A New Book & a Stronger Hold on a Locked Worry Door

   This month our famous little Oklahoma book club, Dinner Club With a Reading Problem, is trying something a little different. We are reading Marianne Williamson's A Return to Love, which I have just started and am already, well loving. Thank you sweet Stephanie for the assignment!

   For a while we all had been hearing nibblets of wisdom associated with this woman (perhaps so have you) and I had mistakenly thought she was the author of A Course in Miracles. Not so, She studied Course in her youth and became quite an accomplished student of its philosophies and teachings. She started giving lectures, which turned into speaking events, which grew into her book and subsequent wild popularity. I urge you to join us in reading the book if you have a little time.

   Okay.

   Since I've only just begin to tread A Return to Love and certainly have not yet read the Course, tonight I only have a little nibble for you. But it's a doozie.

   You know how for months I have been prattling on and on about positive thinking? Perhaps you have heard mention of the Secret from time to time, or at least you tune into the notion that counting our blessings is the way to go? Right. Also, the Worry Door. Were you a regular guest of this digital Lazy W when I wrote about that?

   If you have a couple of minutes, I would love for you to read what happened almost a year ago: I had a bonafide vision that has since guided me away from a worried lifestyle. It has been revolutionary for me, and slowly I am seeing actual, tangible results in my life, in my relationships, in my earthly circumstances.

   You guys. The repeated wisdom here is too intense to brush off as coincidence.

   This Return to Love is echoing all the best things to my heart, in just the first few chapters.

   It is either going to be one of those books I read in a single day or one of those books that takes me a month because every page, no, every paragraph, warrants note taking and essay writing.

   I know you have many good things to do, but please let me share something small with you. These are Marianne Williamson's words:

"I realized, many years ago, that I must be very powerful if I could mess up everything I touched, everywhere I went, with such amazing consistency. I figured there must be a way to apply the same mental power, then embedded in neurosis, in a more positive way. A lot of today's most common psychological orientation is to analyze the darkness in order to reach the light, thinking that if we focus on our neuroses- their origins and dynamics- then we will move beyond them. Eastern religions tell us that is we go for God, all that is not authentically ourselves will drop. Go for the light and darkness will disappear. Focus on Christ means focus on the goodness and power that lie latent within us, in order to invoke them into realization and expression. We get in life that which we focus on. Continual focus on darkness leads us, as individuals and as a society, further into darkness. Focus on the light brings us into the light."

   What do you think? Yes, a sentence up there smacks of humanism, but I am not suggesting a debate. Just an effort to see how much we all have in common. It's really both refreshing and terrifying to see the pillars of Christian faith expressed in such light-filled, inclusive language.

   Have you read The Secret? Or the Bonhoeffer biography yet? Or C.S. Lewis' Abolition of Man? Speaking only for my own spiritual journey, I know these books have found their way to me for a reason, a complicated and wonderful weave of ideas and expressions. Now Return to Love. Wow.

   Positive thinking is powerful. Negative thinking is powerful. Our thoughts manifest. We all are members of the church, the body of Christ, regardless of man-made denomination. Love is the bottom line.

   I am listening, Universe.

"Worry is a Misuse of the Imagination."
~Dan Zadra
xoxoxoxo