dying, day 7

Come to Stillness: Take a few minutes to allow your mind and heart to be still before God.

Opening Prayer:
You, O Christ, are my wealth. All those things I thought I couldn't live without "dissolve" in a glance from you. They are nothing when considered in the larger light of your intimate presence. How difficult it has been to come to this moment! The moment of letting go! I, who have learned so well to hoard, grasp, clutch, and control! Now I want only to be grasped by you. All my possessions are empty when they become obstacles to my union with you. O Glance of God, prepare my heart for the Great Surrender. Enable me to surrender my ego self so that I may put on Christ. Then I will begin enjoying heaven on earth. Amen. (Abide by Macrina Wiederkehr)

Psalm for the Week: Psalm 49

Scripture for the Day: Romans 6:1-14

Reading for Reflection:

Christians need to understand that bearing the cross does not in the first place refer to the trials which we call crosses, but to that daily giving up of life, of dying to self, which must mark us as much as it did Jesus, which we need in times of prosperity almost more than in adversity, and without which the fullness of the blessing of the cross cannot be disclosed to us. (Like Christ by Andrew Murray)

 
Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

Song for the Week: Alas and Did My Savior Bleed

Alas and did my savior bleed
And did my Sovereign die?
Would He devote that sacred head
For sinners such as I?

Was it for sins that I have done
He suffered on the tree?
Amazing pity! Grace unknown!
And love beyond degree!

Well might the sun in darkness hide
And shut His glory in
When Christ, the great Redeemer died
For man the creature's sin.

Thus might I hide my blushing face
While His dear cross appears,
Dissolve my heart in thankfulness,
And melt mine eyes to tears.

But drops of grief can ne'er repay
The debt of love I owe:
Here, Lord, I give myself away
'Tis all that I can do.

Closing Prayer:
Dear God,
Please untie the knots that are in my mind my heart and my life. Remove the have nots, the can nots, and the do nots I have in my mind. Erase the will nots, may nots, the might nots that may find a home in my heart. Release me from the would nots could nots and should nots that obstruct my life. And most of all, remove from my mind my heart and my life, the am nots that I have allowed to hold me back especially the thought that I am not good enough. Amen. (Author unknown)

dying, day 6

Come to Stillness: Take a few minutes to allow your mind and heart to be still before God.

Opening Prayer:
You, O Christ, are my wealth. All those things I thought I couldn't live without "dissolve" in a glance from you. They are nothing when considered in the larger light of your intimate presence. How difficult it has been to come to this moment! The moment of letting go! I, who have learned so well to hoard, grasp, clutch, and control! Now I want only to be grasped by you. All my possessions are empty when they become obstacles to my union with you. O Glance of God, prepare my heart for the Great Surrender. Enable me to surrender my ego self so that I may put on Christ. Then I will begin enjoying heaven on earth. Amen. (Abide by Macrina Wiederkehr)

Psalm for the Week: Psalm 49

Scripture for the Day: Colossians 3:1-17

Reading for Reflection:

The paschal mystery, the dying and rising of Jesus, is the core of our lives as Christians.  We live our lives in between the dying and rising.  We have not fully experienced the dying.  Nor have we lived the fullness of the risen life.  We linger somewhere in between.

     You and I, like Paul, have experienced moments of rising—of being grasped by Christ.  We have known moments of crying out in the silence of our hearts, “all I want is to know Christ!”  We have desired to live our lives in such a way that Christ will be our greatest wealth.  We have prayed for the grace to die to our false selves and rise anew to life in Christ….

     This waiting between dying and rising is like being in the tomb.  It is a waiting room that is essential for spiritual growth.  In this quiet tomb-place we feel, once again, that ancient tugging at the heart.  We experience being drawn, like a magnet, to the divine. (Abide by Macrina Wiederkehr)

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

Song for the Week: Alas and Did My Savior Bleed

Alas and did my savior bleed
And did my Sovereign die?
Would He devote that sacred head
For sinners such as I?

Was it for sins that I have done
He suffered on the tree?
Amazing pity! Grace unknown!
And love beyond degree!

Well might the sun in darkness hide
And shut His glory in
When Christ, the great Redeemer died
For man the creature's sin.

Thus might I hide my blushing face
While His dear cross appears,
Dissolve my heart in thankfulness,
And melt mine eyes to tears.

But drops of grief can ne'er repay
The debt of love I owe:
Here, Lord, I give myself away
'Tis all that I can do.

Closing Prayer:
Dear God,
Please untie the knots that are in my mind my heart and my life. Remove the have nots, the can nots, and the do nots I have in my mind. Erase the will nots, may nots, the might nots that may find a home in my heart. Release me from the would nots could nots and should nots that obstruct my life. And most of all, remove from my mind my heart and my life, the am nots that I have allowed to hold me back especially the thought that I am not good enough. Amen. (Author unknown)

dying, day 5

Come to Stillness: Take a few minutes to allow your mind and heart to be still before God.

