Identity

"How does one seek union with God?"
"The harder you seek, the more distance you create between Him and you."
"So what does one do about the distance?"
"Understand that it isn't there."
"Does that mean that God and I are one?"
"Not one. Not two."
"How is that possible?"
"The sun and its light, the ocean and the wave, the singer and the song-not one. Not two."

From One Minute Wisdom by Anthony de Mello

Fat Tuesday: Making Visible Your Inner Self

Sitting around in sweats I couldn't wait to make a blog post about an excellent article on  The Style Imperative by Hara Estroff Marano in Psychology Today.

But I thought about Lent: how shallow to be focusing on Style in any way shape or form. And then I remembered:

It's Fat Tuesday

"Style is more character than clothes, more attitude than affluence. It's you making visible your inner self.


Whatever else it is, style is optimism made visible.

Style presumes that you are a person of interest, that the world is a place of interest, that life is worth making the effort for.

True style, in addition to being irrevocably social, is even morally responsible. Consumption isn't promiscuous or random, at the whim of the marketplace or the urging of marketers. Rather, it is focused on what is personally suitable and expressive."

From 'The Style Imperative' by Hara Estroff Marano

above: A person of interest, Mardi Gras 1977

Kaleidoscopes and Lent

Kaleidoscopes found their way into my active imagination recently. When an image sticks around for more than a day, I know I need to pay attention.  What this time?  Lens, colors, bits of glass or plastic,mirrors, tubes, changing patterns...nothing resonated for days.

contemporary kaleidoscope circa 1980

Today I found a stunning quote by Luci Shaw. It says when we are created in the image of God,
“... we participate in creative intelligence, giftedness, originality. We each have the faculty of imagination deep within us, waiting, like a seed, to be watered and fertilized.”  

Immediately after I read this a kaleidoscope popped into my mind. And looking through a lens at little colored bits of plastic seeds trapped in a tube making patterns over and over.

 And then I thought of Lent.

Like seeds, my ideas of myself and the world rattle around inside, repeating mandelas that are not always colorful or pretty. My imagination is not always intelligent, gifted or original.

This Lent is asking me- is it time to look through a new lens? Or get rid of lenses altogether for 40 days?

What about you?