Must couples in trouble necessarily fail? No, not necessarily: no healthy couple is doomed to failure. In fact, the only ‘doomed’ relationships are those where one or both partners are unapologetically physically or emotionally abusive . Without a doubt, the only realistic option for someone who finds her- or himself in a fundamentally abusive or exploitative relationship is to exit immediately. Apart from that, I believe that many (if not all) relationships “on the rocks” could be healed under the right circumstances. From my perspective, the fact that this healing so often fails to take place could be an indication that one or both of the partners have stopped listening. Additionally, ceasing to listen indicates a spiritual problem. Let me explain.

It would seem that the  person who hears another’s voice, but is no longer committed to listening to what the other has to say has given up on her or his partner, as well as their relationship together. If you look more closely, however, it soon becomes clear that the person has actually given up on him- or herself. Empathetic listening and appreciative inquiry represent a three-fold choice: 1) to accept the other, 2) to trust the other, and 3) to engage with the other. Closing off the lines of communication also represents a choice: to cease accepting, trusting and engaging with one’s partner. Before I relate this to fundamental spiritual principles, let’s look briefly at each choice.

The choice to accept another human being is foundational. True acceptance represents a fundamental option to see in the other person another self, with exactly the same sorts of strengths and weaknesses that we ourselves possess. This choice to acknowledge the other person as another self  has two destructive opposites. The first perversion of acceptance we call ‘exploitation‘. Philosopher Martin Buber contrasts these approaches with the terms I-Thou (for true acceptance of the other), and I-It (for exploitation). To see your partner merely in terms of his or her usefulness (like a tool or a piece of furniture) or her or his capacity to satisfy you represents a fundamental denial of humanity on your part. The second perversion of the choice to accept your partner shows itself as conditional acceptance. In brief, “I’ll accept you if you do such-and-such or so-and-so.” Conditional acceptance of another puts you in the position of being their judge, jury and executioner. In fact, it represents nothing less than your attempt to usurp the position in your partner’s life properly held by God alone.

Next, let’s look at the choice not to trust your partner. Why don’t you trust her or him? Because you’ve been hurt before? The refusal to trust your partner goes way beyond self-preservation. Once again, it is passing a judgment of condemnation on another person — another self — who exhibits the same sorts of faults and failings that you yourself exhibit. In fact, if the truth were known, the faults and failings that you find most easy to condemn and most difficult to forgive in others are the very ones that you exhibit most strongly yourself. In fact, the two keys that are absolutely essential to unlocking both acceptance and trust are these: first, to acknowledge an identical humanity in both yourself and the other, and, second, to commit yourself to the path of unconditional forgiveness. Who cannot look at the plight of even the most desperate of people around us and not be able truthfully to say, “There, but for the grace of God, go I?” The greatest message of Christianity — and also, I’m afraid,  its most forgotten and neglected — is simply this: unconditional, unlimited forgiveness. If you cannot forgive unconditionally, you cannot trust for very long.

The final choice is the choice to engage with your partner. If you refuse to engage with her or him, you thereby give credence to the (Jungian) ego’s false belief that you are vulnerable and need protection. It’s the same force that drives people’s frantic searching for that illusive (and illusory) ‘security’ that they believe will fix everything and protect them from danger. Once again, it would be foolish to put ourselves in harm’s way by engaging with an abusive partner. We owe it to ourselves and to them to take the necessary precautions so as not to allow ourselves to become victims of deliberate abuse. However, if you imagine that refusing to engage with your well-intentioned partner will grant you some sort of immunity from harm and from hurt, you are mistaken. Do you believe that spiritually you are invulnerable and that nothing outside of yourself — not even death — can destroy the essence of you? “Greater love has no one,” we have heard, “than to lay down his life for another.” Oddly, dieing for someone can actually be a whole lot easier than living for them.

Finally, what does the choice not to listen say about that person’s spiritual condition? The testimony it gives is nothing short of damning. Personally, I would liken it to what Christians refer to as the ‘sin against the Holy Spirit’ or the ‘unforgivable sin.’ Here’s what I mean. Whenever I write, I use the terms ‘acceptance,’  ‘trust’ and ‘engagement’ as  synonyms for what are called the ‘theological virtues’, namely: faith, hope , and love. The ‘sin’ against faith is the decision not to accept the will of God exactly as we encounter it in our world. The ‘sin’ against hope is the choice not to trust that our only Source of genuine security is divine providence. The ‘sin’ against love is the refusal to become meaningfully engaged with those we were sent to serve: our fellow creatures who, along with us, share the “image and likeness of God.” If the ‘sin against the Holy Spirit’ is a refusal to believe that the love of God is powerful enough to forgive us (and so we refuse to ask for forgiveness, and therefore refuse to accept it), then turning a deaf ear to someone we once claimed to love is a ‘sin against love’, for, as we know, the opposite of love is not hate, but deliberate indifference.

