He excused it because he was poor—

He cried bitterly.  He had been caught stealing.  At the police station, the boy spoke of his boyhood: When his mother went to the outdoor market, she balanced a basket on her head and carried him in a pouch on her back.  Passing stands piled high with food, she would bend down to look at some items.  That’s when the little boy picked up whatever he fancied and threw it into the basket.  The child’s wrong behavior was not corrected and continued as he grew up.  He excused it because he was poor.

When I heard of this incident, I knew how important it was for the boy to acknowledge his wrongdoing and not to repeat it.  But I thought, “Didn’t his tears speak of his rebellion against dishonesty?  Didn’t his spiritual innocence call out to be recognized?”

An insight into our spiritual nature initiates moral transformation by denying evil a base of operation – and so begins to regenerate thought and life.  We recognize infinite Mind as the exclusive cause of man and therefore the source of his purity.  We realize that because Mind’s innocence is by reflection man’s innocence, man’s innocence is intact.  Humanity’s struggle to be free from evil, and its yearning for something better, testify to the inherent innocence of man. 

EMH

 An excerpt from my article Innocence—man’s true heritage, published in 1995 

What you once hated can become your helper...

A poet once said, “’[Let God] be your eyes and your hands and your loving.  When you do exactly that, the thing you have hated will become your helper.  A certain preacher always prayed long with enthusiasm for thieves and muggers: “Let your mercy, O Lord, cover their insolence.”  He didn’t pray for the good, but only for the blatantly cruel. His congregation asked, “Why?” “ Because,” he said, “they have done me such a generous favor.  Every time I turn toward the things they like, I run into these thieves and muggers, and they beat me, leaving me nearly dead in the road, and I understand again, that what they hanker after is not what I hanker after. They keep me on the spiritual path. That’s why I honor them and pray for them.  Those that make you return, for whatever reason, to God, be grateful to them.” (The Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks, p.176.)

When the opportunity of a right idea of God and of man reaches us, and we trust and follow it consistently, it is our rescue, because we’ll change as it changed Jacob in a twinkle of an eye, and we can say as he has said, “I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved” (Gen. 32:30).  Like Jacob, we too should not let go of a right idea, or its glorious spiritual light. We should not say, “Ah, now I have seen, and now I know!” And then we turn away from it--go back to our old ways of thinking, talking, and behaving--instead we stay with one right idea about God and man, and everything else in our life increasingly will change for the better.

A challenge to human perceptions of existence does not need to confuse us.  But if it does, and perhaps we unwittingly allow it to undermine our confidence in God, and in ourselves—we have to pause for a moment!  A challenge is only challenging a false base of thinking.  A prophet once said, “I poured forth my soul into myself.”  I understand this to mean: Learn to know yourself.  Leave behind your mortal, negative, morbid, and fearful concepts of self, and then, without laboring hard and long, you’ll gain a quicker sense of Who you really are: a beloved inhabitant of God’s kingdom of harmony—the vast kingdom of Mind. 

--Eva-Maria

Wide Enough

God lighted art is like the

Art of a rainbow—hinting at

The eternal beauty of all good,

All that really is in wonderful grandeur,

All effortlessly unfolds, is

Individual, expansive, reflecting the infinite,

All being

Expressing every thought in full obedience 

To the action of the ever-present Christ

The omni-good of constant unbound grace

Cast in colors and light on every shore

A rainbow wide from black to white.

Vincent Hogrefe

Published 1997

 

From a great poet…

To search for God:

        slow, slow and steady as a river -

        not fanatical, but calm, serene towards the goal --

To know this journey stops for no locality,

To feel contentment though none may ever

notice or care how life's spent,

To be aware and that a current in between, 

                            carries yet loam as well as sand,

        changes you 

                            like the lifting of mist.

       In accepting this, 

         one need not lose heart

              when disheartening thoughts arise, but

                            agree--

       Life lives itself accordingly,

                              to give what flows and flows---

 Vh Lyr