Some people have said they’re not receiving the new emails from Substack. If that’s you and you want to keep getting them, look for the email in your Promotions, Social, Quarantined, places like that. Once you find it, you can move it to your primary inbox and it will keep coming there. If you have problems, give me a shout at anderson.david.robert@gmail.com.

My next reflection will go out Wednesday November 27th, the night before Thanksgiving. Talk with you then!

David

The post Look for Substack “Finding Your Soul” (It May Be In Promotions, Social, Quarantined, Etc.) appeared first on Finding Your Soul.

As I’ve noted the last few weeks, I am moving my blog to Substack. The new post will come from Substack and will look different, but it’s still the same Finding Your Soul.

You don’t need to do anything to keep receiving email notifications of each new post. Just look for Substack tomorrow. If you can’t find the reflection, check your Spam folder or Promotions tab, and move tomorrow’s Substack email to your primary inbox.

If you have any problems, please feel free to email me at Anderson.david.robert@gmail.com.

Thanks for reading—and just a heads up, Advent begins in seventeen days. This year’s daily series, “Advent: A Season of Longing” begins Sunday December 1^st. I can’t wait!

Blessings,

David

The post Look For Substack In Your Inbox appeared first on Finding Your Soul.

On Sunday afternoon I sat on a park bench and watched my granddaughter on the swings. My son-in-law was pushing her, doing “underdogs.” I was worried about many things in this world, and yet something here was lightening my soul.

Next to Novalie in the baby swing was a toddler being pushed by his father. The boy tipped his head back, his hair flaming like wheat in the sun. He shrieked for all the butterflies in his tummy and the joy of being so close to flight and fall—all in the safety of his loving father’s presence. The boy yelped and, out of deference to all of us, the father shushed him. I wanted to say, Oh, let him shriek and yelp, please. He’s sweeping us all into his wild joy.

That moment of peace in the midst of anxiety took me back to my favorite Wendell Berry poem, “The Peace of Wild Things.” There’s something so plain and redemptive about his simple vision for life in this world.

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Right then I could say, “I come into the peace of wild children.” Wild, I mean, in that kids are primitive, untamed, too innocent to be ashamed. Not to romanticize children—everyone knows they’re the best argument for original sin. But the “little ones” whom Jesus holds up for our emulation can pull us into their wholehearted world of openness, trust, and the shrieks and yelps of this precious moment.

Sitting next to me on the park bench was my grandson. At nine, almost ten, Dashiell is old enough to fall on a skateboard, deeply bruise his body and break his wrist. On top of it all, he had strep. Dashiell watched quietly, his arm in a brace. It was Sunday, the sun was setting, and he would soon go home. He laid his head against my chest and said, “I don’t want the weekend to end, Papa. I love you.”

                                                      For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

***

Note to you, dear reader:

I am currently transferring from my old blog to Substack, a platform for writers to easily share their creations with others. During this period of transition, there may be some hiccups in how you receive email notification from the old blog site. Thanks for bearing with me!

Next week I will be fully transitioned, and if you’re now a reader you don’t need to do anything to make the shift with me to Substack. You’ll automatically receive an email notification from Substack that a new essay has been posted.

Thanks for reading, commenting, and sharing these reflections with friends and family.

The post The Peace of Wild Children appeared first on Finding Your Soul.

When it first came out in 1991, I watched “The Fisher King,” a modern version of the Arthurian legend. Jack Lucas (Jeff Bridges) is a raunchy talk show host who inadvertently provokes a caller into a mass shooting at a Manhattan bar. He’s fired from his top job, turns to booze, and just about hits bottom when he meets a homeless man named Parry who miraculously saves him in an alley from a band of thugs (this is 90s New York, after all).

Parry, played with all the kinetic wizardry of Robin Williams, is deeply disturbed. And Jack soon finds out why: he witnessed the murder of his beloved wife in a bar shooting—the one Jack provoked. Parry spends his days searching for the Holy Grail, which he calls “God’s symbol of divine grace.” He believes the grail can heal him, but he needs “the One” to join him in his quest. Jack can hardly believe he’s implicated in all this, but feeling culpable, he agrees to help this poor man.

