Be still and know that I am God

Spiritual resource to share: fulfillment



Be still and know that I am God.Quiet the noisy rush of daily duties, arguments and demands, and remember God.

Be still and know that I am.In this stillness, contemplate the very nature of the I AM - "the all-knowing, all-seeing, all-acting, all-wise, all-loving, and eternal; Principle; Mind; Soul; Spirit; Life; Truth; Love; all substance; intelligence."

Be still and know.Soak up the confident knowing of God's gentle presence and peaceful power.

Be still.Affirm, again, that all is well and under God's government. Out of the quiet peaceful space of God's love comes the form of all of our human activities.

Be.
You are because God is the I AM. You are because I AM.











To share your thoughts on this or to explore this idea further, please feel free to be in contact with me, add your own comments below, email this article to a friend, or add to the healing finds and sites on the web to the right.
photo by Gabe Korinek
© text by Kim Korinek, CS

nature's healing balm - revisited

Spiritual resource to share: stillness and awe


A friend and I were talking about a recent transition we had made. During that time, we both needed to find healing and a new direction. And we both took off to the outdoors to give ourselves a space to do so.

I have always found it nourishing and reaffirming to be out in the open prairie, or under a pitch black sky looking at the startling clarity of stars and planets. These are the things that prompt my thought to consider the largeness and tenderness of God.


But I also know that wherever I am, I have my thought. And thought can be aligned with God in any situation, under any condition, and in any place.

I love this prayer and promise from the Bible: "For the mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed; but my kindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed, saith the Lord that hath mercy on thee."

The fortitude of mountains, the yielding and playful spontaneity of rivers, and the permanence of the very air we breathe teach us lessons about God. And the biggest lesson is that strength, spontaneity and permanence is everywhere God is, everywhere we are.

Click here for an incredible display of life on earth.

What prompts you to feel God's presence?



To share your thoughts on this or to explore this idea further, please feel free to be in contact with me, add your own comments below, email this article to a friend, or add to the healing finds and sites on the web to the right!

Be still

Spiritual resource to share: quietness and peace

It's no mistake that when Mary Baker Eddy talks about prayer in her book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, that she repeatedly urges us to vigorously shut out the clamor of daily life and concerns.

"To enter into the heart of prayer, the door of the erring senses must be closed."
"Lips must be mute and materialism silent."
"The closet (of prayer) ...shuts out sinful sense, but lets in Truth, Life and Love."
"....we must enter the closet and shut the door."
"We must close the lips and silence the material senses."

Maybe it speaks to the discipline needed to actually get to the point of stillness and openness in our thought where we can feel God's peace and warmth. This type of prayer affirms the fundamental, primitive nature of God's goodness, aligns consciousness with all that is pure and true and makes us aware of God's full approval and delight in His creation, that is, in us.

A well-loved poem reflects this expectant prayer:

Doves*
William B. Lynch

I want
the words to flutter
around you and land softly
on your shoulders in peace.
I want you to hear them
tell you of heaven.

Stand still
and they will gather.








*From the book Ideas on Wings - a collection of poems from the Christian Science periodicals, The Christian Science Publishing Society, Boston, MA 1978
photo © Igor Nikolayev - Fotolia.com

To share your thoughts on this or to explore this idea further, please feel free to be in contact with me, add your own comments below, email this article to a friend, or add to the healing finds and sites on the web to the right.

now let's just take a moment.........

Spiritual resource to share: stillness

I'd like to take a moment from the raging headlines today and write about moments and why it is hard to catch and keep them.

I'm remembering the time when my exchange student daughter and I visited her high school for the last time before she flew back home. "Wait," she said as she ran around the school taking pictures of her old classrooms, the hallways, her old locker. She took as many pictures as her camera would hold.

Like my son, who told me to wait as we drove off to the airport to see him off for Germany. And so I slowed down and made stops along the way as he took in a long look at our house, the well traveled roads that he walked, ran and biked, the cinema, the restaurant where he worked, as he wouldn't be seeing these again for a whole year.

I can relate. Tons of times I have wanted to capture a moment that I could take out and swim in again and again. But life is rich. It is full of moments and they just keep coming.

So what is in a moment and what makes it memorable? More than a place or a thing – a memorable moment tells us all of what is spiritually rich about our lives.

