Tags
blessings, communion, gladness, gratitude, humble, John Philip Newell, Mother Earth, Peace, Praying With the Earth, resilience, spring, The Sophia Center for Spirituality
Today promises to be the kind of day that makes me glad to live in New York State. The birds are singing, the sun is already doing its best to get us to 72 degrees Fahrenheit, the grass couldn’t be greener or more like a grand outdoor carpet while the flowers and flowering trees are stunning in their natural beauty. The grand unfolding of nature seems such an organic process that I tend to forget all that Mother Earth has been through over the past months: hurricanes, torrential rains, frozen rivers and lakes, destructive winds…
Picking up branches on our land yesterday and noticing the new configurations of those places damaged by the winter winds and water makes me grateful for their resilience. The silence as I walked and bent and cleared debris called me to a deeper place of communion with all that is natural to us and often missed in our busyness. I am grateful for the words of John Philip Newell to express my heart sense this morning:
May the deep blessings of earth be with us. May the fathomless soundings of seas surge in our soul. May the boundless stretches of the universe echo in our depths to open us to wonder, to strengthen us for love, to humble us with gratitude, that we may find ourselves in one another, that we may lose ourselves in gladness, that we may give ourselves to peace. (Praying with the Earth, p.20)
In his small book, Praying with the Earth: A Prayerbook for Peace, John Philip Newell writes each morning and evening of the week a prayer for the life of the world. Brief as they are, they are compelling in their depth and intensity, calling out to God with vision and yearning, always capturing quickly and quietly a trust of the God that will never disappoint. Here is what he offers on this – and every – Saturday morning.
The readings for today are all about transgressions and the need for forgiveness, from Ezekiel to the word of Jesus about the need to forgive 70 X 7 times. Synchronistically, John Philip Newell has a Prayer of Awareness for Thursday morning in his book, Praying with the Earth. Simple and short, it is sufficient for my reflection for this day.
Everything is so still this morning. It reminds me of the line in Paul’s Letter to the Romans where he says that “all creation is on tiptoe, waiting for the children of God to come into their own.” That image is my favorite translation because it is so visual but also because it implies for me an intense use of both ears and eyes. We won’t see it if we have our eyes closed and we won’t hear it if we’re not really listening. Even if all of our five outer senses are engaged, there needs to be an interior readiness for the in-breaking of God’s presence. I’ve come to the conclusion that it is an incremental thing, sparked either by our own silence or by a communal encounter of recognition. Deeper than silence, the stillness becomes palpable and we know something that we didn’t know before – indescribable but deeply true. Again it is John Philip Newell whose prayer suffices for this morning.
Here’s a prayer-poem from John Philip Newell that we might might save and pull out on days when the air is heavy with the rain of the night or the scent of the soil that makes one want to go out and dig in the dirt. (Or is it just me?)
Finally it seems that we have a break from the intense heat and high humidity that hinders movement and keeps effectiveness at a minimum. We were spared the violence of the storms that gripped the Northeast Corridor of our country yesterday but at one moment it was as if some caretaker in the heavens turned a spigot to let all the humidity out of the sky and gave us some moments of straight-down driving rain – a curtain of water to slake the thirst of the land. As I celebrate the freshness of this new day I am drawn to another image of water in a prayer for unity by John Philip Newell. I offer it as a morning prayer for us all.
Late yesterday just after I had arrived at the party marking the 85th birthday of my friend, Florence, the skies opened and gave a torrential drink of water to the parched earth. Just before I left an hour later to return to the retreat I was hosting at home, the rain stopped. Sometimes things just happen that way. Had I been home without a group of people wrapping up an afternoon of deep reflection, I would have loved to go outside and let myself be washed by the cooling water falling from the sky, as I symbolically felt the sensation of having all things being made new. I opted instead for the reasonable option of staying dry.