Personal message: You do not need to hold back on helping out one close to you. It does not diminish you at all.  You have good business ideas and you can share without boundaries of self or other. No energy spent helping others is wasted energy, and for you it is a creative outlet.  Redefine your metier, your work life, your work path, your skillset.  There is beauty in the natural world, there is expansiveness in our place in it, so do not limit yourself needlessly.  Those days are past of intense focus on organizational objectives and providing for your family with intense self-discipline and hard work.  Now shift to a new dynamic and joyful mode.  That is all.

Luke 11:37-41

This reading today is consistent with your personal message. The Pharisees are focusing too exclusively on external rules about hand washing, yet they are losing their awareness of the imperative for internal purification.  They are adhering to artificial human concepts of clean and unclean, while internally having avariciousness and ambition.  As Jesus says, “Did not the one who made the outside make the inside also?”  Clearly God has no such boundaries of inner and outer, and our inner lives are not hidden from God, since we are all within the one continuous Being of God. 

Jesus provides his contemplative prayer instruction: “Give for alms those things that are within; and see, everything will be clean for you.”  Here he is not merely asking people to give alms with their possessions.  He is telling us how to purify our inner selves to be closer to God, by giving up our cherished ambitions, pride, and hoarding.  Lest we be too hard on ourselves, planning for the future is a reasonable human behavior, but here we are talking about those thoughts and feelings that hold us separate from others at their expense.  “Give for alms” means let go of these fear-based accumulative thoughts and obsessions.  Let go and rest in God’s presence, rest in the vastness of God’s love, and trust that God arranges all things for the good.  Amen.