A Heartful Prayer

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compassion, John Philip Newell, oneness, Peace, stressful, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, visions

In this stressful season for so many, I take comfort in the offering of John Phillip Newell for this Saturday. I hope you feel the same.

“To the home of peace, to the field of love, to the land where forgiveness and right relationship meet, we look, O God, with  longing for earth’s children, with compassion for the creatures, with hearts breaking for the nations and people we love. Open us to visions we have never known, strengthen us for self-givings we have never made, delight us with a oneness we could never have imagined, that we may truly be born of you, makers of peace.

A New Day

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John Philip Newell, life, light, oneness, Praying With the Earth, The Sophia Center for Spirituality

Today we take a breath. Some return to work. For some it is enough to put away gifts received and put out the trash, saying goodbye to loved ones and checking the calendar to keep appointments straight. Regardless of the events of yesterday and how we celebrated Christmas (or not at all), the tumult of the holiday fades today as we return to “normal life.” We might well use the Wednesday morning prayer from John Philip Newell to guide us along into renewed awareness that we can be somehow changed for the better each day, whether a grand holiday or a stitch in ordinary time.

All things come from you, O God, and to you we return. All things merge in your great river of life and into you we vanish again. At the beginning of this day we wake not as separate streams but as countless currents in a single flow, the flow of this day’s dawning, the flow of this day’s delight, the flow of this day’s sorrows, your flow, O God, in the twistings and turnings of this new day.

All things are born of you, O God. We carry within us your light and your life. In the mystery of matter and deep in the cells of our souls are your longings for oneness. The oneness of the universe, vast and vibrating with the sound of its beginning. The oneness of the earth, greening and teeming as a single body. The oneness of the human soul a sacred countenance in infinite form. Grant us your longings for oneness, O God, amidst life’s glorious multiplicities. (Praying With the Earth, p. 26, 28)

Oneness

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John Philip Newell, Life Is a Verb, lightning, oneness, solace, The Sophia Center for Spirituality

When things in the world seem dark and dreary and fragmented, we seek encouragement from any source available to us. Today it will be sunshine – if the predicted weather gives us one of those amazing October days. We hang on to “October’s Bright Blue Weather” as we know that winter will surely soon be upon us. As on the outside, so we hope for solace for our inner selves. I find it in the words of John Philip Newell today in Praying with the Earth.

All things are born of you, O God. We carry within us your light and your life. In the mystery of matter and deep in the cells of our souls are your longings for oneness. The oneness of the universe vast and vibrating with the sound of its beginning. The oneness of the earth greening and teeming as a single body. The oneness of the human soul a sacred countenance in infinite form. Grant us your longings for oneness, O God, amidst life’s glorious multiplicities. (p. 28)

The Restless Wind

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Earth, fileds, hearts, home, mother nature, Native Americans, natural world, oneness, relatives, rivers, Sister Wind, skies, St. Francis of Assisi, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, trees, weather, wind

As light comes outside my window this morning I wake up to the fact that what sounded like a truck or a train passing by (no tracks here though…) was the wind. It’s as if the tree in my sight line is keening after a tragedy – as well she might, given the destruction yesterday in the Midwestern states where winds reached 165 mph, leaving whole towns in a shambles. When we used to say that “March comes in like a lion and out like a lamb,” we never dreamed of that kind of extreme force. It was just a way to characterize the vicissitudes of mother nature trying to birth the season of spring. It seems that by now, with all the talk about climate change and the advances in science, we would be shouldering more responsibility toward “Sister Wind,” as St. Francis used to call her.

I am not a scientist, by any stretch of the imagination, but this morning I cannot ignore what is right before my eyes. I do not understand why we in the Northeast are so lucky as to be virtually unscathed by the weather events that have been happening in different parts of our country over the past year or two. I’m sitting here watching our tree struggle as the refrain of a 1960’s song plays in my mind: The wayward wind is a restless wind, a restless wind that yearns to wander, and he was born the next-of-kin…the next-of-kin to the wayward wind.

