My Cup Runneth Over

The quote “Rarely do members of the same family grow up under the same roof” by Richard Bach is a common saying that suggests true family bonds are not always defined by blood or persons living under the same roof, according to Goodreads and Tumblr. It emphasizes that family can be found in the connections we form with people who bring us respect and joy, regardless of blood relations. This is not to deny or denigrate blood relations that are also “members of the same family,” but brings to mind a saying on a Little Tramp greeting card I saw well over twenty years ago that love does not subtract or divide, it adds and multiplies.

This has never been truer in my experience than when I met the significant other of a precious friend for the first time on Wednesday of this week. The instant I saw into his eyes I felt love. We sat at a small round table in the farmhouse kitchen and shared deeply. Two days later my cup still runneth over.

The phrase comes from Psalm 23. This past Sunday morning a friend of over 50 years gave the message at her church, with that Psalm as the basis for her sharing, “My cup runneth over means my cup — my life — is full to the brim and running over like a cup that was dipped into a bucket of water and full to overflowing. This represents the fullness of God’s blessings in our lives.”

Over the past couple of months I have been listening to and/or watching individuals I have no prior experience with talk about things I barely comprehend, such as Richard Tarnas in The Second Axial Age saying Carl Jung calculated the birth charts of his patients and wrote to Sigmund Freud about synchronicity existing on a cosmic scale. He described a continual meaningful correlation between the movements of the planets and the archetypal patterns of human experience and said, “The psyche is not within us. We are in the psyche.” It is helpful to realize that astrology was taught at Oxford until the 1600’s.

Ilia Delio is a Franciscan Sister of Washington, DC, and an American theologian specializing in the area of science and religion, with interests in evolution, physics, and neuroscience and the import of these for theology. In Off the Page | Ep. 4 | Ilia Delio | A Theology of the Future she says the heart is a deep, deep center of personhood that’s opened up to the mystery of God. And that God is unstoppable in that highest good or love, and will go to the ends of the earth, and how not only is God good, but God desires to share that good with all beings. As she was in the process of the video recording of this interview I watched her cat wanted in. She got up and let the cat in and told the interviewer, “That act of love is higher than the act of knowledge alone.”

Whether you are fluent in astrology or even know what an axial age is, you know what love is. You know love is more than a feeling and love is not something you “do” or something that is “given” or “withheld.” But to say that love is higher than the act of love is likely a profound truth.

When Burt Bacharach offered Dionne Warwick the song What the World Needs Now initially, she turned it down, saying she found it “too country” and “too preachy.” The song proceeded to become a massive hit for Jackie DeShannon in 1965, and Warwick responded by recording it herself the following year, as well as re-recording it in the 1990s.

What the world needs now is love, sweet love
It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of
What the world needs now is love, sweet love
No, not just for some, oh, but just for every, everyone

Tarnas says it this way, “You really have to have an opening of the heart as well as the mind to take in the possibility of an enchanted cosmos…. It’s not just an intellectual conclusion, its something you have to bring your whole being into….”

My cup runneth over means we value all beings, not just human beings, and see family as not just blood relations.

Remember just put the spider out and let the cat in