 is A friend of mine who lives in Italy was traveling in Siena recently and posted a fresco to her Facebook page of the disciples receiving the Holy Spirit from a church. As I gazed upon this photo I realized that, like the disciples, the love of God is all around us and is visible in each other when we look for it.
Curiously, the disciples could not see the flame of the Holy Spirit in themselves but could witness it in their fellow disciples. Maybe not so curious. Perhaps the message here is that in order to find God in ourselves we must seek it (and see it) in others. And even if we don't initially have this view of life, it is possible to generate it. The gathered meeting is one way to shift worry, fear, stress, and anxiety by just being open to something larger than oneself. There is no formula for this, but one way I have found that works for me is to just imagine the flame of the Holy Spirit descending on each person in the meeting. I also recall some good thing about that person and if I don't know them I can simply imagine that they are loved by someone whether they are a mother, father, brother, sister, son or daughter. Besides humans, we also see the creative force of love at work in every biologic process. Just consider a garden. It gives joyfully of itself for no reason. Even those things which seem destructive, like the death of living things, we see the creative force of decomposition to feed the next phase of life. Compost is the creative force of microbes even though to our eye it looks like death and decomposition. And so the contextual shift available to us to is recalibrate our view of life to ALL IS WELL. Life is working just as it was designed to. The queries I am contemplating today are:
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This blog was set up to post content of interest to Old Chatham Quaker members and attenders. Posts related to one's own personal spiritual journey, reports based on interviews with others, and reflections on Quaker-related topics are welcome. Posts by individuals are personal expressions and do not necessarily reflect those of the Meeting as a whole.
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December 2023
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