughly unique junkie - once claimed, "When you stop growing, you start dying." My hunch is that it is more true to say, "When we  quit going deeper, we start to die," but I've been shaped by James Hillman's take on Jung. Simone de Beauvoir wrote, "Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying." Albert Einstein believed that "once you stop learning, you start dying." And Benjamin Franklin quipped, "When you're finished changing, you're finished."

This summer I will become 67 - a good enough time to die to paraphrase Chief Crazy Horse before the Battle of Little Big Horn. But an even better time to take stock of the changes, insights, failures and blessings that continue to lure me deeper. For about a year, the words and consequences of Fr. Richard Rohr in Immortal Diamond have been turning my always changing world upside down - again:

The goodness of God fills all the gaps of the universe, without discrimination or preference. God is the gratuity of absolutely everying. The space in-between everything is not space at all, but Spirit. God is the 'goodness glue' that holds the dark and light of life together, the free energy that carries all death across the Great Divide and transmutes it into Life... Grace is what God does to keep all things (God) has made in love and alive - forever. Grace is God's official job description. Grace is not something God gives; grace is who God is. If we are to believe the primary witnesses, an unexplainable goodness is at work in the universe.

This affirms an embodied and creative way for me to pray. Like rain on the desert soil, this insight has gently and slowly seeped deeper into my heart. It asks me to embrace everything I experience as communion with the holy. It encourages me to see my life as a prayer. And while driving down to Brooklyn this past Wednesday after a stunning snow fall, I got it.  From the inside, not just in my head. For almost four hours my trip was a mystical time of gratitude and awe. I wasn't expecting it but the sheer physical beauty of the snow on the trees, the sun breaking through a surprise snow squall just outside of NYC, my anticipation of just hanging-out with my beloved children and grandchildren for two full days,as well as the health and relative safety to do so, filled me full to overflowing. And just before I got to the Brooklyn condo, NPR ran a story about Lady Gaga's anthemic masterpiece, "Born This Way" and I burst into tears! Tears of joy for Gaga - and the wider LGBTQ community. Tears of rage for the hatred that lurks just below the surface. Tears of solidarity. Tears of confession. Tears of grace. And tears for my own wounded journey that are just too deep for human words. 

Look I'm not trying to appropriate someone else's culture, affirmation, faith, politics or sexuality. It simply felt like the whole thing was a bold gift of grace. It was also an inner blessing to rest into the love that saturates creation.

Later in Rohr's Immortal Diamond he writes: Jesus, and most other great spiritual teachers, make it very clear that there is an (inner) self that has to be found and one that has to be let go of or even renounced. I would go so far as to say there is an inner self that must also die. The false self. The self that only knows shame and fear and judgment. Rohr adds:

It seems that the false self would rather have a very few "wins," that let God win with everybody. That is my sad conclusion after a lifetime of working in many churches on many continents and it is summed up in the often murdered text by most preachers and traditions: "I am calling ALL of you, (says Jesus) but so few of you allow yourselves to be chosen. (Matthew 22: 14)

I am still a child - a baby - in letting myself be chosen by God and God's grace. I have been schooled in fear and judgment and shame. I can forsake that false self. I can practice letting it go, too and place it on the Cross.  But it is strong and well-developed. So let me thank all that is holy for my trip to Brooklyn and pray that I can come to trust this grace a little more as this year of dying to shame and beholding the blessings unfolds.