What can you do if you find yourself failing to listen? Remember the futility of protecting yourself. What can you protect yourself from? Even more importantly, what are you protecting yourself for? After all, your mission here in this world is not to try (futilely) to keep yourself safe. It’s to share with your fellows (and especially those in relationship with you) the same kind of acceptance, trust, and engagement that your God has shown to you. God hears his people’s cry . . . can you do any less?

And what about you who find yourself ‘learning to love one another’ and your words keep falling on deaf ears? You, too, have the opportunity to pass on the love of God. Your acceptance of the other can be renewed continually. Your trust of the other need never fail or fade. You may stand ever at the ready to engage. However, engagement (love) requires reciprocity. God does not condemn, so how could you? God does not constrain, either (because love can never be forced), but rather waits for all eternity for the other to emerge from his or her isolation and re-engage. You can have the willingness to re-engage, whether or not the other ever seeks it. You may never re-engage as you once did: time and the world goes on while the other chooses to isolate, stagnate, or (what’s worse) repeat the same self-defeating choices and behaviors with other partners. You, on the other hand, have the opportunity to accept and trust and engage with people at every stage and every condition of your life: people who, like you, have chosen to listen not only with their ears, but with their hearts.

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2010 H. Les Brown

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Today, I’d like to share with you the (always-tentative) response that I seem to be getting from my six decades of  reflexively auto-dialing a universal ’411′. It seems — to the best of my ability to understand the answer — that the universe and all it contains is nothing but a mega-University that’s only function is to educate Consciousness (in all its known and unknown iterations) in just two interrelated subjects: what I’m calling the Two Great Lessons of Life. I won’t keep you hanging there in anticipation. The First Great Lesson of Life comes down to this: learning how to love. The Second Great Lesson of Life is its complement: learning how to let go. That’s it. That’s all there is. Once you’ve mastered both subjects, you’re ready to graduate. If it were only that easy.

We were all born selfish. You may know that in biology there’s what they call the ‘recapitulation theory’ that suggests that every life form goes through all the stages of evolution on its journey from fertilized egg to viable organism. I have no idea whether or not that’s exactly accurate, although there does seem to be a general pattern observable across all forms of life. It seems clear to me that at least human consciousness in its earliest stages develops along the lines of how consciousness emerged on this planet. At birth, our consciousness makes a giant leap forward that takes the developing distinction between “me’ and ‘mine’ to a whole new level. Birth can be seen simply asa quantum leap in the ever-increasing viability and independence of the organism. Early life outside the womb closely parallels life inside: the infant remains totally dependent on its care-givers for all the conditions necessary for its survival. From that point on, the nascent person must assume ever-greater responsibility for his or her own independent existence. Life begins with the understanding that I must get what what I need in order to survive. I learn to value who I am and what I have been given. ‘Love’ and ‘need’ start out life as synonyms.

As I lead you through this ‘recapitulation theory’ of mine, I hope you’ll take the opportunity to reflect back on your own life’s experiences to see where the crises you’ve encountered indicated ‘sticking points’ in your own evolution. If you try, you can see how they imitate the earth’s plate tectonics: the plates in the earth’s crust push against each other and their energy imperceptibly builds until, at one random moment, they suddenly become unstuck and shift — sometimes with catastrophic seismic results. Each of the crises in your own life represents a seismic shift across every aspect of your life: physical, mental, emotional, relational, economic and spiritual.

If childhood can be defined as that epoch of life during which we learn to take care of ourselves and to become increasingly self-reliant and responsible (we gradually take on the responsibility of  providing for our own survival) then that life transition stage that we identify as ‘adolescence’ must be that period where we are forced by nature and culture to confront our own self-centered self-interest and begin very tentatively to open ourselves to others as well as to the Other. It’s the time when we learn to both value and care for others above and beyond our own selfish needs, even our own need to survive. Love and need split apart in adolescence’s tumultuous soul-quakes. The adolescent transition from childhood to adulthood takes on the features of a transformation.

