A Winter Sinking Feeling

Amid all the expectations and excitement of the New Year, many at this season experience a sinking spell—especially as those of us in the northern hemisphere go deeper into January.

The coming of winter’s depths sometimes has a way of focusing our attention on the sadness, the disappointment, and the things that didn’t work out in life in the way we hoped.

It’s as if New Year’s, because it symbolizes bright new beginnings, spotlights all the ways in which the brightest doesn’t seem to be happening for some of us. Hence the sinking spell.

At such a moment, it’s crucial to recognize that sinking spells have a purpose. They intend not the mere punctuation of our lives, but our transformation.

Sinking spells temporarily suspend our enjoyment of the sensory experience of the world. If we don’t resist this, but allow it to do its work—in the same way that winter does its work in nature—it can lead to the realization that lasting joy doesn’t reside in material things, events, or other people, but in ourselves.

Such times awaken us to the fact that beneath our sadness, disappointment, or disillusionment, there resides a reality few humans are acquainted with at this stage in our evolution as a species—our true being, which is grounded in the divine Presence.

There’s a difference between allowing a sinking spell, a dark night of the soul, a winter, to do its work in us, and indulging in melancholy. The one hones us, sharpens us, deepens us, redirects us. The other saps the soul from us.

Wallowing in misery, self-pity, melancholy, a sense of “how unfair” everything is, and “why is God doing this to me,” isn’t helpful—at least, not in the short term. In such melancholy, there’s no productive “wintering” going on. The darkness isn’t fruitful, it’s just miserable. The long night of melancholy fails to give rise to the celebration of life that is the coming of spring.

In sinking spells we naturally ask, “Why is this happening to me?” There are two ways to ask this question. We can ask it with a resentful tone, which only makes us feel worse. Or we can ask it with inquisitiveness, and discover that there is purpose to what’s happening.

In the eighteenth century, an American writer by the name of Lydia Sigourney realized, “Life has, indeed, many ills, but the mind that views every object in its most cheering aspect, and every doubtful dispensation as replete with latent good, bears within itself a powerful and perpetual antidote.”

Have you discovered the “powerful and perpetual antidote” to life’s disappointments within yourself?

If your life isn’t too pleasant right now, this is the moment to realize that your situation at this very instant is “replete with latent good.” Replete—complete, filled, overflowing. In other words, things are exactly as they are meant to be, with the intent of awaking you to the Infinite Presence deep within you that wants nothing for you but the very best.

How can you access this Presence? How can you find the “latent good” in your situation?

The year 2006 will go down as a year of transformation in my life, for it was both the worst moment of my life and simultaneously the best. As the year draws to a close, I find myself suffused with peace and filled with joy. It’s as if everything that had happened to me leading up to 2006 was preparing me for a life-transforming breakthrough that excelled all previous leaps in my spiritual development.

Out of great pain emerged an awareness of Presence that is greater than I had ever known. It’s an awareness I had already been entering for some time, but not to the depth that 2006 made possible.

What facilitated this was the book The Presence Process, by Michael Brown. In this illuminating book, Michael enables us to get in touch with the latent good of every situation we are experiencing that seems to be against us, and to find within it the seed of new life.

Virgil, the Roman poet of long ago, advised, “Whatever may happen, we master fortune by accepting it.” Embarking on The Presence Process enabled me to accept what was happening to me. I was able to receive the pain of 2006 as a gift, instead of resenting and resisting it—and this was transformative.

Michael Brown shows us that dark times transform us only when we are willing to accept them as life’s gift. Then, we choose to go through them—right through the middle of them—consciously.

That’s the key word, “Consciously.” When you bring real awareness to what’s happening to you, there’s no resistance, no trying to run—but no wallowing either. The sinking spell of your winter does its job then bursts forth into spring.

When we either resist sinking spells or wallow in them, we’re not going through them. In this case, they will have to be repeated until we are thoroughly sick of the grief we bring upon ourselves by reacting to such times instead of receiving them as a gift. Ultimately, we will get the message—divine Presence assures us of this. As Michael says, “It’s all good.”

But how much pain do you want to go through before you awaken to the infinite peace, unbounded joy, and measureless love that Presence seeks to express in your life?

Perhaps 2007 can become for you what 2006 was for me, with the help of Michael Brown’s The Presence Process, both the book and his CDs.

Freeing Christmas of Mere Nostalgia

For something like a billion people on this planet, at the heart of Christmas is the birth of Jesus. But I suggest that if we are looking at this only historically, we are missing the point of the season.

