The essays in this unit help us discover how the ordinary events in our
lives call us to a deeper connection with ourselves and the Holy.
Section 1: Deepening Our Inner Journey
| Sample excerpt from Self Love and Intimacy with God |
| The route to self-love, I believe, lies in understanding deep within ourselves that we are loved by God with no reservations. Imagine the difference in your life if you could operate out of a belief that you are loved and accepted instead of judged, shamed, hated, pushed, denied, shunned, ignored or abandoned. Unconditional love: no payments, no expectations, no hoops. It’s awesome just to imagine it. Even pondering the idea of being loved is a major turning point on the spiritual journey. Accepting God’s love allows us to love ourselves, then to love our neighbors. |
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Section 2: Crises, Fear and Anger as Portals for the Holy
| Sample excerpt from Crisis as Portals for God |
| I woke up one morning last spring with an anxiety reaction, which included an increased heartbeat, trembling and the fear that I was about to have a full-blown panic attack. This reaction forced me to face a truth in my life: I couldn’t work any more. My heart was no longer connected to my work and the anxiety was a warning sign that I needed to reassess my life. |
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Section 3: Pilgrimages and Retreats as Spiritual Deepening
| Sample excerpt from Spiritual Pilgrimage: Making a Deep Connection |
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Spiritual pilgrimages are thin places in our lives; they take us to a part of ourselves that is hard to access during our busy days and active lives. Since we are making the effort to connect with God at a deeper level on our pilgrimage, we are likely to encounter the Holy, but almost never in the way we expected. That is what makes it a pilgrimage and not a tourist trip: the intent and the holy connection.
Thin places , according to Marcus Borg, are times, locations or situations in which the boundary between the world of our ordinary experience and the world of the sacred may become porous; where the veil momentarily lifts and we behold the sacred; where our hearts are opened. Thin places may go unprocessed, since we often regard them as either too unusual to talk about, too commonplace to take seriously or too awesome to face. Thin places may give us glimmers of what the saints are blinded by, yet on many occasions we go on after experiencing them as if nothing had happened. Frederick Buechner says, “To go on as though something has happened, even though we are not sure what it was or just where we are supposed to go with it, is to enter the dimension of life that religion is a word for.” |
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