Prayer—reaching outward
reaching inward
reaching toward something
more real than I find myself to be—
reaching toward a light in darkness
toward a confirmation in the midst of doubt
toward fulfillment in a time of emptiness
toward something other.
Prayer moves in emptiness
moves below emptiness
to a place of silent stillness
where there are no words
no feelings
but a sense of completion
as my “I am” dissolves into the Other.
Ann Glover O’Dell
13 January 2020
The Magi had been informed in their study that a new king would be born in their lifetime and a special star would appear in the heavens to indicate the birthplace. They waited and watched until they saw the star.
We are kings of our own kingdom, rulers of individual realm. We are not watching for a star because we’re not interested in a new king. We don’t want any competition for our throne.
But sometimes when we’re most introspective, we realize we would like something new and wonderful happening in our lives—we’re not sure what but something that will give us a kind of joy we haven’t experienced in a long time.
We need not look for a star in the heavens. Our sign is within us, beckoning us to the manger deep in our weary spirits, lighting the way for our conscious awareness to see something new, waiting for us to arrive so the new birth can be witnessed and celebrated.
Don’t be afraid to follow your sign to the place where only you can be reborn. All you need to do is give permission for the new king, your own benevolent monarch, to be born in you—to give you peace, to make you a co-creator with God in establishing a new kingdom of justice and love.
Hurry! The world needs the new you!
Ann Glover O’Dell
January 2018
What a beautiful word. Godchild is primarily a term given to an individual, a young child, whose spiritual life we agree to take responsibility for (and sometimes to become legal guardian of in case of parents’ death). The term suggests a reminder that this individual is God’s child whose spiritual as well as physical being is unique and special.
What about our own inner godchild? That’s the part of us that God wants us to find and watch over.
God imprinted us at our beginning with his image—indelibly. Frederick Buechner reminds us that we have “the mark of God’s thumb” on us. The world has covered it with debris of all sorts. But the imprint never dissolves or disappears. Just as all mammal infants experience the imprimatur of bonding, our souls are permanently bonded with God.
Our task is to let God destroy the debris, the detritus of our lives, so that what is in our holy place can come forward—so our godchild can emerge and become the motivating force of our new lives, become the all-pervasive essential characteristic in our personality.
What a perfect time Christmas is to ponder our own holiness.
Ann Glover O’Dell
June 2018
The story of Jacob and the angel he wrestled with during the night is an intriguing one. In an ancient Jewish version of the story the angel asks Jacob for a blessing, not the other way around. Perhaps this indicates that they blessed each other.
Jacob is between what we know of ourselves and the other Self we don’t know. Each has a blessing for the other. Each is a blessing for the other. Wrestling each with each, determined not to release until the blessing wrested and fully given, reveals the name of one (I Am) and changes the name of the other.
Perhaps the wrestling matches in our lives hold potential for blessing both ways. Just as the struggle provides a blessing for our personality, our participating in the struggle may provide a blessing that reaches out into the world.
Ann Glover O’Dell
8 August 2007
God’s ultimate questions to us are of being—not questions of knowing and especially not questions of doing.
His question to Adam and Eve about location (“Where are you?”) has greater bearing, not on the bushes they were hiding in, but rather where they were in relationship to Him.
Where are you spiritually? Where are you in relation to your real Self—which is, after all, God-within-you?
Elijah flees for his life after Jezebel promises to kill him. Then he decides he is no better than his fathers and tells God he is ready to die. God tells Elijah to stand before Him on the mount. And a great wind came and an earthquake and a fire. But God was not in the wind or earthquake or fire. And after the fire came a still small voice. We, too, seek a knowing in a still small voice.
God directs us through the psalmist to “be still and know that I am God” (Ps. 46:10). Notice the need to be still in order to know. When we know God, we come to know ourselves and the divinity in our being. We come to know that our being in relationship with God is his greatest desire.
Ann Glover O’Dell
June 2018
Someone disagrees with my conviction that under the skin we are all much alike: we have the same fears, the same shame, the same anger, the same existential angst.
Further, I am certain that each of us has an Inner Wisdom, a force for good that wills us wholeness and can give us blessings we cannot give ourselves. This Inner Wisdom is available to all of us in dialogue.
I challenge you readers to prove me right or wrong. First, let me say that the folks I know who have engaged their Inner Wisdom are glad they did. Two I know who had cancer found the cancer no longer remained the hated enemy but actually disappeared. My own debilitating illness was also healed.
