Wiser on Wednesday - ...when I grow up...

Almost certain of what I will do when I grow up.

And just as steadfastly determined never to "grow up" completely--where's the fun in that?

So the question becomes, "what must I do now, today that manifests love and gives life?" The answer involves what it really means to be grown. Right?

To be free and filled with joy in a way that no bars, nor sadness, not even a justifiable despair, can steal this light. I am happy to be me and I am happy to be changing into something extraordinary: me tomorrow.

Not so much grown, but growing...a giant eventually: as love as love can be, over flowing with wonder, whimsy and the wisdom that can only come from courage and failure and exhaustion and well earned rest, disappointment and the fulfillment of making and being a difference

Toby D.Sanders - January 10. 2013

Wiser on Wednesday - Our Thoughts

We cannot always control our thoughts; but, we can surely remember in a way that gives the present the power it needs to endure whatever challenges us, appreciate whatever aides us, and overcome whatever threatens to limit us, in service of a better tomorrow. It all begins with a form of thoughtfulness that is open and directed and hopeful. - Toby D. Sanders (January 30, 2013)

Love...

"Above all, love each other deeply..." ~1 Peter 4:8

Be the first to say "I'm sorry." Love extravagantly. Smile. Hug. Hold hands. Write a love note. 

Wiser on Wednesday - Inspiration

...from the inside inspiration springs. Motivation is largely external, sticks and carrots--but inspiration is born within us, from the wellspring of creativity that is LIFE itself. Christ within us is such an event. ...in an age that is defined by incentives and motivation, sticks and carrots abound, but inspiration is the true hope, the way we become the solution, the answer to our prayers.

This is a meaning of Christ, of Christmas: God seeks to transform us into the answers to our own prayers. This is the meaning of a baby savior. ... Toby D. Sanders

Work of Christmas - Howard Thurman

When the song of the angels is stilled,
when the star in the sky is gone,
when the kings and princes are home,
when the shepherds are back with the flocks,
then the work of Christmas begins:

-to find the lost,
-to heal those broken in spirit,
-to feed the hungry,
-to release the oppressed,
-to rebuild the nations,
-to bring peace among all peoples,
-to make a little music with the heart…

And to radiate the Light of Christ,
every day, in every way, in all that we do and in all that we say.
Then the work of Christmas begins.

Forgiveness and Time - A draft

A draft to defeat the spirit of procrastination...

 "As tyme hem hurt, a tyme doth hem cure" from Troilus and Cresyde, Chaucer

 Forgiveness and Time

The fifth, or quintessential element of forgiveness is time. The relationship between forgiveness and time is the most crucial relationship in our efforts to come to terms with the concept of forgiveness. It is time that is often our greatest enemy and time that can be our greatest friend. People believe falsely, and carelessly that “time heals all wounds”...but those of us who have hurt and been hurt know as a matter of fact, a matter of breath, a matter of pain that time heals nothing. Time in a very basic sense is just a measure and one may measure suffering as easily as one may measure pleasure. Time is neutral. Our suffering is not.

The philosopher Heidegger imagined that our conception of time was misshaped by our assumptions about its relationship to eternity. He argued that many of our misconceptions about time were rooted in our attempts to related our experience of it to the infinite expanse of eternity which we could never experience. He reckoned that we would benefit by more honestly having our thinking about time shaped by an honest encounter with the impress of death, of our finitude. As others have rightly noted, we are also limited on this valence. We know no more of death than we do of eternity.

I am a thoroughgoing  ironist. I think we err when we make death and eternity opposites. There are related in a way that is at once mystery and certainty to us. If life has any meaning at all death and eternity work together are intertwined, dance, even make love: make each other possible.

  

We measure our life in hurts and strivings. We all are hurt by and hurt others, often deeply. It seems the very processes of life: birth, growth, flourishing, and death involve forms of pain, blood, anguish and injury. How we come to be who we are is a blood-stained and tear-soaked and grief-formed reality. Without forgiveness and other forms or resilience and reconciliation there would be only death and pain, with pleasure as simply a narcotic, an addiction to get us through to the next assault.