Opening Prayer:
You, O Christ, are my wealth. All those things I thought I couldn't live without "dissolve" in a glance from you. They are nothing when considered in the larger light of your intimate presence. How difficult it has been to come to this moment! The moment of letting go! I. who have learned so well to hoard, grasp, clutch, and control! Now I want only to be grasped by you. All my possessions are empty when they become obstacles to my union with you. O Glance of God, prepare my heart for the Great Surrender. Enable me to surrender my ego self so that I may put on Christ. Then I will begin enjoying heaven on earth. Amen. (Abide by Macrina Wiederkehr)

Psalm for the Week: Psalm 49

Scripture for the Day: 2 Corinthians 4:1-18

Reading for Reflection:

I've noticed a shift over the past couple of months; a shift that has been very subtle...and very welcomed. It is a shift that I didn't fully recognize until one morning when I read these words from John 12, my scripture reading for that day. It is a shift in seasons—a shift from the first half of John 12:24 to the second half. It is the slow shift from a season of dying to a season of living; from a season of "unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies" to a season of "if it dies, it produces many seeds." Somewhere in the past few weeks and months I've shifted from mourning a loss to celebrating the "many seeds" of new life.  And they are everywhere. And I am so grateful! Thanks be to God!

                                                                         ~Jim Branch

                                                                        September 2011


Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

Song for the Week: Alas and Did My Savior Bleed

Alas and did my savior bleed
And did my Sovereign die?
Would He devote that sacred head
For sinners such as I?

Was it for sins that I have done
He suffered on the tree?
Amazing pity! Grace unknown!
And love beyond degree!

Well might the sun in darkness hide
And shut His glory in
When Christ, the great Redeemer died
For man the creature's sin.

Thus might I hide my blushing face
While His dear cross appears,
Dissolve my heart in thankfulness,
And melt mine eyes to tears.

But drops of grief can ne'er repay
The debt of love I owe:
Here, Lord, I give myself away
'Tis all that I can do.

Closing Prayer:
Dear God,
Please untie the knots that are in my mind my heart and my life. Remove the have nots, the can nots, and the do nots I have in my mind. Erase the will nots, may nots, the might nots that may find a home in my heart. Release me from the would nots could nots and should nots that obstruct my life. And most of all, remove from my mind my heart and my life, the am nots that I have allowed to hold me back especially the thought that I am not good enough. Amen. (Author unknown)

dying, day 4

Come to Stillness: Take a few minutes to allow your mind and heart to be still before God.

Opening Prayer:
You, O Christ, are my wealth. All those things I thought I couldn't live without "dissolve" in a glance from you. They are nothing when considered in the larger light of your intimate presence. How difficult it has been to come to this moment! The moment of letting go! I. who have learned so well to hoard, grasp, clutch, and control! Now I want only to be grasped by you. All my possessions are empty when they become obstacles to my union with you. O Glance of God, prepare my heart for the Great Surrender. Enable me to surrender my ego self so that I may put on Christ. Then I will begin enjoying heaven on earth. Amen. (Abide by Macrina Wiederkehr)

Psalm for the Week: Psalm 49

Scripture for the Day: John 12:20-36

Reading for Reflection:

When I am able to approach the Word of God expecting some kind of conversion, I experience a little death.  The Hebrew people believed that one could not see the face of God and live.  In light of that belief perhaps the dying I experience should delight me.  When I am confronted with God’s Word, I am sometimes able to recognize that some change is needed in my life.  Ordinarily I name this piece of growth transformation.  Of course, the other side of transformation is that until I am able to integrate the change into my life, with a certain acceptance, it feels more like death. (Abide by Macrina Wiederkehr)


Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

Song for the Week: Alas and Did My Savior Bleed

Alas and did my savior bleed
And did my Sovereign die?
Would He devote that sacred head
For sinners such as I?

Was it for sins that I have done
He suffered on the tree?
Amazing pity! Grace unknown!
And love beyond degree!

Well might the sun in darkness hide
And shut His glory in
When Christ, the great Redeemer died
For man the creature's sin.

Thus might I hide my blushing face
While His dear cross appears,
Dissolve my heart in thankfulness,
And melt mine eyes to tears.

But drops of grief can ne'er repay
The debt of love I owe:
Here, Lord, I give myself away
'Tis all that I can do.

