TRANSCRIPTION of Story Stones 1 – Blessing
Welcome to Story Stones, an hour of deep listening and learning together.
I am a storyteller, a listener, and a holder of spaces where we can connect with the Story of Us.
My work is rooted in Myth, Mysticism, and the Christian Tradition.
I’m an artist, a writer, a mom, a runner, and a poet. My faith is in the space between us where two or more are gathered, my trust is in the mystery and my practice is listening and communicating from there.
That’s me.
Okay… so how does this hour work?
There will be some readings, some sacred text and scripture, and poetry.
These are the pieces I’ve been praying into all week and have then crafted a message of sorts from. There will also be moments where I invite you into deep listening between you and your understanding of what I call God, or you might call the Divine, or maybe even your guidance or inner wisdom.
In some practices this is prayer or meditation, but I call it deep listening.
Let’s settle in.
GRATITUDE CANDLE
I light a gratitude story candle to remind us no matter where we are, or what the story is inside our heads, or the story we are currently living, we are never alone. The mystery of our being and how we are held in this space and time, is always with us. We are LOVED. The mystery of us is always with us.
INVITATION TO LISTEN
This is time you’ve carved out to be with you, to be with your understanding of the sacred, to be with God and the Mystery of us. Take a breath. Take a minute to drop in, close your eyes and just get here.
Let the story of your morning go. It is not of this moment. Let the story of what you think this is going to be go, it is not of this moment. Let yourself be.
Listen beyond the words in your head. Open up to listening to the space itself.
MUSIC
I invite you to listen to the words of Kyle Church: SLOW DOWN on Spotify.
The story stone we are listening into today is the word: BLESSING and BLESSED. What does it mean to be blessed? Or when we say: that’s such a blessing. What does that even mean? And how do we live that? This is the word we are listening into today.
FOR THE KIDS
Let’s start with something really easy, something kids might understand:
This comes from Shel Silverstein’s book: Where the Sidewalk Ends
Shel Silverstein (September 25, 1930 – May 10, 1999) was an American writer known for his cartoons, songs, and children’s books. I grew up having them read to me and I have read them to my boys.
By playing what we’ve got…
KIDS READING
Hmmm…. boredom, imagination, making something out of nothing. Because the nothing is the blessing.
LISTEN
Let us LISTEN
I invite you to close your eyes and listen in to the phrase of ‘what is the nothing you feel blessed by? What does your NOTHING want to say to you today?
Breathe and be.
Be and Breathe.
Let the story of blessed by no-thing be with you.
What do you hear?
We’re going to move into three readings,
One from the Bible, from Matthew 5, and Psalm 15 and another from a Rumi poem.
MATTHEW 5 1:12
You’re Blessed
5 1-2 When Jesus saw his ministry drawing huge crowds, he climbed a hillside. Those who were apprenticed to him, the committed, climbed with him. Arriving at a quiet place, he sat down and taught his climbing companions. This is what he said:
3 “You’re blessed when you’re at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God and his rule.
4 “You’re blessed when you feel you’ve lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the One most dear to you.
5 “You’re blessed when you’re content with just who you are—no more, no less. That’s the moment you find yourselves proud owners of everything that can’t be bought.
6 “You’re blessed when you’ve worked up a good appetite for God. He’s food and drink in the best meal you’ll ever eat.
7 “You’re blessed when you care. At the moment of being ‘care-full,’ you find yourselves cared for.
8 “You’re blessed when you get your inside world—your mind and heart—put right. Then you can see God in the outside world.
9 “You’re blessed when you can show people how to cooperate instead of compete or fight. That’s when you discover who you really are, and your place in God’s family.
10 “You’re blessed when your commitment to God provokes persecution. The persecution drives you even deeper into God’s kingdom.
11-12 “Not only that—count yourselves blessed every time people put you down or throw you out or speak lies about you to discredit me. What it means is that the truth is too close for comfort and they are uncomfortable. You can be glad when that happens—give a cheer, even!—for though they don’t like it, I do! And all heaven applauds. And know that you are in good company. My prophets and witnesses have always gotten into this kind of trouble.
I love that… My prophets and witnesses have always gotten into this kind of trouble.
Take a moment to notice what is still with you?
What is speaking to you? What do you hear?
LISTEN.
Psalm 15
God, who gets invited
to dinner at your place?
How do we get on your guest list?