One of my favorite poets is Godfrey John who has this spiritual take on ‘moments’ in his poem:

“This Moment of Your Living”

You’re alive – not merely existing. You are: you’re not trying to be. Discover the life of the moment- this moment of your living.

NOT YOU
Not you – as an amalgam of happenings, you-as-you-were a decade, a moment, ago: to ask What was I? is to be blind to the fact of presence. Man is not a chronology. Not you as a mosaic of hopes and fears: to ask What will I be? Is to stop discovering. Not you content with a status quo: a cup of years spilling satisfaction over the hour. Not even you-as-you-becoming --

BUT YOU BEING
You spiritually. You in the action of being you where being is the emanation of I AM. “I AM hath sent me unto you”: Being, God, impels man, breathes through him Love’s incentives. Soul’s expression now, you go as His fragrance in every place.
This is your felt unity with Him. Moment by moment.
Soul plants pure desires along your days. The innocence of what you are flares through the guilt of what you are not. Like cyclamen in the winter sun: not withholding, not seeking to hold- but giving out help simply by being what it is- moment by moment.

YOU TIMELESSLY
Not you in the moment. But this moment of you-- brilliantly, immaculately. Knowing is being. Infinitely. Mind’s allness, Mind’s oneness never stops being known. As man-idea, woman-idea--one idea-- in God’s thought, you are instantly
understood, always being known; you have Soul’s mobility within this hourless
knowing: the dance fulfilling the dancer without end, as in beauty in the unspoken, as rhythm in what is till.

DISCONVERING
To ask Who am I? is to be irrelevant. To ask What am I? is to be blind to substance, to the isness of Spirit where you are.
Ask, How am I being?
Man is what he’s being-- Love’s pure idea-- birthlessly real.
Love’s meaning is your meaning at each moment of new awakening- at the precision –timing of Principle. Here you are learning to be what you are.
Beautifully. Brilliantly. Preciously. Agelessly. Mightily. Deathlessly. Yes, as a psalm spills over you. Yes, in this fond discovering of you. You are what you are because I AM that I AM. NOW.
Moment by moment by moment by moment

copyright 1978 Christian Science Publishing Society
from book Idea on Wings

To share your thoughts on this or to explore this idea further, please feel free to be in contact with me, add your own comments below, email this article to a friend, or add to the healing finds and sites on the web to the right.

Practicing Patience - revisited

Spiritual resource to share: old inspirational favorites

It has been almost two years that I've been blogging and I am happily surprised at how much the conversation on spirituality, prayer and healing is on the web. I have been engaged and linked to many other sites. This one article (below) has been included in about a dozen other ezines and is probably one of my most viewed/read articles. It was written when our family just moved from the Boston area to the northwoods of Wisconsin.

Stillness.. Quiet..... Peace.....Lots of it. Lots and lots of it.

It has been a couple of quiet weeks. I started getting anxious. "Father, is there something more I should be doing?" I asked God.

Busy is good. According to my recent hospital volunteer training in culturally competent care, I learned that Americans consider busy-ness to signify importance. (As in "Love to talk with you now, but gotta run. I am very important.") It follows that busy-ness is second to the I-gotta-fix-it drive. Although I thought the I-gotta-fix-it approach was a guy thing, I started seeing how these two elements were part of my operating system and they were jamming it up.

I am not busy - I could make myself so, but that is not the point. I have little to fix. I have fixed most everything and little is coming my way to fix. Hmmmm. I thought. Not busy. Little to fix. SO then who am I?

I started thinking about patience. It didn't start off well.I reasoned that if I can tolerate patience for a while, then later, I get to be busy and do stuff. I moved on to thinking that if I get the right thinking thing down, double that with the patience, then I get to go somewhere.

OK, I needed another angle. I think the point may be to get beyond a busy life to a meaningful life.

When I did whitewater kayaking, we had a name for those who stayed in the calm waters of the eddy, waiting to figure out how to do a rapid -- sometimes waiting for long periods of time. We called them "eddy flowers."

Being an eddy flower was an anxious thing to be. You could get swamped by indecision, doubt and grow increasingly intimidated by the rapid ahead of you. Far better it was to determine your course and just do it. In fact, that is how I have handled most of my life. See. Pray. Do. Quickly, efficiently, full throttle.

