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Wisdom Quotes
People should think less about what they ought to do and more about what they ought to be.
*Meister Eckhart
Religious practice can be another rope wrapped tightly around the self or a tether that connects you to God: it is all about how you use it, and how you use it is all about how you are who uses it. Like all things, religion draws many persons closer to God and, at the same time, serves for many persons to become more distant from God.
*Brian K. Wilcox
Wisdom Stories
A Sufi tale...
A Sufi went on pilgrimage to Mecca. At the outskirts of the city, he lay himself down by the road, for he was fatigued from the long walk. Barely had he fallen asleep when an irate pilgrim awakened him, complaining, "This is the time when all believers bow their heads toward Mecca, but you have your feet pointed toward the holy shrine, instead. What sort of Muslim are you?"
The Sufi did not move; he merely opened his eyes and spoke, "My dear Brother, would you do me a favor by placing my feet where they won't be pointing to the Lord?"
Another story...
A woman had attended Mass every morning for many years. She missed a morning. So, she went to Confession. "Father," she said, "I have sinned. Please pray for my forgiveness." "My child, how have you sinned?" responded the Priest. The woman said, "I missed Mass this morning." The Priest replied, "Dear one, I will not pray for God to forgive you for missing Mass. I will pray for God to forgive you for thinking He cares that you missed Mass."
Comments
Religion, like life generally, provides a stage to behold everything from the pathetically silly to the pleasantly sublime. When we pass through religion to God, we are much blessed; when get stuck in rules and ways of faith and religious institution, we are bound to another captivity.
Jesus made this clear. The Church seems quickly to have forgotten it; we still tend to forget it. Can we even "recall" the freedom in Spirit and Truth that Jesus taught his first followers? Even the Protestants, for the most part, in seeking to reform the Church, followed in the same meticulous, materialistic, and doctrinaire religiousness.
We miss the delicious fruit, when we keep chewing on the rind. As Eckhart reminds us ~ but, of course, the Catholic Church declared that spiritually enlightened man heretical, for he went beyond the rind of its institutional faith ~ we would do well to pay more attention to our state of being than to our state of doing.
Better to have your heart pointed toward God than your feet, do you not think? Of course, here I mean by the pointing of feet any act of religion. We of different faiths can apply this to ourselves and hopefully find our religion more divine by making it less a matter of what to do and more a matter of how to be. If we get being right, doing will more easily follow; if we focus on doing, we tend to miss-do and often do rightly for all the wrong motives.
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*The first Wisdom story is from Anthony de Mello. Taking Flight. The second is from Brian K. Wilcox.
Brian will respond to requests pertaining to seeking a Spiritual Mentor. He offers retreats, workshops, and classes in such subjects as Contemplative Prayer (he trains in Visualized Praying, Centering Prayer, Christian Meditation, The Jesus Prayer, ...); Contemplative Living; A Spiritual Understanding of the Lord's Prayer; Philippians and Spiritual Community; Spiritual Growth From Matter to Spirit; Spiritual Use of the Scripture.
See any major on-line bookseller for his book An Ache for Union.
For replies and biographical information, and submission to "The Light Shines" daily devotionals ~ a ministry of Christ Community United Methodist Church, Punta Gorda, FL, see next page:
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