Practice | Bonnie Barnard - Part 12

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Partnering Up for Prayer, Part 2, The How-To’s

Imagine the feeling of your favorite holiday or birthday moment and times that times ten. That is the feeling of a powerful prayer partnership. It consists of love, surprise, recognition, intimacy, delight, and the visceral knowing someone has your back. Contrast this with the feeling of being bogged down in complaints, disappointments, anger, unhealed dredge run amock … placed at your feet to fix. That is the heaviness of a prayer partnership which isn’t right. Prayer partnering can change your life or can be a waste of precious time. I’ve experienced both. As my new PP and I are defining and playing with our new partnership, I thought I’d share my notes and insights with you. 1. Choose a partner who has the same level of commitment to their spiritual practice as you do to yours.Now remember, I am a reincarnated monk and nun many times over and I can and have invested all day in prayer. To be with praying light weight isn’t a fair exchange and...

Letters to Lillianne

An old plate with a painting of a cob of corn, husks partially peeled open, hangs above my kitchen sink. This plate was purchased by my favorite grandmother in her antique-seeking days. It hung in her kitchen, now it hangs in mine. In the early 1970s when television stations and programs were multiplying, mothers were working, and Bill Gates hadn’t yet made his way into the halls of Lakeside School to catch his computer vision; my grandmother would wait every summer for the Greyhound Bus to arrive so we could begin our week together. My favorite summer memories were camp, the beach, and visiting grandma. It was just the two of us. Oh, my grandfather was around, but he made himself busy when I was in town so the two of us could have “girl time.” Grandma taught me to cook, sew, ride horses and tend to their farm in Beaverton, Oregon. Television was limited to thirty minutes a day. She still had the Depression pulsing through her blood...

Politics, Conflict and Division

A beloved friend of mine has gone through a treacherous week of FaceBook bashing for his political views. On his FB page a mini-war has erupted with name calling directed at him. He called me really torn up inside. He is a deep, deep lover of humanity and serves his community through action. He is a good guy. And, his political views aren’t mine. Neither are the views of half of my friends. Half of my friends are Democrats and half are Republicans; and I don’t love either group of my friends more or less because of the road each party believes will create our brightest future. Somewhere in our history we have trained ourselves to hate the people, not the views. To attack people, not the views. To kill people, not views. Hate, attack, and killing views or people have never worked, anyway. People become damaged or dead and views still remain. In a dualistic world we will always have black and white, right and left,...

YOU Can’t Make Me!!

There is some High Spiritual Truth in the childish saying “YOU Can’t Make Me!” My friend Glenda would add “I am boss of myself.” Each one of us is at choice and held responsible by the choices we make. Newton’s third law of motion says for every action there is a reaction. The Buddhist would call it karma; what I do to others, I do to myself. The Jew and Christian would say we sow what we’ve planted. No one else is responsible for me. I am the choice maker, I am it. With that said, I have made a commitment to myself to disengage from the public political conversation based within the paradigm of right and wrong, we and they, and hold counsel within my own being aligning to a Presence and Power far greater than divisive politics. My commitment is to come from a place of Love in all discourse, or to not open my mouth. I have come to know words usher in an...

Six Impossible Thoughts Before Breakfast

In the movie Alice in Wonderland, Alice says “I sometimes think of six impossible things before breakfast.” This past weekend I attended a two day conversation with Rev. Dr. Michael Beckwith where he began by inviting the group to enter into the spiritual practice of stretching our minds daily by making a list of at list six things we find impossible. The underlying premise is the more I mentally stretch, the less impossible and more possible something feels. I began my list. 1. Ten thousand regularly readers read my blog. 2. Grocery stores decide to sell only organic food which is affordable to all. 3. The song I write is recorded by Lady Gaga and tops the chart. 4. Individuals realize how powerful they are and harness this power to transform the relationships with others in the world. 5. War ceases within my lifetime and I have to explain to my grand daughter what it once “was.” 6. I live from a place which accepts and doesn’t...

Living Without the Idea of Sin

I am on the final edit of a book I have been working on for over a year. It is a book of daily lessons based upon the work of Emma Curtis Hopkins, a Christian Mystic. Yesterday I edited a lesson based upon the idea “In God there is no sin.” This was written in the late 1880s and was a radical idea. Even today it can be for many of us. Who would you and I be without the idea of sin? Without the idea of good, bad, right, and wrong and myself as the judge of it all? How much energy would we have in my bodies to utilize for creative endeavors if it wasn’t tied up monitoring sin? Judgement is a big business in our country and we tend to feed upon watching and commenting upon “wrongs” we perceive others have made. This morning, then, as I was involved in my spiritual practice, I read from Dr. Ernest Holme’s book The Celestial Voice. In it...