O God of All

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frightening, God of All, hear, hearts, Macrina Wiederkehr, mind, prayer, seven sacred pauses, souls, spirit, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, truth

I heard an urgency in the voice of Macrina Wiederkehr this morning in a prayer she wrote to the God of All. Take it with you today as a plea for what we need to stay the course of courage in this fragile world.

All peoples, all nations, all seasons, all years, all hours and days — You, who have invited us to love, hear our cry! Listen to our prayer. Make our spirits free, our hearts open, our minds healthy, our souls awake. Then we will be able to love as You have asked: with all our hearts, all our minds, all our souls. The all is frightening, yet in our deepest moments of truth we know that this is what we desire. O God of all, hear us. (Seven Sacred Pauses, p.104)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Slow Down; Wake Up!

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Book of Hours, Entering the Silence, God, grace, mind, scattered, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, Thomas Merton, thoughts

My mind feels this morning like oil on a frying pan that has heated enough to be jumping around like the Mexican jumping beans of my childhood. The thoughts are going as fast as the ticker tape headlines across the bottom of a television screen and, because of their speed, are gone before I can latch onto their meaning at all! So I open Thomas Merton’s Book of Hours for Thursday and find this description of me:

My mind is scattered among things, not because of my work, but because I am not detached and I do not attend first of all to God. On the other hand, I do not attend to Him because I am so absorbed in all these objects and events. I have to wait on His grace. But how stubborn and slow my nature is. And how I keep confusing myself and complicating things for myself by useless twisting and turning. What I need most of all is the grace to really accept God as He gives Himself to me in every situation. (Entering the Silence, p.199)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cycles

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activity, centering prayer, cyclic life, dancer, divine dance, eternal, flow, hearts, list, Lord, mind, Quaker, schedule, taize, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, waltz, work week

Today is Monday, the traditional beginning of the work week for most people. For me it is always a time to “gear up” and make a list (or add to my already long one) of the things I hope to accomplish in the week ahead. Then there is the “long term list” of events that will be taking place in this season of spring into summer…As I began that litany in my mind, I realized again how cyclic life is for me and how much better I respond to it if I hold the schedule lightly so it flows like a dance rather than a race. Let me explain.

My work as the program director for the Sophia Center has a few on-going offerings: centering prayer every two weeks on Wednesdays, Taizé on the fourth Sunday of the month (but not next Sunday because of Memorial Day which is the unofficial beginning of summer), etc. Then there are the individual events or series which we have found to be less successful in the summer if just judged by the numbers, when life slows down a little and vacations punctuate the weeks.

At the same time that we are slowing to a waltz at Sophia, the rhythm at the Spiritual Center where I live is picking up as the temperature rises. Only open from May to October, the Center is blooming with the flowers and activity here goes forward like a well-oiled machine: spring cleaning, mowing the lawn, planning menus and shopping…all in preparation to welcome friends new and old who come to renew their commitment to spiritual practice or, occasionally, just to relax.

I am grateful for this alternation of levels of activity as it allows me to focus on the most important work of all: attention to the people who enter the dance at any point in the on-going music of my life. Yesterday as I was working in the kitchen for the first of my “on-duty” weekends serving workshop participants at home, one of the Quaker melodies from last week ran through my mind consistently – a perfect reminder to be open to any encounter. Ye have no time but the present time (3X), therefore prize your time, for your soul’s sake, I sang. This morning it was another tune that carried me to coffee. Mind that which is eternal, which gathers your hearts together up to the Lord, and lets you see that ye are written in one another’s hearts.

Presence to the moment while also conscious of the flow of eternal time is a rare achievement in this world of ours but as our world turns and we allow the turning, we begin to notice the patterns. It is then that gratitude enters, for the opportunity to partner with the Divine Dancer who leads us so seamlessly that we cannot get lost.