The author of the second chapter of the New Testament letter to the Hebrews says that if you don’t know who you are, don’t know what your life is meant to mean, trying looking at Jesus. Says this author, Jesus is the embodiment of the origin and destiny of all humanity.

The birth of Jesus is about a potential in you and me. This potential—who we really are, and what we are becoming—is captured in perhaps the greatest of Christmas carols, O Come, All Ye Faithful.

Listening to the annual Christmas Eve service of lessons and carols live from King’s College, Cambridge, England, on public radio, I was struck by the second verse of this carol. The lyrics are:

God of God,
Light of Light.
Lo! He abhors not the virgin’s womb.
Very God,
Begotten not created.

If you check the lyrics used by many today, you’ll find this verse either missing or altered. But these are the words that were sung in the traditional pageant from King’s this Christmas Eve.

The hymn was originally penned in Latin by Englishman John Wade, with music written for it early in the 1700s by another Englishman, John Reading. Not until 1841 was it translated into English, by Frederick Oakley. The words are drawn from the Nicene Creed, which dates to 381 CE, although this was a revision of an earlier version from 325 CE.

The power of these lyrics is that they affirm that God and humanity are not separate but one. It’s this oneness that Jesus represents and seeks to reveal.

To hear the words “God of God, Light of Light, Very God, begotten not created,” and realize that you and I, like Jesus, participate in this reality, is a transcendent and transforming experience. We are the self-revelation of the Creator, emerging out of eternal Being—the very manifestation of God.

If these words don’t take root in us in a life-changing way—if they remain frozen in a single icy Christmas of the past—we belittle them. If they affect us only nostalgically, and don’t seep into our blood and bone as a life-giving experience, we are robbing them of their power.

Michael Brown shows us how the Presence of God that Jesus epitomized can become the most real experience of our lives. His book opens up a window to the heavens, so that angels may sing in our night skies here in our twenty-first century.

Enter into The Presence Process, and the divine Presence to which Christmas points will transfigure your humdrum existence until your life becomes a manifestation of the glory of God. In a war-torn, violent world, you will experience the “peace on earth” promised in the stories of that first Christmas. You will discover what “joy to the world” is really all about.

A Christmas Lesson from New Orleans

Visiting a friend in New Orleans recently, I accompanied her to several stores as she made purchases of new furniture. Over fifteen months had gone by since her house flooded, and now she was finally getting to move back in!

As it turned out, I don’t think I have ever had a more frustrating shopping experience. Nothing about it was simple.

My heart goes out to the people of New Orleans, for whom difficulties of this kind abound on all fronts.

When you’ve seen your city standing eight, twelve feet in water—for weeks—it takes a lot of courage to try to put your life back together. Especially when, as I write this column, rain is descending in torrents and streets are flooding.

You see, all that water sitting all those weeks was a tremendous strain on an already aging underground infrastructure. Not just the weight, but especially the filthy salt water of Lake Pontchartrain, polluting and corroding everything beneath the city. So drainage is greatly hampered. At any moment, the fish bowl can begin to fill again, as it is in places this morning. It’s estimated it may take 25 years to fix the problems, and well over $5 billion. But where else do you go? This is home. It’s where your family are, your work, your ties.

Plus, New Orleans happens to be one of the most historically and culturally interesting cities on the North American continent. It’s a heritage the world can’t lose. We owe gratitude to the brave people who are seeking to preserve it by continuing their lives there.

To make a purchase of several thousand dollars worth of furniture should have been a simple process of presenting a credit card, signing, then going home to wait for the shipment to arrive. Instead, we were exactly two hours trying to check out. And then, once home, we learned much of the pricing was incorrect. Hours followed on the telephone.

The store situation—it was just one of several—came on the heels of months of frustration that so many are experiencing. You take off work but contractors don’t show. Or they start a job and then disappear for days or weeks. Or, as many have found, they take your money and don’t do the job at all. When this kind of thing happens again and again in area after area of your life, it can be taxing--especially if you are trying to return home after a long period in exile, which has already worn you down.

The store situation was the straw that almost broke the camel’s back. You see, there are special discounts for Katrina survivors, which is wonderful. Except that the complicated way they have to be applied requires staff that are expert. And if there’s one thing New Orleans suffers from right now, it’s a shortage of longstanding trained employees. It’s hard to get labor in the Big Empty, and the turnover is high.

The fact is, everyone is stressed out. Everywhere you turn, people are trying to cope with their own set of difficulties. The store clerks have their own homes to fix, contractors to meet during work hours, appliances and furniture to buy. Remember, it’s your entire life situation that has to be replaced.