The "aha" thought came today that now, in this quiet time, there is actually lots of life going on. Perhaps I am not in the eddy at all, but am flowing along with the current of life. Perhaps it is a new river, and instead of being a roaring class IV-V, it is a calm class I-II, teeming with life and gorgeous every splash of the way.

As I am typing now, my family is going about their usual routine, and I am looking out over a stand of birch, maple and pine trees with the wind flickering all the leaves. This is the epitome of pleasantness.

In the quiet of the last few mornings, I had a distinct thought about someone I love very much. Although I would never suspect that this person would ask for healing through prayer - through Christian Science treatment, I thought through how I would pray for this person if called on. I opened my favorite book on prayer and healing, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, randomly fell on some ideas and started praying.

The next day, I was told this person was in the emergency room. I went to visit him and he commented that he was going to call me to ask for treatment the night before. We talked and what we shared made me realize that in the quiet of those few days, I had been mentally preparing to be of help to him. And he was helped.

I realized that there was never a moment lost. What we gain in moments of stillness is our strength in moments of need.


Here are some wonderful bits about presentness, moments and stillness.

"The present moment holds infinite riches beyond your wildest dreams but you will only enjoy them to the extent of your faith and love. The more a soul loves, the more it longs, the more it hopes, the more it finds. The will of God is manifest in each moment, an immense ocean which only the heart fathoms insofar as it overflows with faith, trust and love." — Jean-Pierre De Caussade in The Sacrament of the Present Moment

"Yet more and more I find that dwelling in the present moment, in the face of everything that would call us out of it, is our highest spiritual discipline. More boldly, I would say that our very presentness is our salvation; the present moment, entered into fully, is our gateway to eternal life." — Philip Simmons in Learning to Fall

"The best spiritual type of Christly method for uplifting human thought and imparting divine Truth, is stationary power, stillness, and strength; and when this spiritual ideal is made our own, it becomes the model for human action.."--Mary Baker Eddy in Retrospection and Introspection

Photo by Gabe Korinek


To share your thoughts on this or to explore this idea further, please feel free to be in contact with me, add your own comments below, email this article to a friend, or add to the healing finds and sites on the web to the right.

traveling down a forest road

Spiritual resource to share: the fullness of life wherever we are

It was inky dark when I returned home from dropping my son off at school a few days ago. I decided to take the forested roads home, even though it was more isolated. I could only see what was directly in front of me and above me. The stars were brilliant against such a black sky.

At one point, I stopped the car and rolled down the windows to hear a full chorus of tree frogs and crickets. However dark and isolated the roads were that night, there was that full force of life going on all around.

The poem "O Gentle Presence" by Mary Baker Eddy came to thought. It was so appropriate. I hope you enjoy its quietness, restfulness and assurance:

O gentle presence, peace and joy and power;
O Life divine, that owns each waiting hour,
Thou Love that guards the nestling's faltering flight!
Keep Thou my child on upward wing tonight.

Love is our refuge; only with mine eye
Can I behold the snare, the pit, the fall:
His habitation high is here, and nigh,
His arm encircles me, and mine, and all.

O make me glad for every scalding tear,
For hope deferred, ingratitude, disdain!
Wait, and love more for every hate, and fear
No ill, — since God is good, and loss is gain.

Beneath the shadow of His mighty wing;
In that sweet secret of the narrow way,
Seeking and finding, with the angels sing:
"Lo, I am with you alway," — watch and pray.

No snare, no fowler, pestilence or pain;
No night drops down upon the troubled breast,
When heaven's aftersmile earth's tear-drops gain,
And mother finds her home and heav'nly rest.





To share your thoughts on this or to explore this idea further, please feel free to be in contact with me, add your own comments below, email this article to a friend, or add to the healing finds and sites on the web to the right.

speak once...listen twice

Spiritual resource to share: listening





Speak once, listen twice - I actually heard that at a community meeting recently. Sage advice. And powerful, too, if you can do it!

My husband has been meeting with a men's group for over 15 years. The group has actually been meeting for decades with men going in and out as they wish. There has been a core group of his friends that have been meeting now for over 10 years.

Once when all the families of this group were together, I came up to the group and joined their conversation. I had something to add and spoke. As I was speaking I had this funny sensation. It took me a while to figure out: They were all quietly listening intently. I realized that this group has so diligently crafted the skill of listening so well, that it was startling!