Learning to love . . . learning to accept unconditionally, to trust unconditionally, to become fully engaged with another . . . committed to another. These lessons of love take a long, hard time to learn because the real lesson (that love is a choice, a decision) only begins when the ‘other’ love — the emotional surrogate of love — starts to fade away. Love is what’s left after all the needing and wanting has dissipated, been satisfied or disappointed.

My first prayer as a young man entering the chapel on my first day in the major seminary was: “Lord, teach me to love.” That was the prayer of a foolish youth who didn’t understand that the prayer to learn to love, like the prayer for patience, is one that’s always answered and always in startlingly unexpected ways. “Greater love has no one, than to lay down life itself for another.” What they don’t tell you is that it’s much more difficult to live for others than it is to die for them.

Just as some people never quite learn the ‘independence’ lesson from childhood, others never quite get what it means to love selflessly. There’s a type of grieving involved in every act of true love, because it means letting go of all of our expectations. We want to be loved back, to be unconditionally accepted and trusted, to have someone somewhere somehow commit unconditionally to us. We feel as though we need that affirmation of self: if we don’t receive it, we’ll just die.
But, we don’t fully receive it — we don’t fully give it either — and we don’t die. Instead, we learn life’s Great Lesson number one.

Then comes midlife. Just when we think we’ve gotten our Master’s degree in loving, life turns the tables on us. We positively freak out when we first turn to that page in the book of life’s instructions that our parents and our whole culture and upbringing gave us for guidance and we read, “Everything in this book may be wrong.” Here begins life’s Great Lesson number two: letting go.

Letting go begins with relaxing our death-grip on our opinions, starting, of course, with everything we were once so certain and sure of. Today, on the other side of the midlife divide, I am certain of very few things. As certain as I am that there exists a universal Truth, I am equally certain that I will never fully know or understand it. And, as far as God is concerned, the God of my understanding has been replaced with the God of my lack-of-understanding. In fact, all that I really need to know about my God is that I am not he. Everything else is open to interpretation. In life, as both Martin Buber and Karl Jung so clearly saw, there is an I (a Self) in constant dialogue with a Thou (an Other) and, as with all true dialogues, meaning is always given by the receiver, not the giver. Contrary to popular belief, what God said is relevant only in regard to what we actually heard and understood.

The crises of midlife arise from the difficulty that each individual has letting go of the certitude that we hold with regard to our beliefs and opinions. At midlife, we are brought face-to-face with the great transcendental ideals that Plato and Aristotle proposed: absolute Goodness, Truth, Beauty, and Unity, and we begin to recognize that we in this world enjoy only their analogates: relative goodness, truth, beauty, and unity. We will never know (nor can we as humans really adequately even understand) such things as Life, Love, Security, Health, Peace and Freedom. The famous midlife crisis is the struggle that we wage against having to give up our pretensions to these Divine attributes. When the crisis is over, we find that we have let go a little bit more of our pretensions to the divine. The answer to the great question, “Why me?” (as though we had some divine right to Life,  Love, Security, Health, Peace and Freedom) is always the humiliating, “Why not you?”

Our topic today of the Two Great Lessons of Life has brought us to the understanding that all of life is, in fact, one great process in two distinct stages: learning to let go of self (what we call love), then learning to let go of everything else (what we call death). It makes me think of the Jewish proverb that says: Shrouds have no pockets. All of this lifetime of learning to let go is just preparation for the Great Letting Go that silently awaits each of us. Like all lettings-go, life’s Great Lessons involve grief in (at least) five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. How you think about death and how you feel about the lessons that life is handing you right now, today can be very good indicators of where you are in the learning process. The more you learn to let go, the more grieving there is. The more grieving you do, the farther along you progress toward acceptance. So, where are you?

And, just a final word to the wise, if the Roman poet Horace was right when he wrote, “Non omnis moriar” (“I shall not wholly die”) — and I believe he was — then whatever letting go and whatever grieving you don’t get done in this life, you will carry with you into the next. That’s just something to about it.

