Gratitude is the doorway to the room
Called devotion.
Your ego, a puddle;
His love,
the ocean.
Aligning your dream
With no ulterior motive,
Combustible love,
Divine and explosive.
And God cares
That we want
Him alone?
Beyond the world
And its vaporous throne,
You won’t hear His voice
Or discover His phone
If your signal is busy,
Stacking up every bone
In closets where skeletons dance
With no gauge.
And with all those bones,
Build you a cage,
Unable to see
Beyond the old page,
Where ancestors wrote
Instructions of rage.
But gratitude is the doorway
To the room called devotion.
His love alone,
The only real ocean.
But in those waters,
Your soul will not drown
But blossom again,
And again come around
To freedom and love,
To no more fear,
To His voice calling you
Back home,
Free and clear.
2
Is it important to God that we only be devoted to Him,
Without an ulterior motive attached?
“Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?” Jesus said to him, “‘You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’
Matthew 22:36-38
And how are we supposed to love God with all of our heart, soul, and mind
When we sometimes struggle to have enough faith that He is there at all?
Or if we don’t struggle with faith
About His existence,
If we are honest, real love and devotion
Is difficult to muster,
Especially in days burdened by fear,
Or self-doubt,
Or when the oceans of life toss you this way and that.
It’s easy to say one is devoted and full of love for God,
But how many are actually in that state?
And if we can admit that we struggle in this way,
Then how do we get there?
Are there any steps we can take to cultivate love and devotion to God? To this invisible being?
Is He really invisible?
Or is everything we’ve ever seen a part of His body?
Can He be separated from the world or from consciousness itself?
2
Imagine all the music in the world,
The gift of life itself,
The love you see from your child,
Sunset on an ocean,
The pizza party you had when you were a kid,
Your first kiss,
Making love in euphoric nights.
And dark side as well,
Being betrayed,
The dark night of the soul,
Isolated,
Fear, guilt, and self-condemnation.
The vast array of life,
New love,
Children being born,
And death and loss.
The complicated gift of life,
The immaculate show calling us home.
This is why gratitude is the doorway to devotion,
Because even through life’s difficulties and tortures,
The gift of being ness,
The gift of consciousness,
The gift of life and all its glories,
Is too vast to really understand.
And we couldn’t comprehend its light
Without knowing the shadows as well.
When we consider the vastness of His creation,
The complexity,
The cruelty,
That dances always with grace and mercy,
We sell ourselves short not to consider the creator of all of this,
And what His expression
(Us being born in His image)
Says about Him,
And says about us.
3
So how do we cultivate
A gratitude that leads to devotion,
And then a devotion that leads to peace?
It’s interesting that the very things that are most important in the realm of the spirit
And also in our lives,
The qualities that are required of us the most,
Are themselves kind of ethereal beings
That require
A kind of cultivation which extends and expands
Both to and from many aspects of our lives.
Gratitude and devotion,
Even love,
Forgiveness,
They are all the result of grace and mercy
As much as anything we can do to bring them about.
And so how on earth can one guide you to have these qualities
When in fact we don’t really have the capacity to fully garner these qualities in and of ourselves?
That is to say,
If one is full of devotion,
Gratitude,
Faith,
Love, and forgiveness,
They have ascended to a high level of spiritual power indeed,
And they didn’t rise to that place by the force of their own will alone.
Let’s take gratitude for instance.
People will often suggest a gratitude list,
Or the practice of writing down daily everything you’re grateful for.
Certainly, nothing wrong with this exercise,
But often we will fill the list with transitory matters of the material plane.
We are grateful
For the roof over our head,
The food in our fridge,
Our healthy family,
Our health,
The job we love,
The wife or the girlfriend,
Or the husband, etc.
And the problem with putting our focus in this direction is that if gratitude was a house,
We are building it on a shaky foundation.
As all of these things can be removed from us without warning,
And all of them eventually will be removed.
What do we have left?
And what have we always had?
What is eternal?
These things are difficult to discuss and write about, no doubt.
All ethereal and spiritual sounding,
It’s easy to
Come off as overly spiritual or religious.
