THROUGH THE AIRPLANE WINDOW

The last session of our three-month long Center for Action and Contemplation course 'Mystical Sobriety' with Jim Finley has opened.

The teaching from this last session sends me digging through old boxes of journals searching for an entry from my first trip to Mexico.

I am like the woman in the bible searching for her lost coin... until I find the journal entry I am looking for:

I am looking out a small thick airplane window.  The terrain below is changing like my life.  The mountains are different than they were a few minutes ago.  This unfamiliar land below me looks like a papier-mâché globe that someone smashed with a giant hand in order to make it an interior map for me to follow.  I sit up straighter in my blue upholstered seat. The airplane bounces and something inside me shifts? I have crossed the border into Mexico long before the Customs Man will ever stamp my passport. (Circa 1986).

Was my experience on that flight to Mexico maybe the unconscious showing me my smashed life in the only way I could handle it back then?  Did it know I would come back to that journal entry thirty plus years later?

The unconscious is kind.

It gave a small bounce, not a huge crash.

It gave a papier-mâché map, not twisted car accident metal.

On a related note, I listened to an interview this week with Murray Bodo, OFM. It is amazing to me that in this interview Murray Bodo speaks of St. Francis as having PTSD from war.

Finally, I want to close with something else Murray Bodo said in the interview I referenced above.  Bodo said something to the effect of, and I'm paraphrasing here: "St. Francis wasn't crazy as many in his day called him, there was nothing wrong with him, he just risked revealing his inner life."

Fear not, if you are called to reveal your inner life.

Fear not, if you are called to share your contemplation.

You are not alone.

Amen.

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