Last week I took a trip to the outskirts of Baltimore to visit an old friend, someone I first met in 1990 in Tucson where I was doing my internship at the church where she was a member. Since we both liked to sing, during that year I was in Tucson we got together now and then to practice duets, accompanying ourselves on our guitars and enjoying how well our voices blended.
So this past week I loaded up my guitar to take along with me, and during my visit she and I had a couple of singing sessions, trying our best to remember the songs and harmonies we used to sing and, even though we were both rusty, we had a blast.
Of course, before we started singing we had to tune our guitars, which is why I’m telling you all this.
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve written about what I see as the essential aspects of the spiritual life. First I wrote about knowing oneself as foundational, then last week I spoke about opening to the Great Love and shared a watershed moment in my own spiritual life.
But it’s the third aspect in which it all comes together, when we bring our way of being into closer and closer alignment with what the first two aspects of the spiritual life have revealed to us. We can have all the depth of self-awareness and all the profound moments of awakening imaginable, but unless those things play out in our daily lives they are meaningless. Which brings me back to the guitars.Continue Reading