A Letter From Jesus

One of the writing exercises I find most powerful is writing a letter from God, Jesus, or a spiritual guide to me. It’s a way of finding out the words and message that the holy has for each one of us. In every workshop where I have led this exercise, I have always been awed by the love, tenderness and power of these words that come to us and through us. I truly believe that we become vessels for a greater knowing, for a love and power that is often beyond our ordinary consciousness, but always available to us.

Next time you need some encouragement try this simple exercise. Take a pen and a paper, and write a letter from God, Jesus, or a Biblical figures, or spiritual guide to you. If you want, you can make it a dialogue, with questions and answers, a conversation.

I guarantee that you will be blessed. The following is an excerpt from a letter from Jesus to me. In it is a promise for all of us:

“It is my job to bring healing into situations that seem hopeless and impossible. Trust that I have power to heal events not only in the present, but in the past, too.

Perfect love casts out all fear, but even imperfect ordinary love can cast out some fear. I want you to remember that I know that you love me. You can call on me, count on me, and trust me to be present with you and for you. All you need to do is ask. Invoke my presence; utter my name and I will walk with you. I will hold your hand. I will stand with you in every situation. I will give you words when you can’t speak. I will give you strength when you are weak. I will be all that you cannot and I will never desert you. For you are my beloved child. With you I am well pleased.”

After Words

I wrote this poem a few weeks after the Twin Towers went down. Remembering today, that it's still my fervent desire to find a way toward peace.

After Words
A response to September 11, 2001

It was a time of uncertainty, doubt and fear
a time of mourning, weeping and crying out
a cacophony demanding
Revenge, Justice, an End to the Madness
Peace.
A time when we perched at the brink
looked into blackness
and rock crumbled underneath our feet.
A time when we held our collective breath
and braced ourselves for the hand
that would push
us into the abyss.
We clamped our eyes shut
images of destruction replaying
in the darkness behind our eyelids.

Then we felt it.
We were not standing alone.
Shoulders pressed against ours.
Fingers found their way
into our clenched fists.
We offered our hands, opened our eyes
stepped back from the precipice
into a sea of tear-streaked faces.
Voices swelled like waves
our grief, our lament, washing us clean.
Stripping us bare.

And we knew that to heal
We needed a new vocabulary
with the power to break divisions we’d invented
to keep us “us” and others “them”.
Words to topple fences
that kept neighbors apart.
Words to weave humanity together
across the span of continents.
Words to reveal what it means to be human
in all our brokenness and beauty.

At the edge of the pit
we held the hands of strangers
we called them brother and sister.
We sang of hope, of love, of a presence bigger
than our constructions and our understanding.
We spoke of the power that embraces us all.
We became the river of life
carving a new path to a place
we’d been longing to discover all of our lives.

Blog On Break

Thank you for visiting my blog. I am currently concentrating my writing on my MFA program, writing essays and memoir that are in progress and too long to post here. Don't let the lack of recent activity discourage you. I hope you will visit my archives and that the essays, prayers, and poems I've written will encourage you on your spiritual journey.

At the Manger

Jesus, like the magi, and the little drummer child, I bring you a gift. I pray it will be of use in this world. The wrapping isn’t fancy, the package not designed to sell. All that I can offer you is myself and the words I possess, words that I unfold before you. Words about a life, mine, that has been transformed by a life, yours. The words of epiphanies, of God moments that have changed me from a Herod––fearful and wanting control because I never really had it––into a mother Mary, willing to say yes to God even when I don’t understand how the plan is to come about.

I stand before the manger with words you will need when you are older, words that will thread you to humanity and your divine essence, words to balance you between worlds. I bring you words that are the story of struggle and triumph of each person who has made their way to you.

I drop to my knees under the weight of these words, wrapped in a tattered cloth I have tied around my arm. Then one by one I tuck words like Thank You into the corners of the straw around your sleeping frame. Your little fist opens for a moment, reaching for a word to hold tight to your chest. You choose Love.