The Call To Live Awake (Day 5)

Accepting oneself is not easy especially if you’ve battled years of struggling to find a place to fit in. The struggling to adjust to the people around you and not being able to bare your entire self as transparently as you need to exhale and breathe can feel like an imprisonment or slow suffocating death.  
Lately, I’ve been thinking about this because receiving God’s love means I receive it for myself and this love should be able to help me accept myself with all my flaws and idiosyncrasies.  I haven’t been able to wrap my mind around it  else I would be completely secure in His love all the time.  
God’s love is not easy to anchor on especially if acceptance and affirmation is something we always rely on other people for.  It’s not easy to anchor on to someone you cannot see, talk to or hang out with. But I’ve realized that by not anchoring myself on Him, I too am not able to completely receive other people’s love completely as well.  I will always doubt, question or be critical.  I will always wonder if what people share with me is real.  And I will always hurt when I realize that not everybody is as real as they would like to be.  
The fact of the matter is, nobody is as real as we would like to be until we have decided to get real with God.  Until we are able to get the guts to ask God to show us the truth about ourselves, it is impossible to become our real selves.
Last night’s talk with Sr. Isabel and Tita Malu made me realize that everything in this world passes away.  The recent calamities that affected my country should wake me up to the truth about how life is but a vapor.  The things that we see and experience everyday can pass away.  They reminded me that the only thing to long for is eternity because longing for eternity means longing for that eternal happiness and joy that knows no rejection or separation.
Living awake is admitting that what I have in this world and the possessions that I own will never completely create for me that haven of acceptance.  It will never be enough.  Self-acceptance is only possible once I’ve understood how God has long accepted me. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Art and Business

Letting myself unwind for the past couple of hours after an intense dialogue with executives on business strategy and leadership philosophies.  I ran into this video.  Aside from faith, what motivates me is my passion for art or any related artistic experience.  Finding a relationship between deepening my faith and learning about how artistic experiences can help this deepening process has been an ongoing pursuit for me since I graduated from business school.   I've realized how art can help me become more grounded and reflective in anything I do which translates to almost a prayerful experience.  This helps me understand why faith is needed in pursuing any experience and in understanding the aspects that strengthen faith, I am able to keep up with my perseverance of pursuing any experience.  An elective I took up in business school called "Self-Mastery and the Arts" has convinced me how important the impact of art is in one's life.  In that study, I also learned ho
Read more

Lectio Divina | A Reflection on Yehuda Amichai's "The Amen Stone"

Image
It took me a week to finally choose a poem I resonated with among the six poems I was assigned to reflect on through the ancient practice of sacred reading called  lectio divina .  The experience of being in a writing course (albeit online) has given me the liberation to explore the power of words and unearth the gift I know I've long locked within.  The gift of realizing I have the same power as well. My writing process was a painful unraveling.  I could not write immediately.  I could not catch the thought and pin it down on paper.  I tried reading other books that would get the flow of creativity going and to no avail the anxiety caught on and forced me to take a break.  So I did.  And went back on it again this weekend.  I had to recalibrate my mind for 2 hours.  Removing the residue of the business mind that forces me to constrict my definitions of life in a less human sounding voice.  I began my  meditatio  of  Yehuda Amichai's  "The Amen Stone".  
Read more

Anxious No More

Image
There are many interesting things that have been happening to me these past 3 weeks. It's been a journey out of and into another chapter of my life.  And this chapter is the chapter that makes me face that thing I want to do the most.   Write.   The stories on this page have been slow because I've been trying to discover what it is that I want to really write about and when I ask myself this question, I begin to ask myself the most important question: what am I really about?  It doesn't feel so difficult to ask now compared to before.  I'd squirm and I'd let my gaze wander off into a blank wall or I'd stiffen up and change the subject because I don't really want to dig in too deep and ask myself that because I fear the answer to that question.  I fear having to say it out loud.  I fear having to type it out here.   What am I really about?  I don't really know.   I don't really have it all figured out just yet.  It's been a while
Read more