Life Is Good and God Is Great
A meditation on gratitude
Let me tell you about my morning… and it has been a beautiful morning. Let me tell you about this week… and it has been a beautiful week.
Everything went “wrong” and turned out oddly better. At this point I am beginning to believe that life is conspiring to give me grace, beauty, and a sense of joy. I am beginning to experience more fully that I live in an ever-creative, embracing reality that always exceeds and overflows my near-sighted expectations.
I expected to play ultimate frisbee today, and I hopped on my bike to meet the group only to be met by a youth soccer tournament taking up the whole field. “Oh, well,” I mused, “I guess I will just continue riding through this cool and beautiful fall day along the bike path.” As I ride, everything I had been intending to “work on” came to me like magic. Perhaps this is how God “sings my body electric”, as the Walt Whitman expression goes. A song of of effortless support enters my heart and head as I ride along. My body feels the gratefulness of this morning.
I had worried about how I might communicate, to the math class I am teaching to nursing students, that I will not be allowed to change their class to in-person, due to some regulation around it being listed as an online class. (I know, doesn’t make sense does it?) But the divine thought entered my head that I could have “office hours” beforehand, pair up students to help each other, and count homework more as a participation grade than slaving over every problem for every student. I would just use their problem-solving as a graceful guide to their struggles, and work with them directly (or have them work with fellow students) until they got the problems down enough to pass the tests.
I am preparing to facilitate a seminar on diversity this Tuesday for the entire college staff (one in the morning for colleague-to-colleague and one in the afternoon for faculty-to-student). With a heart soaring along on a leaf-strewn bike path, I realized that I could use the four foundational questions I devised for my class on counseling: “Who Am I?” (self), “Who Are You?” (other), “Who are We?” (relationship), and “Who is Us?” (humanity). That is really what “diversity” boils down to anyway doesn’t it. By examining, coming to know, and honoring myself, I become calm. By coming to know others as they are, I cease to react. By honoring both of us, I look to co-create mutual, powerful, positive relationships. By “zooming out” and seeing the ocean, the cosmos that we all exist within, I approach the profundity of life and avoid its pettiness.
God also has a huge sense of humor as well as grace. Within the last week, I dropped out of a spiritual direction program I found to have neither spirit nor direction. And yet my own spirit led me to, of all things, a Facebook ad for the The Teacher Project, a cutting-edge education support platform run by a bunch of young people in England, which provides an amazing framework and support for starting and growing my own spiritual education courses, a lifelong dream.
I get notified by a “dating concierge” service (that I paid very little money for), that they are arranged a date for me this past Friday at a nice restaurant in Dublin, Ohio (with its own vegan menu, no less). The date was involving, relaxing, and filled with interesting conversation, and simply very enjoyable. No doubts or fears emerge, wondering about if this person was right for me. Grace and gratitude descend again, and I simply welcome the experience as one of learning and joy. Isn’t it funny what can happen when you don’t calculate, gauge, control, and expect? Serendipity is free to breathe and spirit is given room to roam.
This grace and gratefulness is not a contrivance, or a product of belief, or an excuse to make me feel better. Real benefits come from these heavenly and benevolent clouds of unknowing to rest in my grateful being. Not that this is simply about receiving. Grace demands much MORE of you and me spiritually, but in the currency of vulnerability, openness, and humility, rather than control and self-determined effort.
If we but answer the call, we need only respond with this one prayer (as Meister Eckhart says): “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”
All blessings,
Zeus