The dialogue with your Inner Wisdom is not a courageous act, not a leap of faith, not surrender. Your free will is never compromised. It is an interview—questions and answers. Your rational conscious self is in charge at all times and you can end the conversation whenever you wish.
Begin the written conversation with a question, keeping in mind that your Inner wisdom is concerned with your spiritual and physical well-being, not with tangible things you might want.
The first response from your Inner Wisdom might be, “What do you think?” and that simple question may very well cause your mind to begin thinking in a whole new way about something you thought you had exhausted.
As the dialogue continues, you may find there is something your Inner Wisdom can do for you that you cannot consciously do for yourself. And all it needs is your permission—your unconditional permission to do its work in its own way in its own time. You decide whether to give that needed permission.
If you do, save your written interview as proof positive later on when you want to demonstrate to others that you initiated something that changed your life.
If you give permission for your Inner Wisdom to act on your behalf, eventually I predict a catharsis will occur in your life, washing away whatever has kept you from experienced your real Self. And I hope you will report to me so I will be proved right.
Ann Glover O’Dell
7 July 2018
Many Christians today are not interested in what others describe as a second birth. But Jesus gives a graphic picture to Nicodemus about the spiritual birth that needs to happen before one can enjoy full relationship with God.
Nicodemus kept thinking in terms of something physical and Jesus kept talking about being born of the Spirit. Birth is the essential word because as our anger and guilt and shame are washed away, our new original Self is born in us. We are not the same as we were before.
Both kinds of birthing include labor—and pain. Our spiritual birth includes the tears and anguish of remorse of all that we have committed and omitted in our attempts to make ourselves into what we thought we ought to be. There has to be some rearranging of our personality—which has a similar trauma to the pain of parturition.
But just as a mother will declare, as she dotes on the infant she has born, that all the labor pains are worth the result, so one who has experienced spiritual rebirth will declare those labor pains produced something invaluable.
Your second birth awaits your cooperation.
Ann Glover O’Dell
5 August 2018
Your Inner Wisdom awaits your engagement. Whatever you choose to call it—Guardian Angel, God, Higher Power, Holy Spirit, it is that secret inner part of your personality. The creative part. The part that cannot be controlled by your conscious willful self.
Your Inner Wisdom is a force that can do for you what you cannot do for yourself–make you into your original self. It is always a force for good. It wants health and wholeness for you and can give that to you if you cooperate.
Your cooperation is required in the form of giving your Inner Wisdom permission to do whatever needs to be done in you to make room for the goodness it has to give you.
You can glibly say to yourself, “Sure, I give permission for something good to happen to me.”
But that is not enough. In a written dialog you need to converse with your Inner Wisdom until you realize you want a new life with all of your conscious might. And you need to discover that your Inner Wisdom is a benevolent force. Then the permission becomes authentic.
You are always in control of the conversation. And can stop it at any time. There is no coercion. Your free will is left intact. The conversation is not surrender, a leap of faith, a courageous act. It is a dialog—questions and answers. Begin with any question and listen for a response from deep within you.
You are on your way to experiencing God’s special miracle for you.
When God’s voice said, “Be!”
and all the guilt and anger in me vanished
I began to know as I am known—
to understand in deepest heart
that what our mind has told us we must do
can never be divine directives
because our mind attempts to be God,
not listening for his holy will.
When God said, “Be!”
He gave me new relationship
where tasting, feeling, sensing
takes precedence to thinking and deciding.
When God told me to be
I became a born again as Jesus once described
those apprehending life’s abundance.
Ann Glover O’Dell
20 November 2017
The rising sun each morning shows us a new opportunity to find a fresh beginning place in ourselves—a clean slate where we can allow the Holy Spirit to write us a love letter. We may carry fatigue or worry from the previous day, but the Spirit of God, that enormous benevolent energy, wants to give us, above, beyond, under, and through each new day, a fresh glimpse of what it means to be a beloved child of God in whom he takes great delight.
Ann Glover O’Dell
“The zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this.” (Isaiah 9:7)
Zeal indicates to me great energy, enthusiasm. The “zeal of the Lord of hosts” says to me that God’s great desire is to bring forth something special—someones special—you and me.
In spiritual terms this suggests the bringing forth of the new being in each being, the full being, combining both human and divine natures.
Scripture doesn’t say the Lord wishes this were so or hastens to ask man to effect the desired outcome. No, Scripture says the Lord will do it—will do it through His zeal. An additional promise from God, suggesting an additional covenant initiated by God. A covenant with the articulated response on man’s part: that God be allowed to carry out His desire. The individual freely chooses to cooperate with the process. God asks us to give permission, just as did Mary in the Nativity story, out of our free will, to let Him use our spiritual womb.
