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MasPrac 07-10-108 Practicing
the Presence of People How we
learn to love Mike Mason Waterbrook
Press, 1999, 272 pp., ISBN 1-57856-265-1 |
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Mason, a writer,
is the author of The Mystery of
Marriage and The Gospel According
to Job. Formerly a loner and
nearly a monk, he almost miraculously discovered people. His series of brief meditations reflect on
how we learn to love people and what that means for our relationship with
God. Many insightful nuggets surface,
some almost poetic. His hope: "I want people to wake up to the wonder of
simply being in one another's presence." (115) "By
treating people the same way I treat God, I began to relax with them and
enjoy them. Not only that, but the
more I make my peace with people, the deeper grows by peace with God. The more I pay attention to people and
connect with them, the richer grows my prayer life. The more I give myself to others, the more
happy and fulfilled I feel." (4)
"To see
other people truly, one must look not from the outside but from the
inside. That is, one must enter into
relationships." "Love
requires getting mixed up with people." (13) "The way we
feel about people is the way we feel about God, and the way we treat people
is the way we treat God." (15) "If I want
an accurate answer to the question, 'How am I doing spiritually?' I need only
turn my thoughts toward the one person in my life with whom I am having the
most trouble. This person represents
the place in my heart where peace with God is lacking." "No one can
be close to God without also being close to people." (16) "To
practice the presence of people is to choose deliberately to focus on the new
creature rather than the old, to see the light in people rather than the
darkness." (29) "We must help one another to see and
to walk in the light." (30) "Believing
people are good will not make them so, but it will issue a powerful invitation. By having faith in people, we dramatically
increase the odds that they will actually behave well and grow in
virtue. This is not naïve positive
thinking, but a matter of practicality.
It's better to believe than not to.
Faith works. In order to believe
in people we must make a decision to know only the good in them. If our eyes are open, we'll see the evil,
too, but we must decide to know only the good." (32) "The great
question in life is not, 'What should I do?' or 'Why?' but rather, 'Who do I
know?' Job found this out." (33) "Do you
realize that what you see in others is only what is in yourself? Think of other people as a
mirror." "How happy you are
is directly related to how many people you can embrace with love." "The mirror of flesh and blood is the
test of true love for God." (35) "Does God
seem distant or absent? It may be
because you have chosen to distance yourself from His people." (36)
"Relationships--even bad ones--speak loudly and clearly. Listen to them. They will tell you the truth about
yourself, while on your own you will certainly miss it." (37) "John…wrote,
'Anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God,
whom he has not seen…. Whoever loves God must also love his brother' (I john
4:20-21)." (37) "Love, if
allowed free rein, would overthrow the world system as we know it. Nothing could stand in its way. Everything would topple like a house of
cards: stock markets, governments, the Mafia, shopping malls, banks,
libraries, our jobs, and on and on.
Isn't this what we're all afraid of?
Aren't we terrified of our little world caving in around us? But the destruction of the world by love is
the goal of the gospel.' (40) "Often what
keeps us from loving is a sense of being swamped by our own problems. But listen: The practice of the presence of
people (and of God) is the answer to all our problems." "Every problem, in other words, has a
relational root. The only real problem
is alienation, and the only cure is love." (42) "Since our
fundamental need is for love, every personal problem is interpersonal."
(44) "Make
friends with your past. Let the story
of your life be a biography of joy and victory, not a trail of broken
dreams. Forgive the dream-crusher, and
no one will ever crush your dreams again." (45) "People
I've judged often hold the greatest gifts for me. What an incentive this becomes to surrender
all judgments…." (46) "The way to
follow Christ is to peel off the crust and to pursue what we truly want. What is this deepest of all desires? It is nothing short of love. To love is to want others as we ourselves
long to be wanted." (50) "The world
is suffering much…because of this terrible disease--not of leprosy, not of
tuberculosis, not even of hunger--but of that feeling of wanting to be
wanted, to be loved, to be somebody to somebody." (p. 53, quoting Mother
Teresa) "If we are
serious about practicing the wisdom found in books, then we will learn to be
faithful to a good book as to a good friend.
We will keep such a book in our lives rather than on the shelf. The gate of learning is not the mind but
the will. When a book begins to speak
to us, we know it is time to act.
Obviously this is the point of reading the Bible." "Has it ever occurred to us that the
same is true of other good books?" (60)
"Why…a
chapter on loving myself? Because your
self, redeemed in Christ, is what you love with. The self is the tool with which you
practice the presence of others. If
you are not good at being yourself, you won't be good at letting others be
who they are." (69) "The
feelings you have toward yourself will inevitably be projected upon
others. If you do not love yourself,
you will not love your neighbor. If
you are not real to yourself, no one else will be real to you either." "It is a natural law. You will not and cannot treat others any
better than you treat yourself. Why
would you?" "If I am plagued
with guilt, be it ever so subtly, then I will be harsh and judgmental with
others." (70) "How can we
know if we love ourselves? What is the
sign? It's simple: We'll have lives
that are characterized by being warm and full inside, happy and
thankful." (70) "Love for
self is not selfishness, because the way I see myself is like a pair of
glasses through which I look at the world.
If my image of myself is poor, then my vision will be warped so that I
cannot see beauty in others. But if I
see myself as God sees me, with lovingkindness, then I will see everyone else
through these same glasses." (72) [I hear this
issue (loving yourself) pushed back and forth. This is about the best writing I've seen on
this side. What is your take on it?
dlm] "If you
feel that God doesn't speak to you, ask yourself: When do I ever lean and
loaf at my ease to enjoy something beautiful for its own sake?" (82) "The goal
of Christian spirituality is not to feel good but to fight well. The moment we focus on good feelings, those
feelings being to slip away."