Or that somehow one doesn’t acknowledge how difficult or odd it is to put your devotion to eternal consciousness (or God) rather than a beautiful partner that is flesh and blood,
Who you can actually lay down with at night.
To which I would say,
Yes, I get it.
It’s an odd game we’ve been born here to participate in.
I didn’t invent the game,
And I see how bizarre it is.
But let’s face it,
If we look at gratitude and devotion as investments,
Which on some level they absolutely are,
Then it’s better to invest in something eternal,
Something unchanging,
Something not susceptible to the harsh winds of change,
Or a love dependent on your material status.
And it is for this reason that real devotion to God
Leads to peace.
All of these qualities,
Devotion,
Gratitude,
Forgiveness,
Even love,
Are practices of cultivation,
Which require a daily focus and a discipline.
One doesn’t expect to have an amazing body
Because they decided they wanted that and went to the gym one time.
And so it’s like that in the realm of the spirit,
With these beautiful spiritual qualities as well.
4
So how do we cultivate
This enlightened devotion to God,
And gratitude to the quality of His eternal consciousness,
That is both beyond all things and from which all things spring?
I think we use peace as our guardrail.
We consider peace,
And what guarantees it.
It’s a short list indeed,
And doesn’t include anything that is transitory in nature.
Any other human being,
Any material possession,
Even our health and our own body.
It does us little good to seriously invest our gratitude and devotion
Into these transitory realms.
That’s not to say that we can’t enjoy these things when they are temporarily with us and seemingly in our control.
But if we want to make gratitude and devotion our practice,
And build that aspect of our spiritual body,
Then we are better off cultivating it,
And building it towards the eternal, unchanging source of all things,
Rather than the things themselves.
To consider every day a gift,
Every breath, really,
Every moment to acknowledge its transitory nature,
Is to really appreciate it.
The death attached to every life
Gives it the quality of weight,
Including every moment we live through.
It’s easy to see this when we investigate ourselves in the past.
The relationships that are no longer here,
That were full of importance and drama,
The ones you saw no end to,
And ended just the same.
When viewing through these lenses,
Their dreamlike quality becomes clearer.
Harder to do this, of course, in the here and now,
But time affords so many of these types of transitory periods that we start to understand the game we are here playing.
What has been with us all along,
That has been unchanging?
How else could we even measure all the changes that have occurred in our lives,
If there wasn’t something unchanging in the background or foreground to everything?
And here’s the interesting thing,
All these transitory gifts of our lives,
All the great relationships (or even the not so great ones),
Our health,
Our fancy car (or not so fancy car),
The roof over our head (fancy or not),
The food in the fridge,
The breath we take, etc.,
All of these things are appreciated all the more
By having gratitude and devotion pointed towards their source rather than at the things themselves.
To acknowledge the gift from the one actually giving it,
That’s like opening the actual gift rather than obsessing over the wrapping paper.
To know that you have an eternal God that loves you enough to create this whole world for you to exist in and go through all the dimensions of challenges,
All the love,
All the loss,
All the fear and all the transcendence,
The shadows and light.
To acknowledge the eternal
Source of it,
Is to wake up into the reality of how profound the gift actually is.
He wants our gratitude and our devotion,
Not from some small-minded human ego projection that we dress that up as,
But rather because this is the way to fully take in the enormity of the blessing.
And to invest those qualities into a source that isn’t subject to changing at all.
A worthy recipient of your devotion,
Which wakes up the knowledge that those transitory aspects of our lives don’t even really want or can handle the weight of that type of devotion.
They want to be enjoyed,
And taken care of,
They want to be appreciated and even loved.
But real devotion and gratitude belong to the lord
And so in that become doorways to the mansion called peace.
A peace that isn’t dependent on anyone or anything
A peace that isn’t dependent on your income or lifestyle
A peace that knows all those things are here today and gone tomorrow
And in so doing
Roots itself in the timeless and indestructible reality from which manifestations of consciousness endlessly rise and fall
The great big cosmic dance of it all
It’s a show for us to enjoy and evolve through
Not devote ourselves too…
That belongs only to God.
