"to be known, rather than remembered.."

"memory,
i can dream
of the old days,
life was
beautiful then..."

I've never really liked this song. But, that said, it is the perfect keynote for this post. And if I have to listen to it, I would prefer to hear Barbra Steisand's version of "Memory," than any other.

This experience was pivotal in my understanding of healing. It happened over thirty years ago, but the Truth I discovered that day, is as fresh today as the day it flooded my heart.

A relationship that meant everything to me was falling apart at the seams. It would seem that whatever had drawn us together in the beginning had been lost forever. For the other person, but not for me. I wanted our relationship to continue so desperately. I loved him with every ounce of my being.

It was clear to me that he was just not remembering how good it was. How amazing it had been. All the reasons that we had come together in the first place. So I sent him cards filled with reminders. "Remember our first date? Remember those early months when we couldn't wait to meet at the end of the day and share our inspiration and insights. Remember that trip to...

The more I remembered, the farther away he moved from the closeness we had once enjoyed. I felt bereft. It was so easy for me to remember. And I thought those memories were our lifeline back to all the good we had known together.

One day, when things were at their darkest, I woke to a late spring snow storm. The roads were impassable. It would be a "snow day" for me whether I wanted to be home alone or not. And during that time, home alone was excruciating. So many reminders of "how good it had been."

I knew I couldn't "go there," so I made myself a cup of tea and pulled my books, the Bible and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, off of my desk and curled up in front of the wood stove for a morning of study.

I don't remember what the theme of that week's scriptural study was, but I do remember two things that shifted my heart. One, was the story of Peter's raising of Tabitha from Acts 9, starting at verse 36. Following her passing after an illness, Peter is called to her home, where he finds her friends - weeping widows who who brought him to the upper chamber where she lay surrounded by some of the coats and garments she had made while she was alive.

But it is this next passage that woke me up:

“But Peter
put them all forth..."
 

I got it. It was suddenly so clear to me. I, too, was clinging to memorials. When all along, divine Love was breathing fresh purpose into our relationship. Immediately on the heels of that realization, a statement from Science and Health came to mind:

“If a friend be with us,
why need we memorials
of that friend."
 

I knew I had to let go of all the "reasons" from the past. My loved one didn't need to be bombarded with memories, he needed to be trusted. He needed for me to release us both from the past. If we were to continue, it would be because God's purpose for our relationship was still vital to His plan for us.

Another statement from Science and Health helped me arrest that behavior. Eddy says:

"Make no unnecessary inquiries
relative to feelings or disease."
 

So I stopped. Cold turkey. I stopped asking him how he felt. I stopped wondering "what if..." I worked every day to simply show up in the presence of God's purpose for us.

This isn't about a nice, neatly tied up "healing" of a relationship. Each day we each showed up willing to discover more about our love for God, through our love for each other. But most importantly, I stopped looking backwards to affirm or define my relationships -- with God, with my loved ones, with my body. It allows relationships to evolve with purpose. It requires the discipleship of knowing -- versus remembering It's a spiritual demand that takes devout focus on loving God as the only "I am."

And isn't this what Peter was so clear about. Tabitha wasn't a memory, she was an idea of God. A reflection of divine Mind. And I love the definition of the word "reflect," as "deep thinking or pondering." Tabitha was God was thinking, not what he was remembering. And Peter knew that he too could know her, not through the widow's memorials, but through an understanding of her present identity.

This would have been so edifying for Peter -- the last thing we would have wanted, was to be remembered for his past denials of Christ, but known for the faithful man of God, the faithful apostle he was day-by-day as he fulfilled his holy purpose.

This spiritual demand to know, rather than remember, blesses everyone and everything. I once thought of myself as someone with a great memory. Now I know myself as someone who knows - not remembers - God. As someone who knows Love. It is enough.


offered with Love,

Kate

"Resting in the presence of Mind..."

"...There's a magic every moment
There's a miracle each day
There's a magic every moment
Oh won't you let the music play..."
- Dan Fogelberg

Have you ever had one of those night when the hands of the clock on the bedside table seem to be swimming through molasses.  Nights when you slog through the past in golashes of regret only to find yourself walking in circles of "what if". 

Sometimes, for me, the past creeps in through the dark slivers of space under the closet door and swirls and hisses and threatens its claim that mistakes (mine or another's) made in the "once upon a time"  will reverberate throughout eternity…or at least this chapter of it…and undermine all the good I would try to do…today.

When these demons are most vivid…calling up detailed moments of bad judgment or forcing us to wander through a mental photo albums full of  deckle-edged snapshots recalling a misbegotten youth…I often lie there captive waiting for them to choose when to stop their howling and cackling.

I forget that I am not a prisoner of war.  I am a child of God, a child of "the Great I AM"…not the great I was.