Nothing is easy in the Big Easy right now.

It took a week or two to get the purchases straightened out on the credit card, with the correct discounts applied. In the end, all came out well. Everything shipped on time. My friend is back home at last.

But when you are spending thousands of dollars, and it’s so difficult to make it happen, something in you says, “I deserve better service than this. I shouldn’t have to endure a huge struggle in order to spend my money. It’s such a big waste of my time.”

Yet it is what it is.

Given what it is, we can respond either with drama or joyfully. But what’s the point of drama? Becoming angry does no good at all and makes a difficult situation even more miserable for everyone.

It comes down to expectations. When we shop, or seek some assistance we greatly need (as many in New Orleans are having to do), behind our request is a hidden longing for unconditional love. We want to be treated like we are “someone.” When we’re not, we feel slighted.

If you want to experience unconditional love, there’s only one way to guarantee it. You have to find it in yourself. You have to allow the loving person you are at your center to come alive and flood you with the love you crave.

When you love yourself, and have no expectation of others showing you unconditional love, not only are you not wounded when things don’t go your way, you actually become helpful. You look for ways you can give of yourself to make it easier on the other party.

This changes how you shop. Instead of going into a store with the expectation of being kowtowed to because you are, after all, spending your money to pay these people’s wages, you go to be a blessing to the staff in the store.

In his book The Presence Process, Michael Brown states, “There is nothing to ‘get’ from this world.” He explains that when we really see “that there is nothing for us to get in this world and that instead we are the ones who have come to place unconditional love into our experience of this world, then we will have crossed the bridge to a new and profound life experience.”

Do you think of yourself as being here to place unconditional love into your experience of life?

Amazingly, frustration ebbs away when you begin shopping with an attitude of gratitude rather than expecting to be served. You see a difficult situation as an opportunity to spread cheer, warmth, and a relaxed frame of mind. You are looking for how you can contribute positively to a transaction, instead of being upset because you didn’t get treated in the grandiose manner your ego expects. It gives you joy to have money to be able to bless those who work at the store with an income.

This Christmas, there’s a lesson for all of us in this New Orleans experience. Behind the surface of their roles as staff are individuals who share the same Inner Presence as you. It’s not just a financial transaction that’s happening in business, it’s a potential experience of this Presence. By responding consciously to people, seeking how you can make your interaction a loving exchange, you honor this Presence.

Each person behind a counter, behind a desk, or waiting tables is a sister or brother who has come into your life, however briefly, to help you awaken to the love within you.

When a transaction is difficult, it’s an opportunity. You have a chance to rein in the temptation to rant and rave, and instead respond from the loving Presence that’s your essence.

In other words, it’s not about the furniture, the clothes, the food, or the gifts. It’s never about the surface situation. All of life’s situations are but the context that facilitates the arising of Presence within.

Says Michael Brown, “The moment we really ‘get this,’ our fear, anger, and grief will subside and our experiences will be washed clean with gratitude.”

We are here not to get, but to bless. We are here to “learn what it means to give unconditionally of ourselves.”

As you finish up Christmas shopping, and you unwrap your gifts in a few days’ time, free yourself of the expectation of “getting” unconditional love. Instead, appreciate whatever comes your way in your entire experience of Christmas—even if it feels inadequate, a bad choice, or just plain stressful.

By opening yourself up to the Presence at the heart of each person in your Christmas, you’ll experience the true peace and goodwill of the season.

Show Up in Your Life

The gospels of Matthew and Luke present two different stories of the birth of Jesus.

In Matthew, Herod was king of Judea. When magi—astrologers—arrived from Babylon claiming a king had been born among the Jews, Herod wasn’t exactly ecstatic. Warned in a dream not to return to Herod as they had been asked to do, the magi departed secretly. Herod then sent soldiers to slaughter all male infants up to the age of two in and around Bethlehem. Also tipped off by a dream, Joseph fled with Mary and the child to Egypt.

While Matthew has the family secretly fleeing across the Negev, Luke has them going to the temple for the traditional purification rituals forty days after the birth. Two well-known prophets utter words about the child’s future. Nothing is done in secret.

To heighten the public import of the birth of Jesus, angels appear to shepherds and instruct them to visit the babe. After their visit, the shepherds make “widely known” what they have experienced. In this gospel, no magi visit, no infants are slain, and there is no flight to Egypt. The family journey back to Nazareth, which according to Luke was their home.