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2010 H. Les Brown

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Obviously, the middle ages were infused with what we would consider a ‘morbid fascination’ with death. Yet, they had good reason. Back then, there was no hiding from the end of life. Infant mortality was rampant. Life was short (the average age at death was 40 or less). Disease swept Europe in waves that killed millions. Families encountered death ‘up close and personal’ on a disturbingly regular basis. Death, back then, was certainly an unavoidable ‘fact of life.’ Indeed, the experience of death and dying was so pervasive that it was completely taken for granted, like eating and sleeping. People needed to be reminded of what it meant: “Memento, homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris” (“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return” from the Ash Wednesday service). Even Thomas Moore, Lord Chancellor of England under king Henry VIII adopted a famous motto: “Memento Mori” which is a Latin pun meaning both ‘remember death’ and ‘remember Moore.’ We would not want to return to the fixation on death that characterized the medieval period. Yet, what have we replaced it with?

Rather than focus on our ultimate destiny, leaving this world behind, our culture has chosen to replace a morbid fascination with death with a morbid fascination with rigidity and changelessness. Our obsession with youth and nostalgia for an imagined halcyon age in times gone by permeates not only our decision-making processes, but also the meaning we give to the world. ‘Living in the moment’ seems to have become ‘living for the moment.’ Haven’t our lives been overtaken by an obsessive pursuit of security? How much thought, time, and resources have you devoted in the past year alone to achieving security for yourself and your family? Even the term ‘conservative’ has shifted from meaning a forward-looking, thoughtful decision-making process to meaning a kind of reflexive instinct for self-preservation. Yet no real security can ever be attained.

Sometimes the discipline of philosophy can bring sense to a worldview that appears confusing and contradictory. Medieval writers spoke of everything having a ‘final cause.’ That meant for them that things happen with an inner logic that drives them forward (whether or not we are aware of what that logic might be). If the universe had a beginning (and it did: the ‘big bang’), then it has a direction and an inner logic that drives its evolution toward some future, as yet unknown, ending. The universe is not static. It’s not rigid. It’s not eternal and changeless. The only constant in the universe is change. Although its inner logic drives it forward, the universe’s unfolding is anything but ‘secure.’ All we know for certain is that, at some point, the earth will be swallowed up by the sun, the sun will become a super-nova and die, our galaxy will collide with others and be ripped apart, and the forces of the entire universe will eventually play themselves out. Time and space as we know it will just cease.

The life that each of us enjoys can be understood as a microcosmic reflection of the universe itself. For us, as for the universe, there is no security, no stability, no guarantees. We grow and our lives play themselves out by an inner logic over which we have only limited influence. We call that inner logic our ‘destiny’ — that complex of possibilities that work together with our understanding and our decision-making powers to determine who and what we shall become. We absolutely must look backward to appreciate where we’ve come from. However, in life, there’s no room for sentimental nostalgia. We can’t — we shouldn’t want to — turn back the clock. At midlife, youth has gone; good riddance! Enlightened by the past, our decision-making power must be focused rather on achieving our destiny whatever that may be. Our choices need to be forward-looking, enlightened by our ultimate end, our ‘final cause,’ our purpose for being here. Looking forward gives meaning and direction to our lives; obsessing on the past can only leave our lives frustrated, empty and meaningless.

Now how do we put this understanding into practice? One of Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits is, “Begin with the end in mind.” How will you know if you’ve made the right decisions if you have no idea where you’re going? As the Cheshire Cat told Alice, “If you don’t know where you’re going, then any path will take you there.” As you begin this new year, do you know where you’re going? Do you have a clear mission for your life? Defined values? A vision for the next 12 months? A written intention statement that defines specifically what you want to accomplish? If you knew that death awaited you a year from now, how much differently would you live today? Death overtook our aunt while the rest of us were making plans for the New Year. Every time something like that happens, it’s a wake-up call that reminds us with stark finality of our own end. Most of those who read this will end this year with a greater or lesser degree of success (however you choose to define that). Yet, some of you may not. Eventually, each of us will come to a year without a New Year’s eve. Should we not begin this one with the end in mind? Indeed, “Memento Mori.”

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2009 H. Les Brown

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Just before Christmas, I had stumbled upon the archives from Craig’s friend and performance poet, Chasen Gaver, who had died of AIDS in 1989. In those archives were listed audio tapes of conversations that the two of them had recorded many years ago. Seeing the list of familiar tapes and documents now part of a university library collection really affected Craig. He mused, as we walked along the water’s edge, about how strange it was to be confronted by the person he had been back then, when life was new and full of possibilities and ideas were exciting and heavy with promise. Now, he said, he felt as though his life was in ‘maintenance mode.’ It made me think: this is the shift of perspective that sets maturity apart from mere adulthood. It’s a tough change of perspective to navigate successfully.