 Forgiveness is fundamental to life as juxtapose to mere existence. Here is something of the central import of forgiveness.

 Here is something I have come to understand  beneath an almost unbearable grief-like weight: forgiveness and time are bound together inextricably. All who suffer know this, like we know we need air to breath. But I do believe it might help some to know that forgiveness involves encountering time on your own terms and in a way that will allow you to direct the healing power of grace, to us this gift, to thrive even in the most difficult hours, to experience joy, real joy in your lowest moments...

  

Forgiveness is a way of navigating time...

 We understand time as split in three parts: past, present and future. Deep forgiveness maps this structure as well. A part of the real prolegomena of forgiveness is the way we most often trenchantly misunderstand the things that hurt us. There is a mechanism within us whenever we are hurt that seeks to protect us from the assault that is severe injury. This assault causes us to lose time, to not feel, what we feel as painfully as we might. We are drugged by our body and our psyche at "the moment of impact, crisis or injury." The things that hurt us MOST (let's say disrespect and betrayal) are always tethered to a past experience. The present hurt, whatever it is is NEVER the total source of our anguish. The crisis it creates fractures our sense of self and makes the future unbearable in a way impossible. This is the very architecture of the "unforgivable." Time already is inherently, every moment of it, anxiety ridden by definition. We are imprisoned in a series of presenceS"  and the past is only as good as our imperfect memories and the future is inherently uncertain. The struggle to be human is to integrate this broken experience of time into a whole personality.

   

The work of being human, the art of living and loving is our response to this crisis of temporality. Forgiveness, after love, is the most important spiritual virtue in this battle to be whole. I have been thinking through and struggling for years, months, days, hours, interminable seconds to deal with my own brokenness and broken heartedness (or not deal with it--this is what makes this piece, this draft so hard to write. It is the heart of the matter.)  Here is what I think I have found. 

 When we find it difficult or almost impossible to forgive and when we are ready to seek to forgive we cannot begin with what we think is the most acute and searing center of our pain. This is almost always an illusion, a partial truth, an obscurant. The very thing that is hurting us most is simply the present iteration of a past hurt that we evaded, buried, found unbearable to express or sublimated. As painful as it is, and it may be horrific, as adults it is not the source of our difficulty in forgiving. This anguish has simply reminded us of a deeper unbearable anguish.

 The process of burying that hurt has created in us a tendency and proclivity to blame ourselves for being vulnerable in the "second" place and often makes us blame ourselves for things that are not at all wholly our fault, which ironically undermines our capacity to forgive at all. We cannot forgive ourselves and this freezes us in time. It actually destroys hope and traps us in a funky house of mirrors without clocks. Our only relational currency becomes resentments which we build up and exchange with the people we are trying to love most or work with most. And we collude with them to exchange these resentments as a form of narcotic that only partially releases some of the tension built up in our deep anguish and grief, at the same time as it builds up the pain it needs to survive, not us--but our hurt feeds on us.

  

Ultimately, the hurt of the past, which might have been a smaller or more manageable injury becomes a complex or series of complexes, one built on top of the other. And forgiveness in the present is impossible because the source of our pain is so deeply buried in the past--usually under someone who we loved so much we couldn't bear to be angry and honest with them and now our life is either a masquerade, or sham, or flat out lie because we turn every close loving relationship into the same type of inside out love-hate codependency we never dealt with before.

  

In order to deeply forgive we must 1. Forgive ourselves 2. Forgive the person (or group of people) who originally hurt us; 3. Forgive the person who re-injured, reawakened the old pain in us.

  

This involves dealing with time in a way we are usually unwilling or unable to do. It involves too much honesty. Often, important people are either dead or have buried their transgressions in the sea of "You should be over that!" Still deep forgiveness involves this kind of work.

  

How do we forgive when most often are cut off from any kind of apology or conversation even, most of the people who hurt us originally and the most are related to us and have a heavy investment in denial or the cheap grace of water under the bridge?