Matthew and Luke relate mutually exclusive stories because they are intended not as biography but as proclamation. We are in a world of imagery, not history.

The imagery of the magi is drawn from the book of Daniel. The king of Babylon had a dream that none of his magi could interpret. But Daniel, a Jewish captive, was able to decipher its meaning. Matthew retells this story with a twist. Now it’s the Jewish priests and scribes who can’t read the signs of the times, whereas the Gentiles from Babylon can read them very well.

It’s important to bear in mind that, to Jews, Babylon was a hated land. It had been the location of their captivity 500 years earlier. To suggest that spiritual insight could come from such a source would be stunning to Matthew’s readers.

To intensify the effect of the message, Matthew next features Israel’s other traditionally hated enemy—Egypt. Here, too, Hebrews had been captives.

In the book of Genesis, a man named Jacob had twelve sons, one of whom was called Joseph. His father gave him a coat of many colors—a story that inspired Andrew Lloyd Weber’s musical Joseph and His Technicolor Dream Coat. This Joseph dreamed dreams, which predicted that his father, mother, and brothers would someday bow down to him.

Joseph’s brothers were jealous of him, so they sold him to merchants, who took him to Egypt to become a slave. Once in Egypt, his ability to interpret dreams served him well. Before long he was in charge of Egypt’s affairs, second only to pharaoh himself. When a time of famine occurred, his dreams about his father, mother, and brothers were fulfilled as they came to Egypt to be nourished during the years of scarcity.

So in both Genesis and Matthew’s nativity story, we encounter two Josephs, both with fathers called Jacob, both of whom go to Egypt, and both of whom dream divinely inspired dreams.

The plot in Matthew’s storytelling thickens.

In time, the king of Egypt felt the Israelites were becoming too numerous. He saw them as a threat. So he decreed that all male babies should be killed at birth. One escaped, and he became Moses. He had a sister called Miriam, which is the Hebrew for Mary. Moses led the people out of Egypt and tried to take them into the land of Israel, but he failed to get all the way. His successor was Joshua, and Joshua succeeded in taking them into the country that became their homeland.

In Genesis and Exodus we have a Jacob, a Joseph, a Mary, and a Joshua, all of whom are in Egypt. And in Matthew we have a Jacob, a Joseph, a Mary . . . but what about a Joshua? Ah, is there no Joshua in Matthew’s story?

Not in the English translations we have. But Jesus is the Greek name for Joshua! So in fact we have a Jacob, a Joseph, a Mary, and a Joshua. But whereas the Egyptian king killed the Israelite babies in the Old Testament story, in Matthew it’s reversed. It’s the Jewish king who kills the little boys, and Egypt becomes the land of safety. So Herod and pharaoh have traded places, and the land of Israel and the land of Egypt have traded places. Gentiles sought to kill Israel’s progeny, but now they protect Jesus.

What’s Matthew’s point?

Jerusalem had been destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE. Distrustful of Gentiles, Jewish Christians started to pull away from Gentiles who had become Christians. Matthew writes to Jewish Christians to counter this.

Matthew wants his readers to see that imagining themselves to have been specially chosen—that God had spoken to them and not to others—was mistaken. He wants them to realize that the “still, small voice” of the divine is audible to any who pay attention.

Matthew used an accepted literary device of that era—imagery intended to convey not facts but truth. But in time the story became literalized as if it had actually happened, and its message was lost.

By literalizing the nativity stories, Christendom missed their main point. We turned Jesus into an exclusive figure, instead of seeing him as the embodiment of the divine Presence of which all humans are the bearers. His experience of the Presence of God in his life is an experience open to each of us—even hated Babylonians and Egyptians.

Luke’s story also conveys a message. It’s encoded in the imagery of the shepherds, who visit the baby Jesus in the vicinity of Bethlehem, the city of David, Israel’s first bona fide king.

Kings were traditionally the firstborn son. But David was far from the first to be born in his family, and hence had no claim to a throne. He was a shepherd on the hillsides of Bethlehem. Yet it is the least likely to be chosen who becomes king.

So it is with Jesus. One who is “of no reputation,” as Saint Paul describes him in his New Testament letter to the Philippians, becomes the one who shows us that the kingdom of God can be experienced in the now, and not just in the future. He brings us salvation—a word that simply means to “make us whole”—by introducing us to awareness of the divine Presence at our center.

Luke is saying that God’s Presence arises in the least likely places, in the most ordinary lives. When we become open to an experience of this Presence, we “show up” in life—like David, and like Jesus. We become people whose lives are transformed, and who therefore have a transformative effect on the world around us.