Can you remember the thoughts and feelings . . . the dreams . . . that you held so dear when you first emerged into adulthood? So much was new! There was the first time you decided that you had found your partner in life. There was your first foray into politics. Your first career. Your first trip abroad. I’m certain that you can think of many, many more ‘firsts,’ each one seeming to open up new vistas, new possibilities, new promises. Life, for adults, appears like an endless series of adventures. Remember “Don’t knock it ’til you’ve tried it”? All the while that your storehouse of experiences grew more complete, your ideals were tested by time and adversity, your tastes became solidified, your hopes and desires tempered by disappointments.

The final transition between adulthood and maturity happens when reality forces you to acknowledge that your own hard-won experience has let you down. You look around at all that you’ve accomplished and built for yourself and suddenly you see it for the first time as emotionally and spiritually unsatisfying. You hunger for more, but everything that you’ve experienced and everything that you’ve learned tells you that ‘more’ promises only more of the same. The midlife awakening can be summed up in one sad phrase: “Is that all there is?”

Beneath the surface of your conscious thought, you’re experiencing a transformation. ‘Hope’ is robbed of the meaning that it once had for you. What’s there to hope for when you’re left trying simply to maintain yourself in a reasonable semblance of well-being until you die? What’s the point? Believe it or not, this is the turning-point of the midlife transformation. This is where you’re given the opportunity to create a solid foundation of maturity that goes beyond anything that you could have experienced in your adult life thus far. Leaving behind the ‘hope’ of the child waiting breathlessly for Christmas morning (mere anticipation) actually represents a major step forward toward living a fulfilling life. For the mature person, ‘hope’ comes to mean the kind of trust that sinks down into your very bones that, in the words of the Desiderata, “No doubt, the universe is unfolding as it should.” And that universe encompasses you.

The meaning that you find in your life no longer needs to be dependent on your accomplishments from yesterday. They helped to make you the person who you are, but now they are faded and stale. Regardless of how exalted your position, by now someone somewhere has bested you. Few accomplishments remain notable for very long. Nor can you expect to discover the meaning of your life in those things that you are yet to accomplish. By now, you’re way too cognizant of your limitations to imagine that you’ll be changing the world any time soon. What’s left? Ah! There’s the gift that you’re being given to ease you into maturity! What you discover that you have left is all you really ever had: today.

We’re looking at the immanent close of this year and our entry into the teens of this new century. Of course, we do well to look at where we’ve been this past year and where we hope to go in the one that begins anew in a couple of days. This could be a time for a radically new approach to living, if you want it to be. You have the choice of turning away from the regrets and recriminations that kept you stuck in the past and letting go of the fruitless habit of making ‘resolutions’ for the new year, as though you could by sheer act of will change what’s coming tomorrow.

There are but three decisions (call them ‘resolutions’ if you wish) that are worth making for this New Year (and every one thereafter): 1) to lay aside and detach yourself from every expectation that you may entertain about yourself or others for the coming year, 2) to deepen your personal contact with your Higher Power (however you may define that Power) Who supports and sustains you through every moment of your life, and 3) to live fully just for today in conscious awareness that you are an integral part of the divine plan and to do what you can to bring that sense of purpose to those around you who languish without it.

Every year at this time, I am reminded that my first coach, Lyn Christian, discouraged me from making New Year’s resolutions, and, instead, encouraged me to adopt a theme for the new year.  Here is my theme for 2010: “Be the hope you wish to experience.” What will your theme be? E-mail your theme for 2010 to me at lbrown@proactivation.com, and I will share it with my readers. A happy and blessed New Year to you all!

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2009 H. Les Brown

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“There’ll be scary ghost stories
And tales of the glories
Of Christmases long, long ago”

Nostalgia — the recalling of pleasant emotions from times past — is a wonderful part of the human experience, and imparts a wonderful warmth and intimacy to the close of the calendar year, especially in latitudes where warmth and sunshine are in very short supply. Nostalgia allows us to relive moments of our past with simplicity and purity, memories stripped of the inconveniences of real life that prevented us from fully enjoying those experiences at the time. Nostalgia is a creative enterprise, a cooperative effort of the memory and the imagination, that constructs a mythical world of times gone by out of fragments of events and wishful thinking.

