Coram Deo
But if you cannot do good,
at the least, do no harm
Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.
Siddartha
Hello, and Welcome
Perhaps sometimes you feel like you are a stranger on this world and when you look around you you feel that it is only you who are alone. But it is not so, we can all feel alone - strangers in a strange land indeed - and to cover and hide that feeling of emptiness and aloneness, and in a vain attempt to protect and nourish ourselves, over the years we can fall into the habit of being selfish and grasping, even cruel.
It is on that lonely path that our hearts become blind and we can do harm without even being aware that it is harm.
Whatever your position on religion (and this site has nothing to do with trying to ‘convert’ you, so be not afraid), all religions, at their heart, say that the way home, the end of that aloneness, is via a surrender to something greater than ourselves.
In our modern ego-driven world with the cult of the individual and rampant consumer fetishism such a concept is generally seen as being asked to give away our rights, to give in, to be taken over, but this is not what is meant.
The invitation to surrender is not an invitation to join a religion or to believe certain things or to be afraid of a ‘hell’, it is an invitation to become what we were designed to be. By surrendering to that ‘Other’ we become open hearted, compassionate, kind, giving, courageous.
It is an invitation to become fully human. It is an invitation to love.
Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.
Leo Buscag
The response to that invitation involves you in a journey,
a journey that may take a lifetime - your lifetime - and the first hesitant step along that path is an awakening of your true morality.
It is like this .... you will agree perhaps, that the most plaintive and heart-rending of all cries children make is that “it is not fair”?
Well that cry was made by you too, many times, and that innate sense of fairness - of goodness, has never left your heart, it has only been hidden.
How deeply it has been hidden and how easy it is to retrieve will depend very much upon you.
Living in this world as an adult and making the right decisions is difficult.
When you are at a loss and thirst for the ‘right answer’ to the moral and ethical decisions you are daily confronted with, stop for a quiet moment and remember your child’s heart - that is where the Well is, where the Truth is, where Wisdom is - and that is where the right answer waits -
And here is the incredible thing - when you stop doing harm, allow compassionate tears, and start to do good - after a while you no longer feel like a stranger on this planet - and you no longer feel alone and joy, radiant as the sun, breaks through.
When you carry out acts of kindness you get a wonderful feeling inside.
It is as though something inside your body responds and says, yes, this is how I ought to feel.
Harry Kushner