There are people who are excellent listeners. (I count Christian Science practitioners as some of the best listeners I know!) They take time for the person speaking. They give their full attention. They silently engage and in so doing, they create an accepting attitude so the speaker feels a freedom to let his or her thoughts flow.

There's a lot to be said for good listening. Browsing the internet proves this to be the case. Check out these quotes from the international group Listen.org:

The most basic of all human needs is the need to understand and be understood. The best way to understand people is to listen to them. — Ralph Nichols

Effective listeners remember that "words have no meaning - people have meaning." — Larry Barker

Sometimes the most revealing part of a message isn't found in the words themselves but in the subtle messages wrapped around those words. Failure to pick up on these "secret messages" may leave you blind to what is really being communicated. . . . — Dianne Booher

Our first responsibility as effective listeners is to understand ourselves as communicators. ... (listeners)should ...know themselves. — Carolyn Coakley

Every person in this life has something to teach me -- and as soon as I accept that, I open myself to truly listening. — Catherine Doucette

The first step to effective listening is to stop talking! — Ken Fracaro

And here is some more fun stuff about listening:

LISTENING STYLES

• People listen through one of four primary styles, including people oriented,
  time oriented, action oriented and content oriented.
• Females are more likely to be people-oriented and males are more likely to be action, content, or time oriented (Barker & Watson, 2000).
• 40 % of individuals choose to listen with two or more distinct styles
  (Weaver, Richendoller, & Kirtley, 1995).
• Those with a high people-orientation have a low apprehension for receiving
  information (Bodie & Villaume, 2003).

But do listening styles differ across cultural barriers? Yes, says an Oxford Study:

Do the listening styles preferred by young adults in Germany, Israel, and
the USA differ significantly?

In order to address this question, college students in all three countries completed versions of the Listening Styles Profile (LSP; Watson et al. 1995) presented in their native languages. Factor analysis revealed four predominant constructs underlying the LSP, which were designated as people, action, content, and time listening styles.

Comparisons between the three cultures revealed distinctively different patterns of listening style preferences, with Germans preferring the action style, Israelis
endorsing the content style, and Americans favoring both the people and time styles.

And now, if you are really ambitious, you can even give yourself a test!

So, if you have hung with me thus far, and are still hungry for more listening ideas, let's go to the underlying basis of listening: LOVE.

The still, small voice of Love is what we listen for, and out of that "deep listening, life happens." Regardless of culture, age, circumstance or time, the love, respect and dignity given to the person you are listening to communicates volumes. Click here to hear one woman's account of listening to divine Love.



To share your thoughts on this or to explore this idea further, please feel free to be in contact with me, add your own comments below, email this article to a friend, or add to the healing finds and sites on the web to the right.

Comfort on every side

Spiritual resource to share: comfort


In this Valentine's Day, saturated with poems of love, I thought I would write about comfort.

Anyway, an old favorite German movie "Wings of Desire" by Wim Wenders depicts angels as men in trenchcoats giving comfort and companionship to the mortals they are assigned to. The moodiness and tender beauty of this movie left me with the tangible feeling of angels among us.

In Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy defines angels as "God's thoughts passing to man." We can feel, right now, that we have angels - Love's messages - surrounding us as we go about our day. And these angels are never more close than when we are grieving.

I had an amazing weekend with an amazing friend. She had experienced three major losses in her life recently and was working through this. It was heartening to hear her speak of these "angels" that came to her in different ways: as a friend to spend time with, memories of wonderful times and the deep lessons learned from those who had gone on, poems, getting out in the fresh air, fun movies, etc.

Other angels included recognizing the wisdom of forgiveness and the strength of the spiritual growth she garnered from those she loves. In each moment, her needs were being met. When she needed quiet, it was there, or distraction, or release from sadness, there was complete love and complete comfort.

I was most touched by how gentle all of this was. This was in the middle of a busy weekend that included training for the Birkebeiner, attending a conference about the proposed Department of Peace, lunch at Sara's Table with its owner, a remarkeable former state senator and other earnest and articulate women, attending church and having a birthday celebration.

Life is always full, and the people we love (and the people we leave) are indelibly woven into the fabric of our lives, leaving their unique reflection of divine Love's goodness, grace and spontaneity.