At first, Jack’s idea of helping is giving Parry some money, telling him he’s batshit crazy and needs to get help. He’s not interested in any deluded “quest,” he doesn’t believe in grails. He just wants to get rid of his guilt. But Parry keeps insisting on this quest, telling Jack he’s “the One.”

Near the movie’s end, there’s a wrenching, haunting line. Jack finally yells, “I’m not going to do this! I’m not the One! There’s nothing special about me!”

I know I must have heard Jack’s anguished cry 33 years ago, but I don’t remember it. Now, as I’m re-watching this ancient story of calling, that cry is all I can hear. Please don’t tell me I’m the One. Please don’t tell me I’m chosen. No, no, there is no power source hidden within me. Don’t tell me I have a divine calling.

I don’t know why, 33 years later, that line impaled me. Maybe it’s because vocation or calling is something that keeps knocking on our doors. We may think we’ve settled that issue years ago, but it returns in all the seasons of our lives. Ignoring or refusing the call is our way of protecting our present lives, happy or miserable—it’s all we can cling to. And it’s our way of protecting the future against any “crazy” deviations from the “normal” trajectory we insist on.

In the end, Jack’s heartbroken words remind me that the great truths usually seem batshit crazy to our little minds. And if everything I believe, everything I seek is “normal,” maybe I’m refusing my calling. Maybe I’m like Jack. Where’s my Parry?

Note to you, dear reader:

I am currently transferring from my old blog to Substack, a platform for writers to easily share their creations with others. During this period of transition, there may be some hiccups in how you receive email notification from the old blog site. Thanks for bearing with me!

The post I’m Not The One appeared first on Finding Your Soul.

A week ago, someone sent me this cartoon. A few days later we had dinner with our neighbors, one of whom is a therapist. She sat down—gladly taking the Manhattan I offered—with a deep sigh. She had seen clients all day, and she was depleted. “People are just deeply anxious,” she said. “It’s fall, and we see the biggest tremblors in the spring and the fall.” Whereupon someone remarked, “And . . .also the election.” “Yes,” she said, “and that.”

No matter who you’re voting for, everyone I know is worried. It’s not just election day, it’s what happens the day after, and the week after. We all know that civil war is possible. Literally.

All around us the world is falling apart. As Yeats put it so well, “the center cannot hold.” Yeats helps remind me that we are not alone in our anxiety. He wrote those lines in 1919, after the nightmare of the world’s first “total war,” and when the brutal Irish War of Independence was just exploding. He finished the poem during the devastating 1918-19 flu epidemic, while his pregnant wife, who nearly died, slowly convalesced. So remember: We’re not the first to witness worldwide cataclysm. There are wise and whole-hearted heroes and heroines who have gone before us, from whom we can learn how darkness is transmuted into light.

One of my heroes is renowned storyteller, author and scholar of mythology and psychology, Michael Meade. Our world is breaking apart and, Meade says, it will continue to fracture and splinter. What we need right now, he says, are stories of creation, or re-creation. Meade reminds us that the biblical story of creation begins with chaos, as do countless creation myths—Greek, Roman, Babylonian—and God is the one who separates the mass-mess, establishing order and harmony.

Many people confront the chaos and just instinctively withdraw in fear. But if we know that chaos always precedes creation, our awareness dramatically shifts.

“We’re caught in that space between chaos and creation,” Meade writes, and we need people who can trust that chaotic contractions are birth pangs. That doesn’t mean we sit and wait for a new creation to drop into our laps. It means we pray, spend time in silence, watch for signs. It means we listen and hold on to people. It means we speak the truth in love. And it means we act. When we begin to discern the moving of the Spirit, who brooded over the watery chaos, we get up and get to work, going where the Wind blows us. We probably won’t be in the majority, and you have to be ok with that. But great transformations always begin with a few faithful souls.

I want to be one of those.

The post Anxious About All The Chaos? Here’s Hope. appeared first on Finding Your Soul.