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