“Walk straight,
act right,
tell the truth.
“Don’t hurt your friend,
don’t blame your neighbor;
despise the despicable.
“Keep your word even when it costs you,
make an honest living,
never take a bribe.
“You’ll never get
blacklisted
if you live like this.”
SERMON
Creator…. God…. Universe… Mystery…
I acknowledge the story of us that was here before we got here and the story that of us that will be here long after we’re gone. May the words of my mouth hold your hearts well and be in service to the unfolding of the story of us all.
“You’ll never get blacklisted when you live like this”. Have you ever felt like that? Like you must be on the ‘naughty’ list. If you’ve seen Elf over the holidays you’re already laughing. But how about blacklisted? As in, the red rope of entry is closed to you, or worse, you feel like you are on the list of bad, doomed even. Or maybe you feel like you must be a target, as in a magnet for awful things.
Have you ever felt like that?
If you’re fortunate, you haven’t. Or maybe you’re lucky and this experience hasn’t happened to you. Maybe you’re one of the rare ones and you have no scars. But I doubt it. Because we are all blessed.
And that’s the WORD we are listening into today: BLESSED.
You will notice everything I do, every story I tell, every place I invite us into, I bring what I call the double edge sword of story to it. I am most interested in the wholeness of story, because it is where the wisdom lives. There is no wisdom in what we might call light only.
There is light… sure! Totally! Awesome! I Love it. I just posted on Facebook… Dear God… can the rain please stop? I’ve had a few dark days this month and the rain and dreariness is kicking my ass. I love light.
But the wisdom of story doesn’t happen on one side of the sword. It happens on all three. Yes three sides.
What we might call light
What we might call dark
And then the edge between.
In Story listening, our invitation is to listen from the edge, so integration can happen.
We can’t hear integration.
We can’t hear transformative steps in a puzzle already done.
We hear in the individual pieces.
And today’s piece, or Story Stone is the stone of blessed. We are blessed.
So let’s jump into this notion I just threw at you about being blacklisted, or on the naughty list, or the experience that we might be bad or something.
From Matthew we hear:
10 “You’re blessed when your commitment to God provokes persecution. The persecution drives you even deeper into God’s kingdom.
Okay, before we go any further, since this is my first story stones episode, let’s deal with the God issue. For those of you who balk at the word God – I get it. A lot has been done in the name of God that hurts. A lot has been done in the name of God that can’t be undone.
Remember though: in the name of God, not as God. But then many of you don’t believe in God. Cool. I get that too.
I don’t know who I believe in, as in holding a pronoun he, she, or they. I don’t have some big image of a person or celestial being called God in my head.
I don’t know what I believe in, as in holding a static picture like: wind, or energy, or the ocean. I can’t say for sure what God is.
God is a mystery.
And the mystery happens in the space between us, when we connect, when we have opened our hearts a little, when we are shields down, and in that space, an experience of God or spirit as a ‘carrier’ of God happens.
Have you ever heard: ‘where two or more are gathered…’ – That’s what I’m talking about.
You might say then, that what I believe in for sure for sure for sure is experiences of God – because it’s happened to all of us. That deep look into someone’s eyes and there’s an unmistakable – otherworldly connection. Those moments when you’re with someone and all the hairs on the back of your neck go up. Or those moments when you’re with nature and the beauty of the place takes your breath away, or as my dear friend Jillian Rutledge (a breath coach) says, when you are awestruck.
To me… those are the universal experiences of God. We know exactly what they are when we have them. As to who or what is God? That’s not for me to say for you. But I believe in it. In the great unknown and the love we find in those places. So when I say God, for those of you who are carrying pain from that word, or cognitive reasoning disbelief with that word, please hear an acronym of God as the ‘Good Ole I Dunno” – because nobody does.
And that’s the point.
I think that’s the most beautiful invitation of all. To experience God and not be able to describe it. And I am devoted to that.
So back to the scripture from MATTHEW where we heard ‘You’re blessed when your commitment to God provokes persecution’.
In a literal sense, that sounds awful. Commitment to God provokes persecution… yikes. Right… kinda like marriage to some: til death do us part… you mean, I gotta die to get out of this one?
But that’s not what I hear. I don’t hear ball and chain marriage. I don’t hear die for my faith. I don’t hear suffering for enlightenment. Or the suffering of enlightenment. I hear freedom.
