Good morning…
By 12:34 am I was stirred awake from sleep by a panicky dream. So I got up from bed, scratched notes in my journal, then went back to bed to sleep through the night. Now I wake for the day at 6:43 am and I try to read the words chicken-scratched in last night’s dark: “Fingerprint – carbon copy – at 1:23 am, put your thumb on the start button of phone – scan to see how closely you resemble the fingerprint God gave you. How well developed have you become in comparison to the designed God intended.”
I think the roots of this dream run deep into the words we read aloud in class on Friday. “A few years ago,” writes author Parker Palmer,” my daughter and her newborn baby came to live with me for a while. Watching my granddaughter from her earliest days on earth, I was able, in my early fifties, to see something that had eluded me as a twenty-something parent: my granddaughter arrived in the world as this kind of person rather than that, or that, or that. She did not show up as raw material to be shaped into whatever image the world might want her to take. She arrived with her own gifted form, with the shape of her own sacred soul. Biblical faith calls it the image of God in which we are all created. Thomas Merton calls it true self. Quakers call it the inner light, or “that of God” in every person. The humanist tradition calls it identity and integrity. No matter what you call it, it is a pearl of great value. (Let Your Life Speak, 11)
“It is a strange gift, this birthright gift of self,” I re-read these convicting words. “Accepting it turns out to be even more demanding than attempting to become someone else! I have sometimes responded to that demand by ignoring the gift, hiding from it, or fleeing from it, or squandering it – and I think I am not alone. There is a Hasidic tale that reveals, with amazing brevity, both the universal tendency to want to be someone else and the ultimate importance of becoming one’s self: Rabbi Zusya, when he was an old man, said, ‘In the coming world, they will not ask me: “Why were you not Moses?” They will ask me: “Why were you not Zusya?”” (11-12)
We are each a unique portion of the fingerprint of God, a tiny carbon copy of the divine Trinity: Then God said, “Let Us (Father, Son, Holy Spirit) make man in Our image, according to Our likeness [not physical, but a spiritual personality and moral likeness]; and let them have complete authority over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the cattle, and over the entire earth, and over everything that creeps and crawls on the earth.” So God created man in His own image, in the image and likeness of God He created him; male and female He created them (Genesis 1:26-27, AMP).
I think my dream was about having a universal check-up on our spiritual personality and our moral likeness. What are we each doing with our birthright gift of self? Are we ignoring it? Hiding from it? Fleeing from it? Squandering it? Or are we growing into our Creator’s image and likeness as we caretake for every living thing thing on the earth? We must remember, in the coming world, they will not ask, “Why were you not Moses?” They will ask: “Why were you not you?”
Jesus said, “Again, the Kingdom of Heaven is like a merchant on the lookout for choice pearls. When he discovered a pearl of great value, he sold everything he owned and bought it!” (Matthew 13:45-46, NLT).
…Sue…
