grateful for divine patience...

The late John O'Donohue put it best:

When our eyes are graced with wonder, the world reveals its wonders to us. There are people who see only dullness in the world and that is because their eyes have already been dulled. So much depends on how we look at things. The quality of our looking determines what we come to see. Too often we squander the invitations extended to us because our looking has become repetitive and blind. The mystery and beauty is all around us but we never manage to see it. When the imagination awakens, the inner world illuminates. We begin to glimpse things that no-one speaks about, that the outer world seems to ignore.

But let's not be naive or absurdly romantic: this does not happen automatically. Yes, a few organic innocents still walk the face of Terra Mater, but most lose this grace by middle school, for that's how reality is ordered. This is not cynicism, mind you; it is, as John Prine used to say, just the way the world goes round. Or as Meister Eckhart insisted: Reality is the will of God - it can always be better - but we must first start with what is real. I don't have a lot of patience for cynics or those they are certain they know better than anyone else... probably because I've been that person in the past and found myself insufferable. As Jung teaches: what we bristle at in others is pointing out to us something we don't want to deal with.

So, knowing that, today I give thanks for God's patience: with me, with you, with all of us.  In Diana Butler Bass's morning meditation, she included this prayer that obliquely recalls Moses being called by name by the One who Is and Always Shall Be. Its tenderness feels just right today:

This people had no temple,
no worship-place.
This people built temples
for others,
for gods they dreaded,
rising in terrible power
over them, having
no regard for
their misery.

They prayed under
the weight of their burdens.
They cried out in
the unprayer of pain,
and God, having no need
of temples, heard,
as God always hears.
And God, leaning to the
brokenhearted, saw,
as God always sees.

For the very earth is holy.
The ground under our feet.
Take off your shoes and feel it,
feel the dry-ground-powder
and the sharp stones,
the infinite tiny beings
that call the earth home.
Take off your shoes.
Know you are part of
all this, part of the
the glory that fills
all things, as the waters
fill the seas.
You will be heard,
wherever you are.
You can listen,
wherever you are.
You are home.
— Andrea Skevington, “Holy Ground, barefoot”