The book The Presence Process, by Michael Brown, is all about how you can show up in your life through awakening to the Presence within you—and, by so doing, make a difference in the lives of others.

A Nativity Story

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who was a paleontologist, a Jesuit priest, and a prolific author of books about spirituality, once said that Christianity “has never doubted but that God must be looked for only in heaven, that is to say in more or less direct and profound discontinuity with here below.”

The movie The Nativity Story, currently in cinemas, focuses on a God who is found only in heaven, but who in Jesus descends to Earth to save us from ourselves. Surprisingly, however, the profound discontinuity with the “here below” portrayed in the movie can’t be found in the gospels.

On the contrary, the gospels are at pains to introduce us to Jesus as the epitome of what it is to be a human being in the image and likeness of God. The divine, the authors of these gospels reveal, has always resided in humanity—we just haven’t recognized it.

While the characters in this movie are a little more lifelike than characters usually are in movies about Jesus, it isn’t exactly a stunning portrayal of the birth narratives. Yet there were times when it touched me deeply.

For instance, there’s a moment when a conjunction of planets forms a particularly bright “star” over Bethlehem. A beam of light shoots down right into the cave upon the infant who has just been born. In the glory of that heavenly beam, I saw myself. I saw all humankind. It sent chills down my spine. Tears flooded my eyes.

What I experienced was the sheer wonder of being God incarnate. For this is what each of us is.

The nativity stories—there are two of them—employ imagery to get a message across. This imagery is intended to show us how incredibly wondrous and precious we are. It points to a great Presence that lies at the heart of our humanity.

The Nativity Story doesn’t recognize that the gospel birth stories are imagery. As a consequence of treating them literally, it paints itself into a corner—and its only escape is to ignore a whole section of one of the stories. The moviemakers had no choice but to omit much of Luke’s story. Read as biography instead of as imagery, the stories go in quite different directions—a reality that they just couldn’t portray in film!

The first gospel to be written, Mark, has no birth or infancy narrative, but begins when Jesus is about thirty years old. Similarly, the last gospel to be written, John, has no birth story. Rather, it goes back to the beginning of time and shows us that the eternal being of God has always been at work in history and continues to be present in us today, the key insight Jesus shared with people that so transformed their lives.

Matthew and Luke pen the only birth stories, and the two don’t present us with a nativity scene that’s anything like the one pictured in the movie. It’s not like the nativity scenes on our lawns or in our churches, either, all of which attempt to combine Matthew and Luke as if they were telling the same story. In fact, Matthew and Luke’s nativity stories are radically different—and for an important reason.

In Matthew, there are no angels in the sky and no shepherds. Neither is there a manger. Oh, and there’s no journey from Bethlehem on the traditional Christmas donkey, either! For in this gospel, Mary and Joseph live in Bethlehem already, in a house, to which magi—astrologers from Babylon—come bearing gifts as they discern a sign in the conjunctions of the heavenly bodies.

After the magi present their gifts, they depart secretly at night, and Joseph and Mary take the infant Jesus and flee to Egypt. Herod then slaughters all the boy babies up to the age of two. Only after a long period in Egypt do the family return to Palestine. At first they try to go back to Judea, their home, but this proves dangerous. So they seek out a new home and come upon the little village of Nazareth in Galilee. Read the account carefully, and you’ll see Nazareth is new to them. This isn’t a return to a place they formerly lived.

While the family are secretly fleeing to Egypt in Matthew’s nativity story, in Luke they are instead appearing in public, presenting Jesus in the temple on two occasions at which well known spiritual figures pronounce blessings upon the infant. Then, after the rites of circumcision and purification have been completed publicly, and word of Jesus’ birth has been spread to all in Jerusalem, they peacefully return to Nazareth, their home. There is no danger from Herod, no escape to Egypt, and no slaying of the baby boys.

You cannot make these stories say the same thing. And for good reason. They are not biography, but stories that are built on characters well known to us from the Hebrew Bible. Their purpose is to show where the divine Presence can be found.

Matthew’s nativity is based on the story of Daniel in the court of the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar, where magi were unable to decipher the signs given the king, whereas Daniel the Jew could. Matthew reverses this story. The pagan magi can see what the Jewish religious authorities and royal court can’t.

Matthew also retells the slaughter of the infant Hebrew boys from the book of Exodus—only now, it’s the Jewish king and the land of Palestine, not the Egyptian king, that’s the threat, while Egypt is a place of safety.