 I will not pretend to know the answers to this for everyone or even wholly myself or the people I love most. But i do know that some things will help.

 1. We must work to forgive ourselves. Which we can do by accepting the forgiveness of God as a given. In my tradition of Love, we have a prayer that asks of God, "Forgive us as we    forgive." I think we often hear this wrong. It is NOT forgive ME as "I" forgive. it is a request for help from God to help "US" forgive. We pray for those we have hurt and for those who have hurt us:forgiveness. When we pray I know we realize that we are not reminding God of anything and often God has already acted on our behalf most times, we are asking God to allow us to see the provision.

 2. The hardest work of forgiveness is dealing with the past hurt that often we dont recognize as the hurt. Often we need help and always courage to see the ways that malformed or malpracticed love hurts us in ways so deep it misshapes our capacity to love rightly even ourselves.

3. Forgiving the person we are closest to today whi has betrayed us or disrespected us becomes infinitely easier when we have learned to deal with the past and our own loss of hope and we can center on the truth of the presence offense in its proper context. We can recognize what is our crap and what may be their crap in the hurt we have infected with resentments and has exploded in anguish and resignation.

 Forgiveness is a gift but it requires following the instructions to get the full utilization out of it. At its core forgiveness is the real gift of time. Time restored, time enhanced, time saved, time preserved, time filled with promise or hope.

Toby Sanders December 1, 2012 - Facebook page

Our Nature...Toby D. Sanders

I am a bit frustrated by some simple things that are much harder than they should be. I have come to strongly believe that often our nature works against us. I think this is what folk like Augustine meant by the "fall." I think that our basic selfishness and impulses toward survival, so important when we are young, even babies, or when we were more animalistic, (or when we are threatened and vulnerable, injured or broken, when our circumstances approximate the darkest moments of our past), becomes a real debilitation as we try and become better people, families, communities, societies. It is this battle within us that is the foundation of most of our difficulties--maybe all of them--when we consider that those who hurt us likely suffer from the same debilitations.

The hardest part is facing this about ourselves first, admitting the truth to ourselves about ourselves. This is difficult work, this examined life is excruciating and rewarding: certa

inly the least done. 

Our nature, if there is such a thing, is surely shaped by our personal experience and more, the patterns or tendencies built by a billion choices most of which we did not make but have been bequeathed to us as a inheritance in our blood.

This is why it does no good to blame at all and why it is, at the same time, absolutely vital and life-giving to take responsibility for the small choices we make that build the larger choices: the art that is our lives. Our destiny, which is not fixed by our inheritance, by our mistakes, but is open, that is, designed by our hope. We are what we hope! And when we lose hope we are doomed to the trajectory of our nature, we are bound by the inertia of our past and only death awaits us. But when we hope, believe and act in alignment with these hopes we are born, again. The "again" signifies the great irony of hope that it only exists as a response to the power of death, which is only fear. The "again" signifies resilience, resurrection.

Hope requires untold amounts of courage. It is not an accident. It is our only salvation from the fall. It is the ability to fly. It is the only real freedom there is for a soul, a psyche. And as difficult as it is to believe, it IS a gift. It is already there in the darkness, it is born in us, somehow, at the very moment that it or death is the only choice. only there. It is LIFE! This too is our nature, somehow to both fall and to hope.