The ‘Savior’ is the part of our personality that transforms us by dying. The ‘Savior’ is the best we know ourselves to be—the part that needs to offer itself to God in order that God might accept it, purify it, and return it to us as part of the best He knows us to be.
23 December 2014
We can use Jesus as our model in our relationship with God and ponder his use of “Abba” when referring to his father. God wants to be the same kind of parent to us as he was to Jesus. He invites us to use whatever name to call him that will evoke for us what “Abba” did for Jesus.
Our task is to find that name, invent that name that represents what we need God to be to us. Then use that name in periods of quiet when we are open to experiencing God in greater depth. We are to embrace that name as our secret with God. We are to allow ourselves to grow into the deeper relationship that the name affords
Praise to Thee, O Lord, Creator of the Universe,
Who brings forth from your earth womb all life.
Praise to Thee, O God, Sustainer of the Universe,
who gives life the abundance Thou designed for it.
Praise Him who places godhood
in the center of our being.
Blow Holy Spirit, Wayward Wind,
with all thy special power
come stir again the old desire
in us who yearn to flower.
Rain into us the fullness
of the morning dew
made into streams
that penetrate our roots.
Make green the carpet of our days
that we, lured into verdancy,
might sprout new buds
and bloom as never even
once upon a time we dreamed.
Press down upon us sunshine
of the vision in your mind
of who we were and are and yet to be,
always within the firm embrace
of thy mysterious trinity.
Ann Glover O’Dell
30 May 2002
Many clergy and biblical scholars are busy researching the cultural context of the four Gospels and the source material used. We even have reports, based on serious scholarship, of what Jesus probably did and did not say. Eager readers seem to want to know what is fact and what is fiction in the four accounts of the life of Jesus.
What seems to be ignored is this new era of holiness. Our individual and collective level of conscious awareness has risen to the point where we are ready for something more. Our inner Self yearns for a new manifestation of the Sacred—a personal revelation.
We have moved into the era of the Holy Spirit. An era to complete the other two. An era in which we are not consumed with research into the written word. An era in which the energy and spirit of the universe is available and eager to move in and through us if we but will it. This energy can reveal to us a truth stronger than words, a new reality that cannot be denied, and potential that is eager to be realized.
Let us consciously invite this amazing phenomenon to come to us, abide with us, and use us as instruments of peace, creativity, and joy.
What wants to be born in us? What is eager to be hatched? A new, guilt-free, anger-free being. Our real Self. Our original personality.
A self is born which, when a mistake is made gives an immediate apology because the complementary feeling is immediate and authentic. We are immediately sorry for whatever misdeed we have committed. So the apology is genuine and immediately forthcoming. And even though the event may linger in memory, the wrenching guilt that used to linger, multiplying our not-OK feelings, lingers no longer.
Some scholars say our preeminent problem is that of shame: being ashamed of who we are–and who we are not, ashamed that we are not enough–in any situation. We can’t do enough, know enough, have enough, can’t be enough–no matter what. But guilt is the word we use to talk about our not-OK-ness. And when the guilt disappears, the shame and despair it covers also disappear.
What wants to be born in you? The real Self, the original you wants to be born–the human creature, begotten from the union of the inner masculine and feminine parts of the personality. The union of your rational will with your creative intuition (conscious/unconscious) that produces in you the Nurturing Parent, Capable Adult, and Free Child. The new self (having moved from childhood to adulthood to godhood) recreates our sense of awe and wonder and delight–the same that God experiences within his good creation, pronounced good from the beginning. The goodness/godness within us is what we are searching for. And what is searching for us.
The new Child is born–not childish, immature in its ways, but a new child-likeness–an innocence that lives in the world but believes the good will prevail. That celebrates the good in everyone/everything. That looks for the redemptive in every situation. That is able to celebrate wonder and awe and the comic–everywhere. That experiences joy, laughter, the expectation of every day holding the same excitement and newness that Christmas Day did for us as children.
Dream scholars suggest that when that happens we will dream of a wedding uniting a king and queen. I say a dream of a dear child is what tells us either that ours has been born or is calling us to allow it to be born.
Our story begets its own fairy tale happy ending. But ours is not a fantasy. Ours is a ‘until death do us part’ union, which keeps us grounded in the inner life no matter what happens in the outer.
Ann Glover O'Dell 