Luke’s story has a quite different cast of characters and theme. It emphasizes that Bethlehem is the city of David. Consequently, it’s a story that features shepherds—for David, Israel’s first real king, was a shepherd.

What these two nativity stories are saying to us is the topic of our next blog, to appear on Tuesday, December 19. These imagistic stories point us to the surprise places that we will encounter Presence—if we are willing to look. We will discover, as did Teilhard de Chardin, that there is no discontinuity at all between God “on high” and humanity “here below.”

In the meantime, if you aren’t experiencing the power of Presence in your life, we invite you to read Michael Brown’s groundbreaking book, The Presence Process. You’ll discover the God who has always been at the heart of humanity—a Presence that seeks to burst forth in heavenly glory in our everyday lives.

Dancing in Babel

That our outer world reflects our inner condition—an insight Michael Brown highlights in his book The Presence Process—is graphically portrayed in two movies currently playing, but with opposite outcomes in each movie.
In Babel, Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett are a Californian couple on a tour bus in Morocco, when a bullet pierces the window of the bus and seriously injures the wife. The tourists, in a state of panic, assume there’s been a terrorist attack, a mistaken judgment that triggers an international crisis. This only complicates and delays the severely bleeding woman’s rescue by medical helicopter courtesy of the U.S. Embassy.
In fact, there is no international crisis. There’s been no terrorist attack. Instead, the shooting is the tragic result of a well-meaning gesture turned sour in the hands of ordinary folk who haven’t yet learned to live responsibly.
It all began when a Japanese businessman took a hunting trip to Morocco and left his rifle as a gift. In time the rifle found its way into the hands of two young boys who had no idea of the gun’s range. Trying the rifle out for distance, they hit the bus.
This is a difficult film to watch as the consequences of people’s actions unfold with devastating impact on the wellbeing of others. A gift turns into an inadvertent shooting, which leads to the childcare provider back at the couple’s home in California having to miss her son’s wedding in Mexico because the parents are holed up in a desolate mountain hamlet awaiting rescue. Driven by an emotional reaction, she takes the couple’s two children across the border without authorization. On the trip back, in a car with an inebriated relative, she ends up in police custody and is deported.
Meanwhile, the Japanese businessman’s deaf-mute teenage daughter illustrates another key insight of The Presence Process—that all of us are in search of unconditional love, but that the only place we can find it is within ourselves.
The daughter is in crisis, occasioned by her discovery of her mother’s body. The mother had shot herself, a reality with which her daughter couldn’t cope, not having grown up with a knowledge of the power of Presence. Desperately wanting to be accepted and loved in the absence of awareness of the loving Presence within her, the young girl throws herself at any man with the potential of showing her affection—even appearing naked to the policeman who comes to their home to ascertain the ownership of the rifle.
Says Michael Brown, “We are completely responsible for the quality of our life experience.” Babel is a tragic reminder of how so many of our actions are carried out without real awareness. We react to life’s situations—assuming an attack is terrorists, taking children across a border without proper papers, getting in a car with someone who is too intoxicated to drive—instead of responding consciously, guided by our deepest essence. Little things, when handled irresponsibility, can escalate and rebound with painful consequences.
By the same token, awakening to ourselves and becoming truly aware enriches lives. In Happy Feet, Emperor penguins have developed a society that can’t make room for a penguin with dancing feet. Emperors just don’t dance, they sing! This penguin has zero singing talent.
As circumstances will have it, the penguin colony is in danger of losing its food supply to humans, who are fishing the Antarctic at an unprecedented rate.
When the misfit leaves his home, he in due course comes across a different kind of penguin that also dances. Emboldened to be himself, the outcast embraces his dancing ability. This is when circumstances really seem to deteriorate. He finds himself captured and flown to a zoo in the United States. Here, bored out of his mind, he eventually begins doing the one thing he can do—his feet start moving. Noticed by a little girl, he attracts an audience. Just when everything seems hopeless, he’s soon on his way back to Antarctica, with a radio tracker attached. Back home, he tells of his adventures and teaches his whole colony to dance. When the scientists catch up with him, they are so impressed by the dancing colony that the world decides to save the fish supply for the penguins.
Nothing has gone according to plan in this penguin’s life. But as he becomes attuned to his true self, he enables all who are around him to expand their understanding of themselves, recognize the impact of their actions on the lives of others, and develop their ability to make choices that are responsible and loving.
Happy Feet is a fun movie, well animated, uplifting. Babel isn’t fun at all, and not for everyone. As a CNN review reports, “The cumulative effect is more grueling than cathartic, even if it may also be good for the soul.”
Circumstances that aren’t what we planned on burst into all our lives. The question is, do we react destructively? Or do we respond creatively?
There is a Presence within you that has awesome power. No situation is of an order of magnitude too big for this Presence to cope with. Not only can you survive, you can thrive. In fact, the more attuned to Presence you become, the more aware you are that, as Michael Brown puts it, “All that has ever happened to us, no matter what form it has taken, is what has deliberately brought us to this moment.”
Babel is all around us. Action and reaction characterize so much of what happens in everyday life. But in the midst of the world’s chaos, there is an oasis of peace that anyone can tap into. Will you allow your outer world to define you? Or will you redraw your outer world as a reflection of your loving inner Presence?
Your life has brought you to a point at which you can become free of the kind of panic that characterizes the lives of the people portrayed in Babel. Calm and centered in yourself, you then begin making choices that are creative, and that have a positive impact on the people with whom your life interfaces. Capitalizing on your gifts, you become a gift to others. Your happy feet become a channel for generating happy people.