Toby Sanders - Facebook - December 1, 2012

Forgiveness - 4 - Toby D. Sanders

"Forgiveness and Truth The fourth aspect or challenge of forgiveness is its relationship with the truth, with which it shares a complex and terrifying essence. In order to forgive and be forgiven we must have the courage to face the truth, to tell the truth to ourselves and eventually to others. But a part of the reason that we are hurt in the first place or have hurt someone from whom we need forgiveness is because “we cannot handle the truth.” We cannot easily face the truth about ourselves, about others about almost anything. As beautiful as the truth might be conceptually, it is deeply terrifying in reality. When we see the truth or understand it or are in its presence we feel mostly judged and guilty, convicted. When the “truth” of the most painful and wicked offenses against us threatens to rip our very souls from our bodies we are so angry and devastated by God’s own “permissive will” that we flee from it to survive it. The brutality of truth is not our friend. And the ingenuity of our anxieties, the genius of our fantasies and games, the whiteness of the lies we depend on to survive psychic assaults, is to be here commended as a minor grace for those who suffer creatively, internalizing, re-imagining and playing to survive the horrorism of the truth. The truth of the truth, the core of the matter is that we need insulation from its light and fire often. The truth of the truth and forgiveness is that we lie to ourselves and others for good reasons sometimes. That there is an utter and shameful arrogance in those who unchastenedly celebrate the truth as a cure-all. The truth of the truth is that it is not always best literally understood, which is to say, that there is often more truth in the fictions we tell ourselves and others because these things express our desires more accurately than they express our sins. The truth is that sometimes a lie reveals more about us than a shallow and comfortable, palatable truth. The truth is that there are things about us so fragile, so private that they cannot bear the light of the brutal judgements of others, even those we love, as a second offense, a second brutality. We should not be sentenced to shame for our trust and sometimes ellipsis is best for a season. Time is again a pivotal factor and grace here. Those who love us and those that we love should be able to patiently bear the truth as it emerges in its season. A real key to forgiveness is this reality. Often we are not ready or mature enough to face the truth about ourselves “graciously.” We oft too harshly compare and judge even ourselves. Our souls know when we can bear the light of God’s love maturely. The truth, like forgiveness, emerges and grows. It is dynamic. It is life-affirming. it is spiritual. It is not relative in a shallow dishonest and cowardly sense. But it relates to the perspective of our understanding at particular times, seasons, points of maturity. The truth is of infinite value and it is both a means and an end to a better life. The irony is that many of our fictions and lies and evasions tell a truth about us. Forgiveness requires that we seek this light. It requires that we strive to be honest with ourselves first and foremost, to forgive and be forgiven we must in due season stand and sing in the sun of this grace. This requires discernment and trust as a reasonable currency of love. We should not be bound by the demands of the purist, especially one who has not faced his own lies and self-deception and seeks only the power of your contrition or the delicious spectacle of your re-lived misery as catharsis for his own sins. There is an absolutely “pornographic and vicarious” property to much truth-mongering judgmentalism. The truth is that we can only truly forgive the truth. The truth is that to be forgiven a lie or a half-truth is of limited value. The truth is that what we have done that is wrong or what we have suffered at the hands of broken others is just part of the story. The truth is that there may be in this life no full answers sometimes; but, forgiveness need not be partial. The truth, like love, faith and forgiveness is a disposition, an attitude toward reality. There is logic in the truth, but more art in loving and forgiving it. One of the hardest things about forgiving is that the truth of it often shatters fantasies and stories and fictions we have about ourselves and those we love and who love us. We must not insist on it unless we are willing and truly ready to sacrifice the comforts of our fictions which are considerable. Indeed we must be grown-grown to handle the relationship between forgiveness and truth. Life is often far easier as a fiction, full of romances and order, promises and wish fulfillment. It is easier to forget, deny, creatively sublimate than to remember and forgive. It is easier to project our brokenness onto others, especially strangers or disposable people than forgive ourselves and do the hard work of rebuilding a life so shattered by the courage of forgiveness. It is easier to rush into an evasion and new forms of busyness that are narcotic and complex but require little thought. These evasions fill time with the lightness of efficiencies and effectiveness, the illusions of progress and the shallow praise that goes with them. Easier this than to take the time to deal with the grief of failure and loss maturely. And it is easier, far easier to accept a shallow and immediate apology based on a half-truth and a desperate desire to maintain a fictive status quo than to wait and cultivate deep forgiveness and the shattering truths that attends its wake. Forgiveness like love and faith and truth is a choice, a courage to see and be transformed by the holy. To forgive we must be mature enough to handle the truth."