We are left with angels of comfort, moving us from one stage of experience to the next, making sure that we see higher, deeper and wider views of the Life and Love that is given to us from God.


So, for this Valentine's Day, I wish you all love and the rich knowledge that we are never alone, but are comforted on every side as we live and grow.







To share your thoughts on this or to explore this idea further, please feel free to be in contact with me, add your own comments below, email this article to a friend, or add to the healing finds and sites on the web to the right.

Practicing patience

Stillness.. Quiet..... Peace.....Lots of it. Lots and lots of it.
It has been a couple of quiet weeks. I started getting anxious. "Father, is there something more I should be doing?" I asked God.

Busy is good. According to my recent hospital volunteer training in culturally competent care, I learned that Americans consider busy-ness to signify importance. (As in "Love to talk with you now, but gotta run. I am very important.") It follows that busy-ness is second to the I-gotta-fix-it drive. Although I thought the I-gotta-fix-it approach was a guy thing, I started seeing how these two elements were part of my operating system and they were jamming it up.

I am not busy - I could make myself so, but that is not the point. I have little to fix. I have fixed most everything and little is coming my way to fix. Hmmmm. I thought. Not busy. Little to fix. SO then who am I?

I started thinking about patience. It didn't start off well.
I reasoned that if I can tolerate patience for a while, then later, I get to be busy and do stuff. I moved on to thinking that if I get the right thinking thing down, double that with the patience, then I get to go somewhere.

OK, I needed another angle.
I think the point may be to get beyond a busy life to a meaningful life.

When I kayaked, we had a name for those who stayed in the calm waters of the eddy, waiting to figure out how to do a rapid -- sometimes waiting for long periods of time. We called them "eddy flowers." Being an eddy flower was an anxious thing to be. You could get swamped by indecision, doubt and grow increasingly intimidated by the rapid ahead of you. Far better it was to determine your course and just do it. In fact, that is how I have handled most of my life. See. Pray. Do. Quickly, efficiently, full throttle.

The "aha" thought came today that now, in this quiet time, there is actually lots of life going on. Perhaps I am not in the eddy at all, but am flowing along with the current of life. Perhaps it is a new river, and instead of being a roaring class IV, it is a calm class I-II, teeming with life and gorgeous every splash of the way. As I am typing now, my family is going about their usual Satuurday routine, and I am looking out over a stand of birch, maple and pine trees with big, fat snowflakes falling. This is the epitome of pleasantness.

In the quiet of the last few mornings, I had a distinct thought about someone I love very much. Although I would never suspect that this person would ask for Christian Science treatment, I thought through how I would pray for this person if called on. I opened Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy at random and started praying with the ideas that I was reading.

The next day, I was told this person was in the emergency room. I went to visit him and he commented that he was going to call me to ask for treatment the night before. We talked and what he shared made me realize that in the quiet of those few days, I had been mentally preparing to be of help to him.

There was never a moment lost.

Here are some wonderful bits about presentness, moments and stillness.

The present moment holds infinite riches beyond your wildest dreams but you
will only enjoy them to the extent of your faith and love. The more a soul loves, the more it longs, the more it hopes, the more it finds. The will of God is manifest in each moment, an immense ocean which only the heart fathoms insofar as it overflows with faith, trust and love. — Jean-Pierre De Caussade in The Sacrament of the Present Moment

The present is holy ground. — Alfred North Whitehead quoted in Teaching Your
Children About God by David Wolpe

Yet more and more I find that dwelling in the present moment, in the face of
everything that would call us out of it, is our highest spiritual discipline. More boldly, I would say that our very presentness is our salvation; the present moment, entered into fully, is our gateway to eternal life. — Philip Simmons in Learning to Fall

Rushing around smartly is no proof of accomplishing much.
--Mary Baker Eddy in Miscellaneous Writings

Love for God and man is the true incentive incentive in both healing and teaching. Love inspires, illumines, designates, and leads the way. Right motives give pinions to thought, and strength and freedom to speech and action. Love is priestess at the altar of Truth. Wait patiently for divine Love to move upon the waters of mortal mind, and form the perfect concept. Patience must "have her perfect work." --Mary Baker Eddy in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures

I am in my right place. God has graciously given this to me. Abundance. Potential. Gratitude. Grace. Stillness. This is what fills my days.





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