Giving Versus Receiving

How Can It Be More Blessed to Give Than Receive?

A flyer mailed by Capital One Bank reads, “Whoever said, ‘It’s better to give than to receive” probably had an aunt who liked to knit.”

It’s a clever flyer, reflecting the way many in our culture feel.

A South Carolina 12-year-old would no doubt sympathize with the point the bank is making. Reuters reports that his mother, Brandi Ervin, had him arrested for repeatedly taking his Christmas present, a Nintendo video game console, from its place of hiding in his great-grandmother’s house. He was handcuffed, taken to the local police station, and charged with petty larceny.

Somehow I doubt this young man will get the lesson his mom is trying to teach. The urge to grasp and grab for ourselves is encouraged by society. If we are to be giving and sharing, it isn’t likely to result from punishment.

I have to admit that when I was a choirboy sitting in church at Christmas, this was one statement of Jesus I too didn’t care to hear. Oh, I felt guilty for feeling this way; I knew I was supposed to believe what Jesus said. But what child, as December rolls around, wants to hear that it’s more blessed to give than to receive? For that matter, who really wants to give instead of receive the rest of the year?

Well, actually, giving is one of our most natural traits. Before we learn differently, sharing is something we do spontaneously. Watch a toddler with a cookie. She or he will take a bite, then hold it out to offer you a bite too.

And if you have little ones, or are an aunt or uncle, teacher, or friend of very little children, how often have you been given pictures drawn just for you and your refrigerator door? A child loves to give of itself in creative self-expression.

True, children sometimes don’t want to share. “Mine!” and “No!” are frequent words on a youngster’s lips. This is an essential part of learning ownership and self-love. If we are to be giving people, it’s vital we value ourselves and don’t allow ourselves to be trampled on. Self-love is a prerequisite for becoming a person who delights in giving. Withholding, grasping, and hording are behaviors we develop when our self-love and self-expression are thwarted, as they so often are during the growing up process.

Jesus didn’t actually say that it’s “better” to give than to receive. That would imply that we really ought to be giving, not receiving. What he said was, “It is more blessed to give than to receive.” To receive is a blessing, but to give carries with it an even greater blessing. The blessing isn’t that God pats us on the head with approval, as I imagined when I heard this statement of Jesus in my own infancy.

It’s wonderful to receive a lovely gift that you know the person has taken time to select for you. The good feeling you experience when a gift is just right for you isn’t created by the gift, however. Rather, the gift invokes something that’s already in you—an inherent sense of your worth and value, with which we all lose touch as we grow up. You are blessed by being reminded of how worthy you are.

Warming as it is to be reminded of our worth, there’s an even greater joy mirrored in exchanging gifts. Gift giving is a re-enactment of our deepest desire, which is to be the incredible person each of us is, and thereby gift the world with our giftedness.

We all want things. But what we want above all is to express ourselves. We want to be the person we alone are capable of being. As Michael Brown puts it in his book The Presence Process, we long to “show up” in life.

The grounds for wanting things, or wanting another person, is our enjoyment of being ourselves. Things, events, and people are the channels for self-expression. They are a way of exercising the good feeling we automatically experience when we are being true to ourselves.

In his book, Michael invites us to discover a Presence at our center that is the source of all the wonderful presents we share with others. This Presence is total love. Its very nature is self-giving. From an infinite fullness, it pours forth torrents of compassion, caring, sharing, and goodness.

A friend who read my November 30 blog entitled Shopping for Christmas Presence remarked, “I find this time of year very stressful. There is always the struggle of obligation versus what I would like to do.” How many of us experience Christmas gift giving as an obligation! What ought to be fun self-expression becomes a tedious chore.