October 15, 2012

Forgivenes -3 - Toby D. Sanders

"Forgiveness and Time. The third key element or aspect of forgiveness is time. If remembering is the hardest and forgiving one's self is the first order of forgiveness and its graces, then time is the very substance of forgiveness. In a real sense time, is what forgiveness is made of, how it is measured, how it grows, how it is felt and experienced in our minds and souls. When we are brokenhearted, guilty, ashamed, angry and broken in spirit every moment is heavy, almost unbearable. Every breath weighs on us. We lose time. We waste time. We can barely bear time. Life is a sentence. My own brokenness makes this the worst part of forgiveness for me. I am too impatience with myself and everyone. Forgiveness is a quality time takes on. Forgiveness, because it is a grace, a spiritual reality participates in what some people call eternity. Eternity is the mysterious quality given time by God. It is not clock time or historical time that moves in one direction. Eternity is an experiencing of time all at once in its fulness. It is an overflowing. When we forgive time itself becomes a gift. In time, what was once painful, even unbearable becomes not just bearable but an important and empowering part of who we are. Not only do we remember, not only do we forgive ourselves but time helps us become enlarged in the same way our heartbroken-ness made us feel small. Forgiveness changes the meaning of time. Forgiveness changes the meaning of time. Forgiveness is a path, a journey, a way to wholeness. It is a grace. Time is a spiritual gift that actually carries us. Forgiveness in time is like a stream, a river. We think we are walking or climbing but in reality time is carrying us along. Now our paddling matters. We have to try to move in the right direction. We can fall out of our vessel. But, as we strive to move in the right direction, as we give ourselves over to time, She will carry us. If we imagine time as a stream, a river moving toward an ocean, Forgiveness is the water itself, when we are in it we feel it but we are not really aware what is moving it. Staying afloat is nervous work sometimes. But time will take us to the right place, because time itself IS forgiveness. God has already forgiven us and time can help us get to an awareness of that forgiveness. It is not automatic. It requires some work to balance ourselves, some guiding work around obstacles in the stream. It requires forms of trust that are skills. Sometimes it requires just resting on the shore and not doing anything...sabbath rest. Time is the most mysterious aspect of forgiveness and it is different for everyone. But we cannot forgive or be forgiven without it. TIme is the heart of the matter. Because the ultimate purpose of forgiveness is wholeness that will prepare us to use the measure of our talents and gifts inspite of the injuries and brokenness of so much around us. Forgiveness is preparation. Before we can give ourselves fully in our lives we must forgive ourselves and others the injury and pain inherent in our lives. TIme then, is the heart of the matter. In time, You will remember and be whole. You will forgive yourself. You will experience the power of forgiveness to change the meaning of your pain and fulfill your purpose and power. None of this is easy at all. I ask your prayers. I pray for you. I pray with you."

October 13, 2012

Forgiveness - 2 - Toby D. Sanders

"The second hardest thing about forgiveness (and this is no little thing at all) is forgiving yourself for being hurt or vulnerable in the first place. With the things that hurt us most deeply there is this torturous regret that assaults our choice to love and trust in the first place. Of course, this shame-based anguish greatly undermines any hope of whole-ness (Now isn't that what the sincere and desperate desire to forgive and be forgiven is: a hope for whole-ness?) When we find forgiveness most elusive it is often this inability to forgive ourselves that is the primary stumbling block. Ironically we blame ourselves for being hurt and resolve angrily to never be so vulnerable, so ashamed, so alone again. Exacerbating this anguish is the fact that the people who hurt us most deeply are almost always people we love and trust the most, people we are closest to and therefore are not acceptable objects of our legitimate anger and outrage. We are double bound by our broken-heartedness. We must forgive ourselves first. We must properly register responsibility for our pain. If we have hurt ourselves, so be it. We make mistakes but our mistakes are not our identity (this is the lie of shame). If we have been hurt by another, the offense is theirs (And often rooted in their own unresolved unspoken issues). We must forgive ourselves. Every virtue, every good thing requires courage. To be human is to be vulnerable. Forgiveness as an act of grace requires vulnerability. When we are whole we can be vulnerable but not foolish. We can be strong and insistent on the respect and love we deserve. When we forgive we can bear and risk loss in service of whole-ness, love. Forgiveness requires the courage to remember. Forgiveness begins with forgiving ourselves. The pain you feel is NOT your fault. You are forgiven. Take up your mat. Arise. Walk. Love." -

October 12, 2012

Forgiveness - Toby D. Sanders

The hardest part of forgiveness is not forgetting: it is remembering.