One night when the Past Monster (an adult version of the boogeyman) crawled out from underneath the rag rug by the closet door and tiptoed over to my bedside standing so close the his whisper felt like a voice inside my own head…mimicking my own voice so that I would believe he was really "my mind" as my own consciousness…I realized that…surprise, surprise…I was thinking.  And that if I was thinking, I was in the present, not in the past.  And what I called "remembering" was really happening in the present.  And in the present I had the right to think about it in a fresh new way. 

The past - remembered experiences - often seem like they are intractable, carved in stone". "Well", we think, "it happened and that's the way it happened, it's over and done with and there is nothing I can do to change it"  But in the present…if we can stay in the present...we can decide that if we are going to think about something – even something that happened twenty years earlier – we can choose how we are going to think about it NOW. 

Our thinking is always in the present.  Our thinking…about anything…is always something that is going on right now.   And because it is happening now,  we can identify it with the Great I AM that is Mind…the source of all thought.  Mary Baker Eddy, asserts, in Science and Health, that "…it is wise earnestly to consider whether it is the human mind or the divine Mind which is influencing one."  If I choose to see that the divine Mind, the Great I AM is all that has the power to be influencing me in that moment, then I can only remember what the divine Mind remembers (thinks) at that moment.  And as is states in Jeremiah, "I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end."

Remembering is just thinking.  And since there is only one Mind that is causative…that can cause our thinking…or remembering, we have the right to yield to what that one and only Mind knows at that very moment…and what Mind, God knows is always good.

Some glimpse of goodness like a tiny flashlight in the closet begins to deprive the Past Monster of the darkness he needs to survive. 

This was particularly helpful to me recently.  I had gone to bed so inspired after hours and hours of scriptural study and prayer.  The house was quiet and I settled into a lovely space of gratitude for all that I had seen of God's grace that day.  But out of the dark came the thought, "did you notice how so-and-so looked at you out of the corner of her eye last night?"  I began rehearsing every possible thing I could have done to have warranted a sideways glance.  Before long I was in that ugly spiral of "what if it was this?", "could she have thought that?",  "oh my gosh maybe I did thus and so in a way that she misunderstood".

And on and on it went until I remembered I was not "in" those moments…I was in the now…in the I AM with God.  And if I wanted to think about my friend, even in regard to those past moments, I needed to really THINK about her, not try to find a version of her that I could impose on that remembered moment that would satisfy the picture being suggested by the hissing Past Monster. 

So I thought about her joy, her gentleness, her consistent kindness. These were truths about her that didn't exist in the vacumn of a past moment or a repaired future.  These were truths that were timeless and I was experiencing them in my consciousness of her in the eternal now.  The past monster just shriveled up and disappeared in the light of that truth about her…and me.  

In her book, Gifts from the Sea, Anne Morrow Lindbergh shares her insights about living, and I like to remember that Life and Mind are synonymous…so these insights would also refer to thinking, in the present.  She relates them to the act of dancing…which is probably why it so resonates with me:

"One cannot dance well unless one is completely
in time with the music,
not leaning back to the last step or pressing forward to the next one,
but poised directly on the present step as it comes.  Perfect poise in
the beat is what gives good dancing its sense of ease,
of timelessness,
of the eternal."

I love thinking that when I remember, I am thinking.  And I have the right to feel the presence of Mind to define my thinking about anything, past, present, or future, in it's terms.  The past monster dissolves in this light of God's presence of Mind…and in its place all we can see is "the face of God". 

That night I stopped thinking about what my friend might have been thinking about me based on something I may have done in the past, a began thinking about her in the present…in the presence of Mind.  In this present-tense thinking I could see both of us as God-centered, God-directed, God-impelled in all of our thoughts and actions. 

I could dismiss the swirling demons of "but…what if" with the sweeping hand of divine Love's "what is".  "What is" is always consistent with what "the Great I AM" knows about each of us…and it is always good.

In light of this truth the slide show of our life is just an adventure in thinking about those moments in fresh new ways…shining the light of truth on images distorted by self , only to find God's face, in what once seemed like the dark corners of regret.  Realizing that in those moments when we felt desperate, we were actually learning that God's resources are much greater than can ever be calculated on a bank statement.  Discovering for the first time, that in the hours  we thought we were alone with only our own voice of disappointment for company. we were actually quietly, silently…patiently waiting for God to "move upon the waters…and form the perfect concept" of home, companionship, children.  Hindsight may be 20/20, but seeing every moment of our lives out from the eyes of God, "the great I AM"…is perfect vision...filled with hope.

"…You can see forever in a single drop of dew
You can see that same forever if you look down deep inside of you
There's a spark of the creator in every living thing
He respects me when I work but He so loves me when I sing…"
- Dan Fogelberg

rest well...
Kate