Today’s Blog is a bit long – But so well expressed for so many of us “searchers” growing, growing . . .
“On Sundays, I used to stand in front of my Mormon congregation and declare that it all was true.
I’d climb the stairs to the pulpit and smooth my long skirt. I’d smile and share my “testimony” as the church calls it. I’d say I knew God Jesus Christ, the Holy Ghost, prayer, spirits and miracles were all real. I’d express gratitude for my family and for my ancestors who had left lives in Britain, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Norway to pull wagons across America and build a Zion on the plains. When I had finished, I’d bask in the affirmation of the congregation’s “amen.”
In that small chapel by a freeway in Arkansas, I knew the potency of believing, really believing, that I had a certain place in the cosmos. That I was eternally loved. That life made sense. Or that it would, one day, for sure.
I had that, and I left it all.
I never really wanted to leave my faith, I wasn’t interested in exile—familial, cultural or spiritual. But my curiosity pulled me away from the Church of Jesus Crist of Latter-day Saints and toward a secular university. There, I tried to be both religious and cool, believing but discerning. I didn’t see any incompatibility between those things. But America’s intense ideological polarity made me feel as if I had to pick. . . . I recognize, though, that my spiritual longing persists—and it hasn’t been sated by secularism. I want god. I live an ocean away from that small Arkansas chapel, but I still remember the bliss of finding the sublime in the mundane. I still want it all to be true: miracles, souls, some sort of cosmic alchemy that makes sense of the chaos.
For years, I haven’t been able to say that publicly. But it feels like something is changing. That maybe the culture is shifting. That maybe we’re starting to recognize that it’s possible to be both believing and discerning after all.”
Thank You for reading, JoAnnLordahl.com
[My apologies: Reading, Writing currently consumes most of my dwindling energy.]
TWENTY WAYS TO MATTER – A Composite poem
Excavate the truth beneath the truth beneath the truth —
the deeper you go, the simpler it gets:
the longing, love, insecurity, rage, loss—
all of it part of the same fabric,
all just a story
emerging from the quantum foam.
Move through the world
knowing that everyone around you
is doing the best they can,
that humanity is capable
of the Moonlight Sonata
and the concentration camp,
that you are a piece
of the same puzzle.
If you are longing for
the world to be more perfect
do something about it:
become a kind of translator
between reality and possibility,
cast a light on a parallel world,
that little speck in the distance —
it is the hope, it is the struggle, it is the reward.
Let go of the future
but hold on to the beautiful things
that, like music, exist outside of time —
the sense of wonder and love and light.
When the chord changes on you
What if you harmonized it?
The black hole of your devastation
is a wild strong expansive place.
We are really good at coming up
with reasons to not go there.
Go there.
You will find the seeds
that become galaxies of growth.
you will find
what the soul and the spirit and the heart
need to know.
Be on the inside of your heart,,
make home inside yourself,
for to keep other people happy
is distraction from the real work of being
in which there is no final test
for how to be human —
only the open question
of how to be yourself
which you must answer daily
with all the strength and kindness
that you’ve got.
And remember
that life is an extraordinary creative collaboration,
that if we keep shining a light
on the things that mean and matter the most
the light overcomes the darkness
that love is the oldest light in the universe
and when you live and work and listen
with open-hearted love
everything
everything
everything
is possible
for your life.
The Marginalian by Maria Popova
https://www.themarginalian.org/
dated 4-20-25
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