"Fullness of joy comes from aligning ourselves with
others." "To be lit and
humming, we must feel connected." (88) "The other
side of joy is suffering. To befriend
ourselves we must embrace our lives wholly, including the
suffering." "Love eases pain
and when one loves God, one suffers for Him with joy and with courage."
(90, quoting Brother Lawrence) "Whether we
like it or not, we are going to share in the world's sufferings. Will our share of pain embitter us because
we are unwilling to accept it? Or will
we choose and even desire our sufferings, bearing them gladly because of the
joy set before us?" (91) "Not only
that, but we must share the suffering of everyone. Suffering is contagious, like a terrible
disease. It is no idle fear that if we
get too close to others their suffering might rub off on us. Because we are a part of one another, we
cannot help but feel others' pain.
Bearing these burdens, we enter into fellowship; avoiding them, we are
alienated." "If we are to
share people's joys we must also share their sorrows. Shrinking from sorrow, we shrink from joy
as well." (92) "Good clean
fun holds tremendous spiritual power.
Fresh, spontaneous, natural, renewing--fun restores us to our true
selves." "To have fun happen
to you, be a happening person. Are you
a stick-in-the-mud or are you still happening?" (105) "When we're
afraid to be fools, we end up being afraid to be anything." "Pride wants to look good, but humility
has no fear of looking bad. People
will see our faults anyway: like Paul, we should glory in our weaknesses. Then we'll be free to have fun." "Be home to the child you still are at
heart. He or she is your ticket to
having fun." (107) "I want people to wake up to the wonder of
simply being in one another's presence." (115) "To enter
the presence of people is to allow others to be more special, more noticeable
or present than we are to ourselves." (116) "When
bringing some problem or question to the Lord, I find He seldom answers me
directly. Instead He just wants to be with
me, to enjoy my company, and He hopes I too will enjoy Him. In this mutual enjoyment, my problems and
questions begin to dissolve. They do
not disappear, exactly, but their hold on my mind loosens." (121) "…God is
always present; the problem is that we are not. In our minds we tend to live more in the
past and the future than in the present…." (124) "If what
people are saying does not interest you, become interested in what they are
not saying. Be the sort of person who,
when some bore is talking your ear off, happens to notice the peculiar spot
of light shining like a jewel in his hair." "If you want to practice people's
presence, start by giving your own.
Become present to others." (128-29) "We will
never see other people if the air is dense with our own words."
(134) "The first duty of love is
to listen…" (135) "One good
rule of listening is that if you don't have anything to say, don't say
anything." "The hardest job
any of us have is to still the flapping tongue in our brains." "Listening to people teaches us to
listen to God. Do you find God to be
silent? It may be because He is
listening to you chatter." (136) "Whenever
possible, it is best to let others take the lead in correcting
themselves. It is surprising how
willing many are to do this if only they catch a whiff of genuine love. In this atmosphere, as often as not, the
forbidden issue will actually be raised by the other person first, and
suddenly we're invited to give the counsel stored up within us." "A good confrontation leaves no mess
to clean up. Since we do not condemn,
no condemnation sticks to us." (155) "Love is
surrender. Did not Jesus surrender to the whole world when He died on the
cross? In doing so He showed us the
way we are to follow. He showed us
that we are to submit to other people not because they are good or perfect
but precisely because they are not perfect, and so stand in need of our
love." (159) "When I
speak of the practice of the presence of people …I turn my inner eyes upon
people. Abandoning the noise in side
my own head, I let the person before me fill my thoughts and my field of
vision. I say to my ego, 'Excuse me,
sir, but you'll have to stand aside right now. There's a human being who needs my full
attention.'" (171) "When I
sincerely enjoy people, they feel this, and they leave my presence more
joyful. When this happens, I too am
happier…." "I make it my
goal to see the beautiful flower, the handiwork of God, in every
person." (172) "You'll
make more friends in two months by becoming interested in others than you can
in two years by trying to get others interested in you." (189) "Kindness
is not my strong suit. But over and
over I've learned the power of small deeds of kindness for lifting
depression." "No act of kindness is too small to be
significant." (192, 194) "Much of
what goes by the name of intercessory prayer is not true intercession at all,
but judgment." "We need to
love people first, unconditionally, and only then will we know how to pray
for them." (196) "If we do
not love people when we are with them, we won't love them in our prayers either."
(198) "As a
Christian I had always wanted to fix people.
I wanted to win them to Christ….
After years of striving, however, I realized that all my efforts were
not accomplishing these ends."
"Hope and love were missing.
If they were present at all, they were not in first place." (211) "It is one
thing to believe that God loves me.
But to believe that people love me too, and to receive their love as
from God--in some ways this has come to me as an even greater
revelation." (225) "If we know
without a doubt that Jesus is our friend, friendships with people will come
easily. On the other hand, if we fear
Jesus, we will fear everyone. Once I
truly made friends with Jesus, I realized what a great many other friends I
had too." (234) "If we
cannot find intimacy with human beings, we do not have intimacy with God
either." "The quality of our
spiritual life is best measured by the quality of our friendships. True growth will inevitably produce a new
closeness to people…." (235) "…while
friends are not perfect, friendship is.
Friendship is the perfect bond of love between two imperfect
people." (239) "When we
were learning to walk, our parents were there to catch us when we fell. But who will catch us when we grow up? This is what friends are for." "We connect with others not primarily
through our strengths, but through our weaknesses." (240) "Neither
our kind deeds nor our preaching best reveals Jesus to people, but rather the
dept of our friendships. There are
other ways through which the world may see Jesus, but without this one way,
all the others are in vain." (241) "The range
and depth of your friendships accurately reflects your knowledge of the love
of God." (250) |
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