My 2nd loveletter

My 2nd loveletter

I would like to take a few quotations from Karen Armstrong’s book, The Spiral Staircase, to add here to show my appreciation for her journey, offerings, insights, and most of all, for the telling of her story that penetrates my heart more than words can say.

In her story I find my own hopes, struggles, and questions. I find In her story, compassion for; her life, and for my own. This deeper understanding of compassion for my self, deepens my compassion for the world.

Her book is so well written intellectually, and heartfelt. To find a mere passage is difficult. So I will begin with this one that describes ecstasy. For me it has been a struggle, once living in this place of ecstasy, and then at a loss to experience it, and unable to find it once again, knowing somehow it is the way in which I am to live, yet not understanding exactly what it is, or how it happens to be that emptiness occurs, and we are filled with divine movement.

Karen’s research has been more successful than my own. I care to understand and to have the grace to act according to the perfection of the universe, which I believe is our most natural way of living.

Quoting from The Spiral Staircase:

“The Greek, ekstasis, it will be recalled, simply means,” standing outside.” And transcendence means,” climbing above or beyond.”
This does not necessarily imply an exotic state of consciousness. For years I had longed to get to know God, to ascend to a higher plane of being, but I had never considered at length what it was you had to climb from. All the traditions tell us, one way or another, that we have to leave behind our inbuilt selfishness, with it’s greedy fears and cravings. We are, the great spiritual writers insist, most fully ourselves when we give ourselves away, and it is egotism that holds us back from that transcendent experience that has been called God, Nirvana, Brahman, or the Tao.

Further she communicates that she had assumed God was an objective fact, and approached God using the same kind of logical reflection that she had employed in her secular life. Rational analysis was useless for approaching God, and as a result of the empirical reasoning of the 16th and 17th centuries, Western people began talking of God as though he were an objective demonstrable fact. (I am paraphrasing). “The more intuitive disciplines of mythology and mysticism were discredited.” She says. This was the cause of many of the religious problems of our day, including my own.”

The research Karen has done is invaluable to the world today. She brings a gift of clarity and understanding in a story that cleaves to your own heart and soul, a story of the necessity of understanding and compassion. The historical depth of this understanding that she clarifies leads to a freedom of heart.

Romeow, aka Puddy, fast asleep, and unaware the rain has stopped at least momentarily. Outside my window, crows are hobbling around in the yard, apple trees are in bloom, and some of my ground covers are blooming, too. It is overcast here,
(ya think?) but the Sound is in sight and Whidbey Island beyond. I think I need a ferry ride across!