I’ve had a few dark days in my life as I know you have too. In those dark moments, when my belief in all the big things crash like:
Love and being loved: I don’t believe in anything. I am empty. I can actually convince myself that I am never going to be loved by anyone ever….
Abundance and having enough: I am convinced I will struggle forever.
God itself and being supported: I am thoroughly convinced, like I know, I am all alone here, and no one but me will get me through this…
Or even my very existence, and mattering at all. In those times I hear in my head I was a mistake.
Yup. I’m normal like that. I have pain too. Do you ever spiral away like that?
I do – still. Sometimes a lot.
It usually happens when I’ve been side-swiped by a life-experience, or I’ve had a series of bad happenings occur in a row. A person can doubt herself, or slide into a mental health spiral, or worse, ride a big wave of depression. None of us are beyond that happens. It’s one of the signs we are human.
However, in those moments, as I’m positive you have had them too – we are experiencing life as we step away from God. We are forgetting the God moments of our life.
We are empty.
We are feeling persecuted.
And what is the only way out of those things?
All the woo woo books say the same thing. It’s not just the bible or the koran or the Buddhist Sutras or Yoga… They all say the same thing: surrender, or lay it down, or accept, or let it go.
When we lay it down, or in my story language, honour the story of the pain and the persecution, we come closer to God, because the next step, if we’ve truly laid it down and reminded ourselves: we are not the pain we are feeling, and we are . not the persecution which is happening… The next thing that happens is we rest. We have our tears, we empty our buckets and in that empty place, we rest in being blessed that we can… rest.
And we can.
The container for that rest, for the emptying for those tears is the blessing . of God. Or the Good Ole I Dunno. The Mystery.
We are blessed.
PRACTICE
In the moments of my greatest pain, where I am up against my deepest scarring of beliefs which are not true but feel true, I have a practice of sentences I say to myself to help me remember I am blessed. Saying them helps me rewire the circuits in my brain for those moments.
It sounds like this:
I won’t give up my ___________
to ____________
because I already ___________.
For example:
Love – as a single person who experiences stretches of loneliness, and experiences of bad choices, and yes, rejection, I can be faced with the unloveable monster, and can experience what I call clutchy… you might call it desperate… weak… or needy…
These are also very very very very human feels, so no judgement here. And I know when I’m in this place, I forget I am blessed, and I’m at risk of doing anything or trading something to have what might be love, but probably isn’t… You know what I’m talking about.
So this is the phrase I use (following the example above), and I whisper it to myself over and over and over again to calm myself.
I wont give up my SELF
to feel LOVED
because the truth is I am LOVED
(or BLESSED)
Let’s try FAITH:
This is one I used just recently, and it was really, really challenging, but nourished me and brought me closer to my understanding of God:
I won’t give up my FAITH
to belong,
because the truth is, I already belong.
(I am BLESSED)
How about ABUNDANCE:
And to understand this one, many a time I’ve been in a crossroads between the safety of a job, and my integrity as a child of God, and a follower of Mystery. Each of these crossroads were turning points, and catalysts of destruction and rebirth. Here are three examples:
Once upon a time my mom said to me in answer to a crumbling marriage and an impending financial disaster coming: Christina… you just need to get a job.
I remember thinking: You must not understand me.
Another time I was in a leadership tussle within an organization so I asked for guidance from a senior leader and her answer was: Tina… just do what you’re told.
I remember thinking: You must not have heard me.
And recently I was in a job I felt called to and I heard: Tina…you don’t know what you don’t know and you just can’t do that.
And I remember thinking: I’m not motivated by rules, you must not know me.
Which lead to: I love you enough to leave.
This is what I say to myself when I feel myself lean sideways, off my path, off my call, away from my knowing of being blessed.
I won’t give up my calling
to feel safe,
because the truth is, in this moment, I am safe.
What I offer to you is to hold the understanding you are already blessed, and you can rest in that. Craft a guiding sentence which takes the persecution you are experiencing, and the sacredness you are holding within you, and cushion it with the blessing of knowing what is really true.
I won’t give up my SELF/FAITH/SAFETY to BELONG/FEEL WANTED/FEEL SAFE – Because the truth is…. I already…. (insert the blessing of truth).
Okay… so you heard my big three ‘curses’ I tell myself sometimes. These are the three that take me out at the knees… What are yours? What takes you out? What takes you to your knees?
