Early summer morning

It seems hard to live up to, a morning like this one! Cool, but clear and crisp and filled with new leaves and birdsong. My emotions are mostly gratitude and unfocused excitement.

Yet there is also a kind of angst, a superstitious, grinding worry inside my chest that Life is trying to get me to drop my guard so that it can slip in a knockout blow.

How wrong that attitude is, how demonic - that we poison our own bliss by a concern that implies that God would make that kind of world for his children.

(It makes a powerful artistic trope, perhaps, but art is less than God.)

In seeking to free myself from this species of corrosive despair I find my thought most healed by thinking about the clear and luminous insights of William Arkle - In just a few years his direct and intuitive understanding of the divine and human condition has become central to my convictions and aspirations.

From Arkle's essay A Cup of Day.

http://williamarkle.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/late-prose.html

Arkle's text is very slightly edited - his words are in italics; my comments and summaries are in non-italics:

This early morning feeling is that 'My cup runneth over'. But we must not try to catch and hold-onto all the overflowing drops of experience. We cannot 'waste' life; so long as we attend to it - so long as we are here, now, and listening to the divine communications.

All that is really valuable will come back to you when it is needed. It really will!

This is part of the game of life which requires forgetting and letting-go with good grace and a sense of the unimportance of one's self.

Be one with the big fearless love which smiles on everything from its sense of the everlastingness and completeness which lies behind all living reality.

We think we can lose but we can't! There are safety nets around everything, since all comes from perfect love.

If we trust in the love of the creator, our divine parents, then that is the proper basis for living. (Not by terror, not by superstition, not by grasping and gripping - not in despair.) God, surely (and we can discover this for ourselves, if we seek it from divine communications) wants us to be things like hope-full, positive, active, alive, loving, creative, intelligent, aware - whenever possible.

We will, indeed, fail and fall - but by Christ's gift of repentance we will always be caught by those safety nets!

And when joy is not possible, we can endure faithfully in absolute confidence of our Heavenly Father's love - so we can know (with certainty) that, in the end, all hurts will be healed; and our lives become greater than we can curently imagine - except in glimpses.