Come to
Stillness:
Take a few
minutes to allow your mind and heart to be still before
God.
Opening Prayer:
My God and
Father, Lord of the dance, allow me to see this day and this moment for what it
really is—an invitation to dance the dance of life and faith with the One who
made me. May I dance this day with joy
and passion, knowing that there will never be another one just like
it.
In the name of Jesus I Pray.
Amen.
(JLB)
Psalm for the
Week: Psalm 149Scripture for
the Day: Luke 7:24-35Reading for
Reflection:
I did
not mean for all of this to happen to me.
Or any of it, for that matter. I
am still astonished by it all, and still a little afraid of it actually.
I only
started out to put a little formal devotion into my life, a kind of crash
course in organized prayer. At best, I
had this vague notion of wanting to be a person whose first words in the
morning were a prayer, a prayer that rose up in me as I rose up in bed. I am not even very certain where that notion
came from. But since the day that it
entered my head, nothing in my life is the same. Everything has changed—utterly, completely,
irrevocably.
It
started out harmlessly enough: my father had given me a copy of a book that he
had been talking about for some months.
There was a note inside: “Your brother and sister and Mom and I have
been sort of going along through this book together. Next week we will be on week #17—Dad.” Unbeknownst to him, I already had a copy of
the book, he and I had been talking about it, and I confess that I did not even
open the copy that he gave me until years later. The note was inside the front cover and I did
not see it until he had been dead for two years. There were a lot of things to which I was not
paying much attention in those days.
It is a
small book, bound in blue leather, with a gold cross stamped on the front and
three silk ribbons inside. Its pages are
made of Bible paper. The book is divided
into fifty-two weeks, laid out against the liturgical calendar, with a pattern
to follow for prayer and scripture and reading and meditation each day and each
week.
I cannot
say exactly what motivated me to open the book on the particular March day that
I finally did, how much of it was a deep sense of wanting to begin a
disciplined routine of prayer and devotion, or how much of it had to do with
marking my father’s passing and wanting to be near him again in some way. It is clear now that I was being drawn slowly
but steadily to a life that was more quiet, more contemplative, as I have come
to know it to be called.
The
morning I came across the book, I was working in a loft studio that my father
helped me to carve out of the attic space above my living room. I sat at my writing table and looked over the
rail and down into the living room at the patterns the morning sun was making
on the floor below. I looked out the
window through the fields of the farm across the way to see if the neighbors’
horses were stirring yet. Beyond the
farm I could see the steeple on a small church some friends of mine
attend. I opened the book and something
must have opened deep within me as well, though imperceptibly at first, even to
myself. Certainly it was with no grand
plan on my part.
“Painting cannot be taught,” said Picasso once, “it can only be
found.” I think that in many ways that
is true of prayer as well.
I do not
write about prayer as one who knows the mysteries of prayer but as one, among
many, who is drawn by the mystery of prayer.
I never think of myself as a theologian or a teacher. On the days that I lead retreats, I think of
myself only as the head cheerleader, and I am honored to be even that. On the very best of my other days, I consider
myself a poet.
Sometimes I wish that I could sing or dance
or paint or compose symphonies or build cathedrals to express somehow what all
of this means to me. I wish I were a
priest or a robin or a child or a sunset.
“I rage
at my inability to express it all better,” wrote Monet to a friend. “You’d have to use both hands and cover
hundreds of canvases.” A fountain pen
and a blank page seem inadequate to me almost all of the time. Yet they are the tools that have chosen me.
Freelance copywriting and editing projects were what I did at the time
to make a living. For me, it was the
writer’s equivalent of taking in laundry.
My studio was pretty much covered up with piles of paper, mountains of
stuff. I had been given a chance to
ghostwrite a book, and I discovered that it was pretty hard to write a book in
the same room where all the other work I was trying to do was calling out to me
all the time about the deadlines to come and the money to collect.
Frederick Buechner tells of how he wrote for years in a Sunday school
classroom at a church near where his little girl went to school. He would get up in the morning, put on a
jacket and tie as though he were just like other fathers, and go off to work,
dropping his daughter at school on his way.
Then he would take morning prayers with the pastor of the church and go
upstairs to write until it was time for him to pick his daughter up from school
and head for home.
I looked
across the field that morning and decided to give the pastor of the little church
a call to see if they would let me work there.
It was astounding to me but they said yes, I would be welcome to come
and write there. It turned out that the
pastor had known my father and he was kind to me because my father had been
kind to him. It was not the first time
that such a thing happened to me and I do not for a moment expect that it will
be the last.
And so
began the stretch of some months of rising early and doing the things that it
took to help get young children to day care and preschool and so forth, and
then over to the church to spend time in the sanctuary alone with the little
blue book: reading from the saints and the scriptures, reciting the psalms,
whispering the prayers, and scribbling in my journal. After a while, I would go upstairs to write
until it was time to go and pick up the children and head off home.
Somewhere in that spring an ancient rhythm began to resonate within me,
calling me, drawing me, compelling me to join in the general Dance.
I
seemed then, and still seem, to have no control over my heart’s response to
that rhythm. Like the way one’s feet
start tapping when someone plays a country tune, one simply cannot stop even if
one tries. My advice is that if you do
not want to tap your feet, stay away from the jukebox. If you do not want to pray, then do not go
near prayer books. Once your heart has
heard the music, it is happy only when it is dancing. (Living Prayer
by Robert Benson)
Reflection
and Listening: silent and
writtenPrayer: for the church, for
others, for myselfSong for the
Week: Canticle of the Sun
The heavens are telling the glory of
GodAnd all of creation is shouting for
joyCome dance in
the forest, come play in the fieldAnd sing, sing
to the glory of the
LordClosing
PrayerLord God,
draw me out on the dance floor of life this day and fill my ears and heart with
the beautiful music of Your great affection.
Give me such an awareness of your presence that my feet just can’t be
still. Dance with me as I dance with
you. Amen.
(JLB)
