Christian Mystics
During my up and downs the last few years, I found a daily devotional from the library called Christian Mystics: 365 Readings and Meditations. It was a way to connect with my roots and to feed my spiritual side which is still learning and growing and is a held within a changing multicolored spectrum that I thoroughly relish. I would have it no other way. I haven’t had the opportunity to finish reading it, seeing as the copy rests in the library, but I really recommend it from what I was able to get from it. Here’s one of my favorite passages:
“God is supremely good and therefore supremely generous. Sheer joy is God’s and this demands companionship.” -Thomas Aquinas
“God’s Goodness is Not Limited. It is supreme. It is also generous, indeed, supremely generous. Generosity is a divine attribute. For us to develop our generosity is for us to develop our God-likeness. Moreover, the sheer joy of God is the very cause of the universe, since joy demands companionship. Joy seeks to be shared. There lie Aquinas’s thoughts on why the universe exists for the sake of joy. To share joy, God created others, an enlarged community. Community is nothing if it is not a place/space of shared joy.”
Getting to joy took time for me. And the secret was to share it. But to find it, I had to practice gratitude. You can practice it (there are many ways) by taking stock of all you are already rich with. I mean really, from head to toe, be honest with yourself, be authentic about it, because usually it’s something that others don’t perceive, and celebrate and hold it close and use what you have to work with. You have more than you know. But you will have to dig. And you will have to deny shame any place in this search. You are uniquely and specially made. That includes the light and the dark and everything in between.
Try to be joyful, friends. It is a difficult task, but a most rebellious, yet unifying one. We cannot always be 100% joyful, I know. But we can challenge the odds.
