COFFEE BREAK 384

+ Advent: Day 17: Throughout most of Advent, the focus is not on Christmas. The focus is on the Kingdom, or the realm, of God which is deep within us and near us and beyond us and not here yet. The “not here yet” is the main concern during Advent. That’s why John the Baptist has the leading role. According to scripture and tradition, he is more like Adam than Christ. And, unless we are born again as a heavenly being focused on heavenly things far more than a human being focused on earthly things, then we too are stuck all too often in the “not here yet” which we are called to examine so closely as we perceive and practice Advent as intended, a time of deep reflection and repentance.

+ Here is an excerpt from this week's Inner Frontier Inner Work: "Our many relationships seem to define who we are and rightly so, because what we are does not stop at our skin. Through our social intelligence, we all deal with variable relationships of many kinds, fleeting or long-term, superficial or intimate. We treat these as being between us and someone else, between two discreet people. This is our ordinary world of separateness, governed by the rules of morality, etiquette, and courtesy. But there are deeper levels to every relationship .... There is sameness, there is uniqueness, and there is unity, three qualities at three different levels." Read it all.