JOYFUL WANDERING - 10

+ updated at 2:36pm ESDT on Friday, March 25, 2011

+ Joseph Naft offers important wisdom and creative ideas on PRAYER. Excerpt: "Prayer engenders a dialogue between an individual or a group and the Divine, ultimately transforming into a monologue of God (through us) praying to God. The quality of this dialogue ranges enormously from the perfunctory blessing over food to the utter surrender of the saint in mystical union. Four factors determine the power of our prayer: the degrees of our faith, humility, awareness, and intention."

Here's an excerpt on Faith: "The fortunate few attain to the all-consuming faith that emerges from direct and ongoing contact with Divinity. But if you look for the source of faith, you cannot see it. Neither thought nor emotion, faith springs from deep within the will."

Read it all.

+ Inner Work for the week: "Non-Directed, Unitive Will, Passion, Grace, Union" by Joseph Naft.  This is the eleventh and last lesson in his powerful Modes of Will series which is now available in its entirety.

Excerpt 1: "While desires may be more or less satisfied, passions pursued lead to greater passion, inexhaustibly, for they flow from the infinite world of the Unitive energy, of Love, a world where Oneness is the reality. The will that flows down to and through us from that world carries in its very nature that inherent unity. One result of letting this into our hearts is that we feel our separateness as incompleteness, with the consequent arising of a need, a longing, a passionate wish for completion, for unity, for love. That precious wish drives our inner work along the path to the sacred. Spiritual practice, rather than assuaging that wish, increases it, until that longing in our heart becomes a constant reminder of what matters. That wish, that longing, that warmth of heart, reshapes who we are."

Excerpt 2: "Receptivity to the Unitive energy brings grace, the grace of a moment of awakening, the grace of freedom from self-centeredness, the grace of objectivity in seeing and responding to the needs of our neighbor, the grace of accepting ourselves and others utterly, the grace of opportunities and temptations, the grace of purifying situations, the grace of seeing our life as our teacher. Enabling us to rise above our usual mixed motives, moments of grace come unexpectedly."

Read it all.