This type of memory requires courage and is a grace, that is, a gift of time, a gift of God. Forgiveness is a spiritual virtue which we cannot have or attain unless we are willing, even desperate, to share it. We cannot forgive on demand. Forgiveness is not an act of will. It is an act of grace. It is a healing. It is driven by processes and endowments we did not create but from which we benefit, if we make healthy choices in our most difficult moments. In this way, like love, forgiveness is a choice.

Forgiveness comes at great cost. To forgive we must endure great pain. We must face honestly our hurt and the pain we have caused others. Forgiving is excruciating. Fairness is most often uninvolved. There is nothing fair about grace.

I have a dear friend that is going through various stages of rehabilitation after a severe shoulder injury and operation. She talks to me about pain so honestly, about her...progress that does not seem at all like progress to her. We talk about her fear(s). She helps me see that to heal she must strategically stretch the capacity of her injury to restore the functionality of her vital limb...

Forgiveness comes at great cost.

Our hearts are a most vital limb...

Forgiveness is rehab for our hearts...

And, in time, we may be able to love as much and even more...

In time...

Thoughts and Musings - Anger

Anger is a kaleidoscopic darkness. It is a response to fear both perceived and real: fear of death and the things that lead to it,that feel like it. Hunger, failure, isolation and injury are root fears shaped by our experience of life, in an evolutionary, historical and psychological sense our humanity has been shaped by the darkness of fear.

Anger is not just one emotion but a system of interlocking feelings, emotions and thoughts that constitute one very basic system of our response to anxieties, threats, injuries and losses. These responses form a spectrum of anger from annoyance to rage.

The problem with anger is not that it is inherently bad. Anger is a part of the natural order of life. It is an aspect of the design of life and whether you believe that design to be a wondrous accident of organic and iinorganic elements or imagined and inaugurated by a benevolent creator, the design itself affirms life.

The problem is with how we allow anger to use us. The challenge is In how we achieve the proper balance in our responses to what life brings us, how we deal with the great and powerful gifts of our nature, in other words, it is a spiritual problem.

I am struggling this morning so profoundly troubled, but I know God is with me because there is truth power and beauty in my thoughts. I prayed and this note is god"s gift to us. - Toby D. Sanders

 

facebook October 6, 2012

Thoughts and Musings - Soul Music

I realized something a few days ago that made me smile so hard and warmly, I think think I laughed out loud alone...I was listening to Aretha Franklin and I realized that "soul music" the music of my life, is completely about a kind of courage to love without regret! To say it, to sing it, to moan it. In the way we have sex sometimes when our heartaches, or pray when we are angry with God, get up and do what we must, when we are bone-weary; when we are numb with grief and sadness we tell a joke to ease the despair of a friend because we recognize the difference between being sad and being dead. Soul music is an expression of love without regret: a truth telling. "The moment I wake up, before I put on my makeup..."  Toby D. Sanders

facebook - September 28, 2012

Thoughts and Musings - On Trouble

No Trouble don't last always...But Trouble doesn't wait for us to feel better either. Not quite as pithy but just as true. We often must do our best when we don't feel our best. This is surest way to break the momentum of evil, disorder and the spirit of fear: Striving when we should falter; speaking when grief and weariness would silence us; and loving when we should hate; forgiving when rage is justified; singing when we could be crying; and laughing in the face of utter despair.

 
Trouble don't last always because love is the only indomitable force in the universe. - Toby D. Sanders

Facebook - September 25, 2012