During the quiet of summer, when the sun shines brightly on everything I look at, I keep wanting to find words to express the gratefulness I feel for the people and nature around me. The words of Rabbi Rami Shapiro, which I recently became familiar with [Perennial Wisdom for the Spiritually Independent: Sacred Teachings—Annotated & Explained (Skylight Paths Publishing: 2013) xvi.], seem to capture this gratefulness I feel at those moments.
Shapiro says that we can “practice shifting our awareness from a limited self-centered self to the infinite divine Self.” He concretizes this by providing a metaphor which describes this reality. “Everything is a facet of the one thing. Think in terms of white light shining through a prism to reveal the full spectrum of color perceivable by the human eye: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Each of these colors is part of the original whole and cannot be separated from it—turn off the light source and the colors disappear. Now apply this metaphor to the world around and within you. Everything you see, think, feel, and imagine is part of and never apart from the same Source.”
May the practiced shifts in our perception of what and who we see before us become a magnetic force that allows us to more readily recognize the unfolding and transforming God-Source-messages we receive each day.
Mary Rachel Kuebelbeck, OSB
No comments:
Post a Comment