Call me silly, but what if we were to consider all of the natural world as our relatives – as St. Francis and the Native Americans always did? Would we perhaps take better care of our trees and rivers and fields and skies? Would we heed the environmentalists a bit more seriously and be more gentle on our walk through this world? It seems to me that all of this follows from my reflections of yesterday about the necessity of recognizing that even now we can open our hearts a bit wider to the possibility of the oneness of all that exists, thereby taking a bit more responsibility for our actions toward Earth, our home.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Awareness, Anyone?

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authenticity, awareness, collaboration, cooperation, heart, heartbreak, Jan Phillips, No Ordinary Time, oneness, pathway, The Sophia Center for Spirituality

In a section of the Thursday reflections that I was reading this morning in No Ordinary Time by Jan Phillips, I found the following paragraph particularly appropriate for now. See if you agree.

The only access we have to our authenticity is the pathway through the heart, and we must keep this channel open, at all costs. We must look deeply into our world, into its heartbreak, into the eyes of our sisters and brothers, and let these images awaken our senses, expand our awareness, and jolt our memories back to the truth of our oneness. It is not altruism, not charity, not selflessness that will open the gates to our own magnitude. It is awareness. And when awareness is fleshed out in the experience of our lives, it culminates in the events of relationship, of collaboration and cooperation. (p. 115).

N.B. Jan will be at the Sophia Center for Spirituality in Binghamton, New York on April 28 & 29. Please visit our website for more information on the EVENTS page.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Living in God

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Acts of the Apostles, interfaith, offspring of the Divine, oneness, radical empathy, religious, St. Paul, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, world cultures, worship

St. Paul often shows himself as a gifted preacher. Nowhere, in my opinion, is this as apparent as in chapter 17 of the Acts of the Apostles when he is speaking in Athens. I can almost hear him this morning proclaiming – quite loudly, I suspect, since the only “sound system” came from the walls of the Areopagus:

You Athenians, I see that in every respect you are very religious. For as I walked around looking carefully at your shrines, I even discovered an altar inscribed ‘To an Unknown God.’ What therefore you unknowingly worship, I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and all that is in it, the Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in sanctuaries made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands because he needs anything. Rather it is he who gives to everyone life and breath and everything. He made from one the whole human race to dwell on the entire surface of the earth, and he fixed the ordered seasons and the boundaries of their regions, so that people might seek God, even perhaps grope for God and find him, though indeed God is not far from any one of us. For ‘in him we live and move and have our being,’ even as some of your poets have said, ‘For we too are his offspring.’

As I try to live every day out of the realization that I live and move and have my being in God, occasionally I am struck in a deeper way by that reality, as last evening when I joined over 600 people to celebrate a group of extraordinary men and women who personify the theme of “Radical Empathy” in their lives and ministry. Coming from all walks of life and faith traditions, these five individuals and two married couples have given themselves to service to “the neighbor” wherever and in whatever ways they experienced the inner movement toward the love that is the foundation of the world. I am grateful to have been in the company, not only of those individuals, but also in a room that was a microcosm of world cultures where radical empathy is seen each day in those who give and receive under the umbrella of Interfaith Works, the sponsoring organization of last evening’s event. Moments like that remind me that God “made from one the whole human race” and that it is our responsibility and privilege to recognize our oneness, living as “offspring” of the Divine. And what could be better than that!

Oneness

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disciples, diversity, divisions, Jesus, John, oneness, shared humanity, spiritual path, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, unity

Today the gospel reaches the point in the farewell discourse of Jesus where he prays for the unity of all people. This familiar text has Jesus pleading that they (all the disciples and “those who will believe in me through their word” – us) may all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us…that they may be brought to perfection as one…I have made known to them your name and I will make it known, that the love with which you loved me may be in them and I in them. (JN 17:20-26)

Our pleading should rival that of Jesus, I think, when we consider the divisions that exist in our world. No matter the diversity in our prayer and spiritual paths or religious practice, the desire for unity must be backed up with intention toward that goal. If each of us spent some moments every day asking God to wake us up to the unity that already exists by virtue of our shared humanity and to give us the will to foster that unity with all we meet, I believe it could change the world. I’m willing to try. You?