Seeing

A friend and former client gave me the great gift of a book called The Way To Love, The Last Meditations of Anthony De Mello. De Mello was a Jesuit priest.

When I first read the book over a year ago, I read it through, in order. There are 31 meditations, all very wise and compelling. But now I pick it up and go to the table of contents and see what speaks to me. It's like a shot of spiritual adrenaline.

Here's a piece of what I read today. The meditation is called, "Be Awake":

... [T]he first act of love is to see this person or this object, this reality as it truly is. And this involves the enormous discipline of dropping your desires, your prejudices, your memories, your projections, your selective way of looking, a discipline so great that most people would rather plunge headlong into good actions and service than submit to the burning fire of this asceticism. When you set out to serve someone whom you have not taken the trouble to see, are you meeting that person's need or your own? So the first ingredient of love is to really see the other.

I am so immersed in this process right now. I loved reading this as part road map, part validation.

It is central to my journey.