Thought for the week: Daniel Clarke Flynn’s force of habit
‘As human beings, we are both equal to each other and different from anything else we know in creation.’
What comes to mind with the phrase ‘the power of’?
A first thought for me is ‘the power of prayer’. ‘Pray for what you want,’ some say, ‘and leave the results up to Power greater than us. Let go and let God.’ ‘Prayer works,’ a former marine turned tough journalist told me. He had learned the power of obedience in the military, then gained new perspective from practicing petitionary prayer with humility and open-mindedness.
Then came a recollection of The Power of Now, the popular groundbreaking book by Eckhart Tolle that recounted his spiritual awakening. He began living in the here and now, meeting the ineffable Eternal at the centre of his being in everyday life. He had hit a spiritual bottom and saw the Light.
Later a more prosaic title came to me: Gary Klein’s The Power of Intuition: How to use your gut feelings to make better decisions at work. I haven’t read it. I have read many such books in my working life – they all helped.
Later again came The Power of Silence, in which retired BBC journalist Graham Turner allows a diverse group of people – through face-to-face interviews around the world, starting in ‘noisy’ India and ending with the silence of the desert fathers – to speak in their own words how they practice silence and what silence means in their lives.
Most recently is The Power of Intuition, a 2016 Icelandic documentary in which the word for ‘intuition’ can have three meanings: the limitless sea within us of vision, feelings, and imagination; the ability to see within, to know oneself; and the ability to see from the inside out, an inner compass to guide us in the outer world.
This brought me back to the powerful statement in Advices & queries: ‘Our diversity invites us both to speak what we know to be true in our lives and to learn from others.’ How do we do that? By practicing and developing our ability to listen for unplanned thoughts within (intuitions) and to others, without reaction or judgment.
By putting the word ‘power’ in the search box of the online Quaker faith & practice, I find a treasure trove of quotations indicating the power available to us from Power greater than us.
As human beings, we are both equal to each other and different from anything else we know in creation. Only cats rival our God-given ability to stand back and observe. It is then that we are able to exercise the highest power given us, the power to choose our attitude. We align ourselves with our inner compass, which creates our world and who we become. We become who we think we are, ancient wisdom tells us. Life becomes what we think it is. All we need to do is to stop, look, and listen for the Creative Power that brought us into existence and maintains us in life. My eighty-one-year-old heart has beat more than three billion times from Energy Power Greater than me. And for that, I am grateful.
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