Meditation

As I write this post, I am in America – right now visiting my son & daughter-in-law – who live in Brooklyn, NY.  I also have cousins here, from both sides of the family, whom I will also visit.  It is that special week in the Catholic Calendar known as Holy Week!  So I will be attending liturgies during the week while I am here and hopefully will bring those blessings received into all my interactions with loved ones and others.

This is a new beginning for me, writing this blog, since I have not written anything here for nearly two years. My trip is in part gifted to me by my siblings who financed my flights as a gift for my big ‘O’ birthday,  coming up in July! So thanks guys, I really appreciate it.

So what is special about Holy Week? What does it mean for some event or person or time to be holy? In fact ‘whole’ and ‘holy’ share the same roots linguistically. So to be holy implies somehow that we are whole, integrated, complete – that we are grounded in the very core of our being and that we are fully expressing who we are.

In my Christian tradition that wholeness is exemplified perfectly in the historical person of Jesus who lived such a life of loving compassion to all that the religious authorities of his time were utterly challenged by him, which resulted in his execution. Yet his message was that ‘ALL IS ONE’. We are deeply connected to everyone and everything that exists and are in essence part of the great mystery at the heart of life which some call God, or the Divine. Presence, consciousness, being are other words people use. No one can fully express this reality in words, it can only be experienced, hence the many divisions that exist between people, nations and religions who have taken incomplete verbal expressions as the totality of truth which they then rigorously defend.

Jesus message was ‘Love one another’, even ‘Love your enemies!’, not ‘Go out and kill all others, in my name, because they don’t use the ‘right’ words about reality.’ So Holy Week, for me is a reminder that we humans are holy, that all that exists is holy, that time and space are holy, that the earth is holy. A reminder that people like Jesus and the Buddha lived their lives in such a way as to show us how to be at peace both with ourselves and with others.  So enjoy this week. Really appreciate that you are holy, live life and fully express the totality of who you are!