Hump Day

 

Just for today I am sharing some things which I like.  I have no problems right now but I do like these readings and I hope you will like them.

We can, however, define our experience of God, recognizing that what we call “a God experience” may well turn out to be a subjective delusion, but I do not think it is, at least not in most cases. So when I try to make sense of what I believe is my experience of the transcendent, I use three concepts. I experience God as “the Source of life” empowering me to “live fully.” I experience God as “the Source of love” freeing me to “love wastefully,” by which I mean to love without stopping to count the cost; without pausing to determine whether the recipient of that love is an appropriate recipient. I experience God as “the Ground of all Being,” who gives me the courage to be all that I can be. If that is what God means to me then I worship this God by “living fully, loving wastefully and being all that I am capable of being.” My mission as a Christian is not “to convert the heathen” as we once asserted, it is rather to assist in the task of helping all people “to live fully, to love wastefully and to be all that they are capable of being.” This is a Christianity grounded in a radical understanding of humanity.

The reason I call it Christian and the reason I claim my identity as a Christian is that when I look at Jesus, I see in him a life fully lived, a love wastefully given and the courage to be himself in all circumstances, even when people are seeking to make him their king on Palm Sunday or when they were seeking to put him to death on Good Friday. So Jesus is the human life through whom the meaning and the presence of God is mediated to me. I can then join with St. Paul in the assertion that God was in Christ.

John Shelby Spong

Dedication Prayer

by His Holiness, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama

May all beings everywhere

plagued by sufferings of body and mind,

obtain an ocean of happiness and joy

by virtue of my merits.

May no living creature suffer,

commit evil or ever fall ill.

May no one be afraid or belittled,

with a mind weighed down by depression.

May the blind see forms,

and the deaf hear sounds.

May those whose bodies are worn with toil

Be restored on finding repose.

May the naked find clothing,

the hungry find food.

May the thirsty find water

and delicious drink

May the poor find wealth,

those weak with sorrow find joy.

May the forlorn find hope

constant happiness and prosperity.

May there be timely rains

and bountiful harvests.

May all medicines be effective

and wholesome prayers bear fruit.

May all who are sick and ill

quickly be freed from their ailments.

Whatever diseases there are in the world

may they never occur again.

May the frightened cease to be afraid

and those bound be freed.

May the powerless find power

and may people everywhere think of benefiting each other.

  In the Kalamasutra, Buddha said:

Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it.
Do not believe in anything because it is spoken and rumored by many.
Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books.
Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders.
Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations.
But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.