Still Growing

I couldn't find a place where I could capture the whole iris garden that we visited in Oregon.  This gives some idea of how uplifting the beauty was.
Neither can I seem to capture a whole picture of my spirituality.  I don't yet have a unified concept. Yesterday I forgot to say that part and parcel of the foundational notions of Christ in me and God's gracious love is the conviction that any good that I find in myself is Christ's sharing his goodness with me.  There is no place for "merit," which was an important word in the first 30 years of my life.  My role is to say "yes" to Jesus who wants to share his goodness with me and, even to do that, I need his help.  The mystery of free will and grace!
There have been other more contemporary notions, that I have written about in this blog, that have continued to help me grow in my relationship with God.  I have come to think of heaven as another dimension that is intermingled with this world. This idea was influenced by understanding time as a fourth dimension and by John O'Donohue's Anam Cara: a Book of Celtic Wisdom in which his says Irish spirituality speaks of "the other world woven into and through this world."
Teilhard de Chardin, among others, has helped me understand a kind of evolutionary spirituality as God draws the human race and all creation into the future.
Elizabeth Johnson's Quest for the Living God helped me to see that even the name "God" can limit my relationship with the Divine.  Her approach opened up many new ways for me to think about Ultimate Reality.
Most recently Gregory Wolfe's Beauty Will Save the World: Recovering the Human in an Ideological Age has pushed me to go way back in my life and see how important beauty in nature and art has always been in drawing me into God who is Beauty.  This spirituality of Beauty prompts me to add what beauty I can to the world, for example by this blog and the pictures that I use.