You know what I love about that image? It’s the universal body position of surrender, and the invitation for prayer, or sacred time with your connection to God.
Where we lay it down.
At the end of Psalm 15 we hear:
“Keep your word even when it costs you,
make an honest living,
never take a bribe.
“You’ll never get
blacklisted”
Never take a bribe. That is worth repeating.
Or we go back to the words of Shel Silverstein:
And though there may be orchestras
That sound a little better
With their fancy shiny instruments
That cost an awful lot-
Hey we’re making music twice as good
By playing what we’ve got
Hold on to your sovereignty
Hold on to the blessing of you
To remember you are blessed and you’ll never get blacklisted.
And then what happens…?
Well, now we can bring Rumi into this beautiful conversation…
LISTEN:
Don’t hide
The site of your face
Is a blessing
Wherever you place your foot
There rests a blessing
Look,
Every falling leaf is a blessing.
All of nature swings in unison
Singing without tongues
Listening without ears
What a Blessing.
O Soul
The four elements are your face
Water, wind, fire, and earth
Each one is a blessing
Once the seed of faith takes root,
It cannot be blown away
Even by the strongest wind
Now that’s a blessing.
I bow to you
For the dust of your feet
Is the crown on my head
And as I walk towards you
Every step I take is a blessing
-Rumi
Okay… so now you remember you are blessed, and you can source yourself back to that… but what about the big stuff? – right?
You know what I’m talking about… Fires in Australia, Koalas and Kangaroos and other soft padded foot animals burning in the heat. The divisiveness on our planet right now. The fighting we saw in China this year. The innocent people, doctors who couldn’t get to student activists bleeding. The shootings in classrooms of our children. Violence, and I haven’t even begun to talk about disease. We probably don’t need to go there. We have all been touched by cancer already. Someone we know and love has struggled through it, or been claimed by it. Why?
We’ll never truly know.
We are not God.
We are not the Universe.
We are not the intelligence of the cosmos in this one breath, body and brain.
We are not. Some might disagree with me.
So here is what I will suggest:
When we remember, truly remember and practice feeling, knowing, and choosing the understanding that we are blessed, we are developing a practice of treasuring.
And what we treasure we lovingly protect, we don’t put in harm’s way.
What we treasure we honour.
When we are in the act of treasuring, we make different choices.
The fires may still burn, but they wouldn’t be happening by the hands of us, and there wouldn’t be a global climate change due to us.
We wouldn’t be fighting as much. We would protect our values and beliefs differently. We would honour them, and treasure them, and in doing so, we might…. just might…. Be able to see that the person we are talking to across from us is just trying to treasure their stuff too.
Oh mannnnn it’s not like we don’t know this stuff.
Love thy neighbour as you love yourself.
Treasure yourself, and remember they are treasuring themself too.
Remember you are blessed.
They are blessed.
This world is a blessing
And treasure it.
We are treasure.
We are gold.
We are love, belonging, and abundance, and enough, and worthy, and chosen, and and and and and… we ARE.
We are that treasure.
We are that treasured, by God.
The Good Ole I Dunno.
We come in that way, and we go out that way.
We can count our blessings and begin to live as if we are them and are blessed by them:
From Irving Berlin we hear:
When I’m worried and I can’t sleep
I count my blessings instead of sheep
And I fall asleep counting my blessings
Now Rosemary Clooney I am not,
Yet, I am blessed just the same.
And may it be so…
MUSIC:
I invite you to listen to the message of Irving Berlin and the gift of love that is the voice of Diana Krall as she sings: COUNT YOUR BLESSING, on Spotify.
COUNTING YOUR BLESSING.
BENEDICTION
As you close your time with the sacred, I invite you to remember that you are loved by the mystery. You are held by the mystery. You are known by the mystery.
Let no mystery confound you into the conclusion, that mystery cannot be yours.*
Thank you for listening…
xxT
*a quote from Mark Helprin’s book: Soldier of the Great War
This is TinaO’s Ministry of Story. She is a sacred-listener in a divisive time, cultivating safe containers for real change-based connecting and conversation. She is a Storyteller rooted in Myth, Mysticism and the Christian Tradition. To Tina, communication is a spiritual practice of listening and following the living story of us.
Her faith is in the space between us, where two or more are gathered, her trust is in the Mystery and her practice is listening and communicating from there.
If you would like to receive her weekly Story Stones Sessions in your inbox, click here to have it sent to you.