Let There Be Light

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autonomy, communion, connectedness, Constance Fitzgerald, contemplative, creation, David Bohm, Genesis, implicate order, mind, radical individualism, reality, spirit, sub-atomic particles, symbiotic selves, synergistic community, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, unbroken wholeness

I found a startling juxtaposition this morning in the first lectionary text – the beginning of the first creation story in Genesis 1:1-19 – and a section of one of our readings under consideration today here at our contemplative “boot camp” experience. The first of this duo is the lyrical description of God’s splendid work of bringing into being the glorious creation that becomes our home. The second is, in part, a recounting of what scientists have discovered over the last quarter-century about the communication between sub-atomic particles which scientist David Bohm explains as “a deeper and more complex level of reality than we experience, an ‘implicate order or unbroken wholeness’ from which all our perceived reality derives…”

One would hope that these amazing discoveries, the fruit of evolution from the beginning of which Genesis speaks this morning, (although only of the first three “days” of the creation), would be the result of a concomitant evolution of both human mind and spirit. “Not so,” writes Constance Fitzgerald, a well-known theologian. In strong critique of our inability or unwillingness to respond to the task of becoming in this glorious home that has been entrusted to us, Fitzgerald says the following,

Our ability to embody our communion with every human person on the earth and our unassailable connectedness with everything living is limited because we have not yet become these symbiotic “selves.” We continue to privilege our personal autonomy and are unable to make the transition from radical individualism to a genuine synergistic community, even though we know intellectually we are inseparable and physically connected to every living being in the universe. Yet the future of the entire earth community is riding on whether we can find a way beyond the limits of our present evolutionary trajectory.  (Constance Fitzgerald, From Impasse to Prophetic Hope, 37-38)

There is much work to be done and the time is now, it seems, if we are to pay attention to what we have seen as possible in the coherence of the natural world. Let us think on these things!

Take a Deep Breath

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busyness, deep breath, heart, listen, Luke, mind, Pharisees, Sabbath, slowing down, The Sophia Center for Spirituality

One of the things I am most grateful for about the process of the 3-day meeting that I am attending is the schedule. We gather from 9AM to 4PM with a 20-minute break in the morning and the same in the afternoon, as well as an hour for the noon-day meal. There is little possibility that we will complete our agenda but, as our charge has a goal of total completion in mid-2017, we are not anxious about the progress. Since most of us were experiencing some level of jetlag yesterday (perhaps continuing today) and because the mental energy expended is considerable, this schedule seems a wise way to proceed. I have had a number of conversations already about the busyness of our “normal lives” and how difficult it is to find “time off” on a regular basis.

This morning at the beginning of chapter 6 of Luke’s gospel, we find the disciples of Jesus walking through a field on the Sabbath. Because they are hungry, they begin to pick the grain and are immediately criticized by the Pharisees (Where did they come from??) for breaking a Sabbath law about such a “work” task. Jesus responds with the example of David entering the temple and taking the bread reserved for the priests to speak to the necessity of doing what is necessary when circumstances warrant it. The goal of Sabbath rest was and is always to take time to remember God, giving thanks for our lives, and to connect with the deepest part of ourselves. That can take many forms, some of which might be a necessary letting go of perfection because of lack of time or ability to complete a task. Other times we may be called to do something out of the ordinary, perhaps what seems selfish, in order to get out of our minds and into our hearts – taking care of our “being” which is in need of rest.

In a multicultural society such as ours in the United States it is impossible to designate a “Sabbath Day” – or even a common hour – so we need to make a personal decision about how we will achieve such a time of renewal on a regular basis. Today is a good day to wake up to the possibility – and the necessity – of slowing down enough to hear God’s call to us. It starts with a deep breath…

The Greatest Law

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heart, Jesus, love, love God, love our neighbors as ourselves, Mark, mind, soul, strength, ten commandments, The Sophia Center for Spirituality

When someone asks, as the scribe asked Jesus in this morning’s gospel (MK 12:28-34), What is the first of all the commandments? it’s a safe bet that most people who have any religious background will give the same answer. And we know that the one is really two: love of God and love of neighbor as ourselves. Jesus was quick to answer with the imperative from Deuteronomy that he had learned in his youth: Hear, O Israel! The Lord, our Lord, is One (or Lord alone!) What follows tells us how to love God: with all our heart, soul, mind and strength. Pondering that directive would logically lead us to the next: Love your neighbor as yourself. If we’re spending ourselves in love of God with all of those faculties, everything else must flow from that activity, it seems. In other words, we must become the love of God manifest in the world. If that is true, there is no doubt that all of our intention and function would be an impulse of love – of ourselves and everyone else in God. It would all be seamless – no distinction or separation. And that, for thousands of years now, has been God’s desire for us.