As an emotional vacation, nostalgia is harmless enough. Only when it becomes a way of life — as it easily can — does it become a threat to our most precious gift: the future. Nostalgia the drug, when taken in too large a dose, can cause either a compulsive longing (when a return to the “good old days” becomes our fixation) or a sense of seething indignation (when we imagine the indignities and deprivations we once suffered), or both. When nostalgia in either of these forms becomes a way of life, particularly during the midlife transition, it can effectively lock the future in a stranglehold from which it cannot escape. Then hope — not wishful thinking, but the real hope that represents trust in a loving God — suffocates as well.

Each of us is engaged in a life-or-death struggle, and what’s at stake is nothing less than our very souls. If that statement sounds like religious fundamentalism, it is actually entirely the opposite. Our human souls are essentially creative, and meant to partner with a loving Creator to design and build a future of incredible possibility. We are expressions of the conscious driving force guiding and directing the evolution of the universe, no longer on the physical plane or the animate plane but in the realm of consciousness itself. As the mystic John of the Cross wrote allegorically about spiritual growth in terms of an ascent of a mountain (in The Ascent of Mount Carmel), after a certain level of growth, “beyond here there are no paths.” All the signposts of the past point us only to this decision-point. They can point us no further. Beyond this point, we walk only in blind trust of the Power that brought us this far. This is the maturity into which the midlife transition transforms us. Spiritual maturity is no country for the feint of heart.

Lurking in the background, calling to us ever more insistently, the voice of nostalgia warns us about going forward. If the creative Spirit is driving each individual forward in his or her personal evolution, then nostalgia, pulling us away from the unknown and back toward the safe haven of our imagination-scrubbed past, represents the forces of death and decay, masquerading as safety, security, self-interest, and even righteousness. Religious fundamentalism, whether represented by radical Moslems, Hindus, Christians, Marxists, Nazis, or free-market economists, represent men and women devoid of hope and without trust in Providence, however one chooses to define It. Rather, they represent humankind in midlife crisis, seeking quick and easy answers and emotional relief from the terror of the blank page that demands their writing on it in bold letters. Seeking refuge in nostalgic traditions can be the spiritual equivalent of writer’s block.

How can we move forward then into spiritual and humanitarian maturity? Ironically, it means recapturing our lost past. The ancients well understood that all ‘history’ is a distortion. As we have often heard, ‘history’ is the story as told by the winners. All memory is distorted by the same selective memory and enhanced by a similar imagination. The ancients realized that facts are of little consequence. Only their meaning really matters. To the ancients, myth — the attempt to distill meaning from the ‘facts’ — was what had importance, the ‘facts’ were simply an assemblage of meaningless data. If your personal evolution cannot be enhanced by your experience lending some significance to the present, then your experiences in the past has become little more than an emotional tranquilizer. Rather, the lessons of the past are what they are because they have the power to challenge and drive us beyond our reticence to face the terror of the unknown, the void, our future.

Sacred Scriptures are recognized as such not because they were dictated by an executive Deity to a dumb but faithful scribe. Humanity acknowledges writings as ‘sacred’ because those writings refuse to stay frozen in the past like some engraved tablets of stone, serving only as silent witnesses against an errant population. Rather, we recognize their Divine authorship because they stubbornly refuse to stay safely boxed up in the past. No, they live and breathe and enter into dialogue with us continually. What we see there today will be different from what we saw there yesterday, because we have evolved, and the world has evolved. The Word of God cannot be nostalgic, because it constantly challenges us onward toward our destiny to become hour by hour and day by day the image and likeness of our Creator: co-creators of something (our future) out of nothing (our past). Our hope embodies our commitment to become the people that we were always meant to be: regardless of whether or not we have any conception at all of who or what that may be.

It’s the holiday season. Go ahead and take your rest with smoking jacket and slippers, a pipe, a snifter of brandy, and a sentimental old book before a roaring fire, if that’s the form your reverie takes. Saunter down the path of nostalgia and, like Scrooge on the arm of the Ghost of Christmas Past, look in on happier times and enjoy the glow of fond memories. But come back to us. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come may be fearsome and shrouded in darkness, but that is the one in whose dread eyes you will see the reflection of your true Self. For in those eyes, terrifying though they may be, you’ll find real hope. Happy holidays and God bless us, every one!

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2009 H. Les Brown

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