Keeping Your Bearings

We either live by a clock or a compass. The clock represents our obligations and plans-the things that drive our behaviour and condition our responses toward success. The compass represents our beliefs and motives-what we feel should lead our lives towards significance. To keep on course, we must be constantly mindful of the influences on the direction of our lives. If we are arrivng at destinations we didn't expect or desire, perhaps our bearings are off. Our compass needs calibration.

Over time, the hull of a ship builds up magnatism that interfers with the ship's compass. To remove this interference, a ship passes over special coils in the ocean floor. Similarly, our internal compass must be periodically demagnetized if we are to continue our journey along accurate bearings. these coils, in this analogy, are the bible, and those men and women that God has placed in our lives to direct us. We must allow God's word to bring us into allignment with Christ, and we must "remember the ones leading us, who have spoken to us the word of God, and considering the issue of their manner of life, imitate their faith" (Heb. 13:7), living valued centred lives with godliness at the core.

I am not much for watching a movie twice. However, we recently brought home a movie to watch, and I have watched it three times over the last three days. It is a wonderful story of an eleven year old girl, Akeelah Anderson, who enters the Scripps National Spelling Bee. I won't tell you the ourcome of the story. Watch it and see if you are as taken as I.

There is a moment in the movie that changes everything for Akeelah. It is a quote from Marianne Williamson:

"Our Deepest Fear...
is not that we are inadequate, our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, "Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?" Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God within us. It is not just in some of us, it is in everyone.
And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear,our presence automatically liberates others."

Let this mind be in you, that was in Christ Jesus, who existing in the form of God, did not consider being equal with God a treasure to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, becoming in the likeness of men; and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, becoming obedient, even unto death, and that the death of a cross. Therefore also God highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name" (Phil. 2:5-9).

"If you want to win," her coach tells Akeelah, "You can not be a shrinking violet." If we are to win, we must not be afraid. "Stand still and see the salvation of the Lord which he will accomplish for you today" (Exo. 14:13). If we are to travel hopefully, winning every step of the way, we must recognize that we are made in the image of God, born to manifest the glory of God within us. Not in just some of us, but in all of us.

"There is that of God in every man" (William Penn). Let us celebrate, and travel hopefully along the journey. Rent or buy the movie Akeelah and the Bee, and just for sheer joy, watch it with me again and again, and, watch with this in mind, listening closely to the final words.

From the Aims and Means of the Catholic Worker,

When we examine our society, which is generally called capitalist (because of its methods of producing and controling wealth) and is bourgeois (because of prevailing concern for acquisition and material interests, and its emphasis on respectability and mediocrity), we find it far from God's justice:

In politics, the state functions to control and regulate life. Its power has burgeoned hand-in-hand with growth in technology, so that military, scientific, and corporate interests get the highest priority when concrete political policies are formulated. Because of the sheer size of institutions, we tend towards government by bureaucracy-that is, government by nobody. Bureaucracy, in all areas of life, is not only impersonal, but also makes accountability, and therefore, an effective political forum for redressing grievances, next to impossible.