Feelings of obligation, based on what others will think of us because of what we get them or don’t get them, lessen dramatically as we become deeply attuned to the Presence at our center. We begin to have a more solid sense of ourselves, which gives us the confidence to follow our heart.

As we awaken to ourselves as born lovers, we want to give. But our giving, rather than being out of obligation, is responsible. It’s a response to our true desires coupled with the real needs of the situation. We no longer give to impress or to relieve pangs of guilt. We give as our heart tells us to give.

This Christmas, rather than giving because it’s expected, reach deep inside and discover your essential person. You are a unique form of the Presence that lies at the heart of all of us––of the whole creation. This Presence seeks to revel in life. You are meant to be its vehicle.

Giving then becomes an avenue for experiencing in an expanded way the joy of simply being your wonderful self. And, since you get to choose exactly how you express yourself through what you give, it’s even more blessed than receiving, which often doesn’t bring you quite the gift you might have chosen for yourself.

Christmas Presence

Shopping for Christmas Presence

As you brave the crowded malls at this season, what is it you’re shopping for?

“Gifts,” you say.

Yes . . . and, at an unconscious level, much more. For it’s not just presents we seek at this season. We’re also in search of presence.

As a species, something deep inside us drives us to develop rituals. In all of these rituals, we are trying to remember something we have forgotten. Gift giving at Christmas is an attempt to be in touch with an element of ourselves with which we’ve lost touch and that we long to reconnect with.

At Christmas, the decorations, colorful lights, wish lists for Santa, and preparation of Yuletide fare keep alive the hope of discovering what it is we’re seeking. We shop for, and wish for, something we know not quite what. For, no matter that a person picks the perfect gift for us, the fulfillment such a gift engenders is short-lived. The novelty wears off.

Fulfillment doesn’t come packaged in pretty wrapping paper. It’s found not in presents, but in presence.

In his book The Presence Process, Michael Brown explains that the “presence” that fulfills is your own deepest essence. It’s the aspect of you that’s connected to a Oneness that’s the source of everyone and everything that exists. As Saint Paul put it, quoting an ancient poet, “In God we live, and move, and have our being.”

When you awaken to this infinite presence at your center, and discover it as your own fundamental being, you no longer seek an elusive dream. “Seek and you will find,” Jesus said. When you find presence as your essence, all seeking, chasing after happiness, and longing for fulfillment “someday” ceases. You find, in this moment, now, that which you have been seeking!

Michael’s book is incredibly helpful in our search because it shows us the pathway to our inner presence. Each of us is a far richer, deeper, fuller person than we’ve ever imagined ourselves to be, and Michael shows us step-by-step how to take ourselves into this inner fullness.

If you feel fearful, doubtful, insecure, how do you act? You pull back, withdraw, become defensive and protect yourself. But when you feel terrific, your behavior is totally different. Think back to a time you met someone and were in love. It changed everything about you. There was a smile on your face, a spring in your step, a new enthusiasm. The grass looked greener, the sky more blue. How you feel affects everything in your life.

Discovering presence as your essence is like finding a reservoir high in the mountains in the rainy season, filled with water and overflowing. Your inherent sense of fulfillment––that good feeling of being you, when you are really true to yourself––spills over into every aspect of your life, and into the lives of the people around you.

When you feel good, you want to be good. And you want to do good. You want to share the good feeling of yourself with those around you. You want to realize the dream of yourself by overflowing and being a gift to others. This changes how you do Christmas, especially how you shop.

Because you’re no longer trying to appease and satisfy, but simply expressing yourself, shopping for presents takes on the ease and flow of eternal presence. Being in a state of presence is the end of all the frantic shopping to try to get gifts that will make those around you “happy.” Instead, your experience of fulfillment overflows in a generosity that is creative, caring, and therefore uniquely tailored to each individual. Each gift is an expression of your loving presence.

The only acts that are ultimately meaningful are those that in some sense celebrate who you are. Everything else is hollow. Nothing could be more true of Christmas shopping. Let presence well up within you, and you’ll know just what to get for those you care about. Your presence will radiate through the gift, evoking the recipient’s own inherent presence.

Perhaps, for some of the people in your life, the book The Presence Process, or the three CDs connected with it, might be just the right gift. It’s a question of readiness—of timing.

Use Michael’s books and CDs to guide you into your own fullness. Then, this fullness will be your sure guide as you give from a state of presence this Christmas.