I was listening to the radio yesterday and there was a refugee talking about the asylum seeker situation, she said this: if your house is burning and the only way to escape is a rickety and broken ladder you are still going to use it.
If only more people could hear this analogy.
I read this post by Christop today.
One thing about giving away possessions is that it makes you more dependent on other people.
Yesterday day, our car key broke in the car boot. An inconvenience at best, but Geoff was out a fair way from home, the RACV would’ve taken 3 hours. Back to one car (after a year of borrowing my in-laws spare while they were overseas) we had to call friends. I felt bad calling friends, for interrupting their Sunday afternoon. These friends didn’t bat an eyelid, they just came.
It is interesting, dependance, because it asks something really quite small of our pride but gives so much back. It is hard though, to see or be confident in the much.
“It is almost impossible to overestimate the value of true humility and its power in the spiritual life. For the beginning of humility is the beginning of blessedness and the consummation of humility is the perfection of all joy. Humility contains in itself the answer to all the great problems of the life of the soul. It is the only key to faith, with which the spiritual life begins: for faith and humility are inseparable. In perfect humility all selfishness disappears and your soul no longer lives for itself or in itself for God: and it is lost and submerged in Him and transformed into Him.†– from “New Seeds of Contemplationâ€Â Thomas Merton
Heaven wheels above you, displaying to you her eternal glories, and still your eyes are on the ground – Dante Alighieri
It’s totally naff that the ‘heaven’ theme is number 7. I hate cliches.
We do walk around with our eyes on the ground. Sometimes I think that my eyes aren’t anywhere at all, so easy to get lost inside your own brain and wrapped in your own internal world.
The Word became flesh, and here then is some kind of heaven mashed with earth. It’s beautiful. It’s here yet not. My awareness is poorer than I might yearn for. Daily I hope to ask to be woken up. Daily I hope to ask. Over and over and over.
Hold on, hold on to your old ways
Or put off, put off every old face.
And I know, I know you are changed out.
And I hope, I hope you’re arranged out.
But I’m still asleep
And you woke me up again.– Sufjan Stevens
