Deep and Simple by Bo Lozoff

“Deep and Simple” is a wonderful book by Bo Lozoff. About the book review, please refer to the article. I read this book from a friend, and was deeply moved. I would like to extract and share some paragraphs here which touched my heart most.

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Developing a spiritual practice begins by choosing to have faith in something – an idea, a teacher, a saint, a religion, a prayer. We put our faith in something noble and then we take it into our real lives, into our strengths and weaknesses and hopes and fears and disappointments, and work with it.A spiritual truth, an object of our faith, which doesn’t hold up in a prison cell or during an earthquake, isn’t a big enough truth. The Big Truths are true throughout any possible condition life can present to us.When we choose faith, it doesn’t mean that bad things no longer happen to us, it just means that there is no longer any cause for fear or bitterness in our pain. Fear implies we’re unprotected, and bitterness implies something shouldn’t have happened the way it did. Both are false to the person of faith.Fear says, “You’d better watch out! It’s dark up ahead!” But in daily practice of faith, you can remind yourself, “of course it’s dark up ahead! Up ahead is not my business, this moment is, and it’s light enough for me to see right now.” We are like a coal miner carrying his light on his cap. Whenever he arrives, it’s light enough for him to see. He doesn’t look ahead and say, “But it’s dark up there!” he knows that by the time he get there, it will be light. This light by which we see comes from inside of us. So it makes more sense to work on brightening our light and keeping the batteries strong, than to worry about what’s in the dark up ahead. The light only exists “now,” never “then.” Faith accepts this, fear refuses to.

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We are no better than anyone. That’s the message. We have no right to look down on anyone, no matter what they have done.Every human being contains the highest of the high and the lowest of the low. Peter had to find it out the hard way. I hope you and I don’t. Peter must have been so ashamed and humiliated; he probably never wanted to show his face again. But he did. He came down from his lofty perch. He didn’t quit or run away. He didn’t try to forget all about it. He accepted his flawed nature, opened his heart and moved forward a quieter, gentler man who knows he indeed was “just like all the rest.” He could then become the saint we are all destined to become.One thing you can begin taking for granted is that every person you meet who seems to have courage, dignity, compassion, and humility, has experienced failure and weakness and shame. So don’t be an egomaniac and feel like you are the only one, or you’re a worse one than the next. Everybody’s got that stuff. Our spiritual victory rests only on what we are willing to do with it.

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Jesus didn’t come to get us off of death row, heal our cancer or get us out of debt. He came to inspire the courage in us to live a sacred life as he did – to love others and dedicate our lives to the common good. But it is a serious mistake to think that a positive outcome is the point. That’s not the point of faith. It never has been. Those are just demonstrations of the power and Glory we are dealing with – not guarantees. The elderly would have been just as calm and fearless if the general had indeed disemboweled him. His faith was not tied to a particular result. He knows it was small potatoes.Miracle stories serve to remind us that if God wanted our problems to be miraculously solved, they would be. So if the court says, “Execute him,” or the doctor says, “sorry, ma’am, but you are not responding to treatment,” or Pontius Pilate says, “crucify Him,” then we know that God had the power to change it and didn’t. So we can walk calmly, even through the valley of the shadow of death, knowing “Thou art with me.” No bitterness, no doubts, no panic.

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• Deep and Simple -yy888- ♀ (0 bytes) () 03/01/2010 postreply 04:56:54

• 問好，謝分享。新的一周快樂。 -斕婷- ♀ (0 bytes) () 03/01/2010 postreply 17:37:22