Deadly Sins in the Deadly Cold Winter: Reflections on Heart Sickness and Trust

Happy Snow Day Everyone!!! 
Getting crazy over here in Indy!
Hoping you all are warm and safe!

Hope the Christmas & New Years season has been slow and lovely too!
In my slow moments of the last few weeks I have been thinking a bit about my own not so lovely times where there has been some coldness of my heart...

 I was watching a brief commentary on “A Christmas Carol” one evening last week, and when listening to the themes of the tail I could not help but to think of the own belief system and how I would or would not live up to the expectations of ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future.

The beauty about stories is we can weave ourselves into the people on the screen or in the pages,
even some of the most shadowy of characters.
Growing a little older, not only the little girl simply spectating Christmas specials all December long, I see the greater necessity of linking ourselves firstly with those darker characters as they show us the character defects within ourselves-- the areas I would rather not show to the world or believe to be true about myself,
the parts I do not even recognize.

The Sufi Mystic Llewellyn Vaughn-Lee speaks on necessity of inner work – practicing the of balancing our goodness, love, light, and divine nature with our more feeble nature gravitating towards anger, jealousy, greed, etc...  and how the balanced life can only be done through psychological practices and deeply facing our dark side. 

“That is the groundwork of spiritual life”. 

Being that little girl watching the Scrooge infused Christmas specials, I remember being very inspired by the morals of those movies, realizing I did not want to be the one haunted like Ebenezer and rather learning by his example of what not to do. Quite a few Christmas down the road, and billions of unimpressive, hollow, and self-seeking moments since—I even had a many over this year’s Christmas trip too--but I see where the ways of a one Mr. Scoorge are no different than the ways of my own.

Greed, no matter what its fear based manifestation, is always identical at the root.  The greed within the hearts of the people at the top one percent of financial wealth is the same greed of my own.

For me, my particularities in food, well stalked savings account, and a surplus packing job for things like Christmas trips --all this chaotic preparedness-- does not always point towards a trust in a power greater than myself to provide.

“Do not worry about your life, what you will eat, what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; and they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?” (Christian Scripture, Matthew 25-27)

Do your best, and all will be provided for is what I see again and again in holy messages and what resonates to be true in my spirit and my experiences.

Because truly,
our fears and their fruits
--those shadowy actions of our deeper darknesses--
condenses to the even greater spiritual offense of distrust in the powers of
God,
our neighbors,
and ourselves.  

Peter Maurin, assured his co-founder of The Catholic Worker, Dorothy Day, when in question of their fiscal ability to publish their newspaper and support their communities of hospitality that,
"Capital is raised by prayer. God sends you what you need when you need it.
You will be able to pay the printer. Just read the lives of the saints."

May we continue the difficult journey of trusting that we are cosmically cared for, the journey of parsing through our own darknesses, and acknowledging
the light within all. You never know when a Scrooge will see his ghosts, or maybe we will be given the opportunity as a living spirit of perspective to one of them, or our Ebenezer within…

Stay warm boos,
xo