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Primitive religion is not believed, it is danced!

Arthur Darby Nock

Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
And only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

Elizabeth Browning



Sunday, April 28, 2019

we love out of fullness


It isn’t that loving others will make us feel fulfilled.  It’s the other way around:  when we feel fulfilled, we will spontaneously love our neighbors, love them unconditionally and without motivation, not in order to gain anything but as a result of our own fullness of being.

Meanwhile, the craving for secure and complete being drives us to bolster our petty, finite beings in all these miserable and destructive ways.
                                                              Beatrice Bruteau
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There is an old story about a man who had many faults
He did many things that people considered “sinful” and bad
But he attended a church that had a weekly “altar” call
A charismatic fellowship that took seriously the “filling” of the Holy Spirit

As the story goes each Sunday evening this man would sit through the sermon
and every Sunday he would become emotional and caught up in the moment
and every Sunday he would go forth to confess his sins and accept again
the grace of God

As he would wander forward to the altar he would call out, in a loud and fervent voice
“Fill me Jesus, fill me”  “Fill me Jesus, fill me”
He would leave renewed

Only to act the way he had always acted
Only to come back the next week and go through the some routine

Finally one Sunday, as we made his way forward calling “fill me Jesus, fill me”
A voice cried out from the congregation.
“Don’t do it Jesus, he leaks”

We all leak
All of us
We are such poor containers for the Sacred

And yet
And yet
This is our hope
This is the hope for the world

That we can be filled with God
And thus filled
Go forth in fullness rather than need
And love

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