Closing Prayer:
Dear God,
Please untie the knots that are in my mind my heart and my life. Remove the have nots, the can nots, and the do nots I have in my mind. Erase the will nots, may nots, the might nots that may find a home in my heart. Release me from the would nots could nots and should nots that obstruct my life. And most of all, remove from my mind my heart and my life, the am nots that I have allowed to hold me back especially the thought that I am not good enough. Amen. (Author unknown)

dying, day 3

Come to Stillness: Take a few minutes to allow your mind and heart to be still before God.

Opening Prayer:
You, O Christ, are my wealth. All those things I thought I couldn't live without "dissolve" in a glance from you. They are nothing when considered in the larger light of your intimate presence. How difficult it has been to come to this moment! The moment of letting go! I. who have learned so well to hoard, grasp, clutch, and control! Now I want only to be grasped by you. All my possessions are empty when they become obstacles to my union with you. O Glance of God, prepare my heart for the Great Surrender. Enable me to surrender my ego self so that I may put on Christ. Then I will begin enjoying heaven on earth. Amen. (Abide by Macrina Wiederkehr)

Psalm for the Week: Psalm 49

Scripture for the Day: Mark 8:31-38

Reading for Reflection:

The sacrificial instinct is the deep recognition that something always has to die for something bigger to be born. We started with human sacrifice (Abraham and Isaac), we moved to animal sacrifice (the ritual killing of the Passover lamb described in Exodus 12), and we gradually get closer to what really has to be sacrificed, our own beloved ego, as protected and beloved as a little household lamb! We will all find endless disguises and excuses to avoid letting go of what really needs to die. And it is not other humans (firstborn sons of Egyptians), animals (lambs or goats), or even meat on Friday that God wants or needs. It is always our false self that has to be let go, which is going to die anyway.
     By becoming the symbolic Passover Lamb, plus the foot-washing servant in tonight’s Gospel, Jesus makes the movement to the human and the personal very clear and quite concrete. It is always, we, in our youth, in our beauty, in our power and over-protectedness that must be handed over. Otherwise, we will never grow up, big enough to eat of the Mystery of God and Love. It really is about “passing over” to the next level of faith and life. And that never happens without some kind of “dying to the previous levels.”

 

                                                                                            ~Richard Rohr

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

Song for the Week: Alas and Did My Savior Bleed

Alas and did my savior bleed
And did my Sovereign die?
Would He devote that sacred head
For sinners such as I?

Was it for sins that I have done
He suffered on the tree?
Amazing pity! Grace unknown!
And love beyond degree!

Well might the sun in darkness hide
And shut His glory in
When Christ, the great Redeemer died
For man the creature's sin.

Thus might I hide my blushing face
While His dear cross appears,
Dissolve my heart in thankfulness,
And melt mine eyes to tears.

But drops of grief can ne'er repay
The debt of love I owe:
Here, Lord, I give myself away
'Tis all that I can do.

Closing Prayer:
Dear God,
Please untie the knots that are in my mind my heart and my life. Remove the have nots, the can nots, and the do nots I have in my mind. Erase the will nots, may nots, the might nots that may find a home in my heart. Release me from the would nots could nots and should nots that obstruct my life. And most of all, remove from my mind my heart and my life, the am nots that I have allowed to hold me back especially the thought that I am not good enough. Amen. (Author unknown)

dying, day 2

Come to Stillness: Take a few minutes to allow your mind and heart to be still before God.

Opening Prayer:
You, O Christ, are my wealth. All those things I thought I couldn't live without "dissolve" in a glance from you. They are nothing when considered in the larger light of your intimate presence. How difficult it has been to come to this moment! The moment of letting go! I. who have learned so well to hoard, grasp, clutch, and control! Now I want only to be grasped by you. All my possessions are empty when they become obstacles to my union with you. O Glance of God, prepare my heart for the Great Surrender. Enable me to surrender my ego self so that I may put on Christ. Then I will begin enjoying heaven on earth. Amen. (Abide by Macrina Wiederkehr)

Psalm for the Week: Psalm 49

Scripture for the Day: Galatians 2:19-21

Reading for Reflection:

Each time you break open the Word of God you are invited to die a little.  It is a dying that is full of living, a death that is life-giving.  Unlock the door of your heart.  Open the eyes of your soul.  Allow yourself to be vulnerable to the hallowed words. These words will wound you even as they heal you.  They will challenge you in the same moment they bless you.  They summon you to move into the growing places. They call you to trust an invisible Source of Life.  They draw you, like a magnet, to the Divine. 

     Don’t be afraid of your death.  When that time comes, “I will draw my breath and your soul will come to me like a needle to a magnet.”  In these revealing mystical words, God speaks directly to the heart of Mechtild of Magdenburg.  These words re also for you—whoever you may be—for the great death at the end of our lives is not the only death.  There are little deaths along the way.  Each death has the potential of drawing you into the Holy One.  Your breath is not your own; it has been borrowed from God.  Each breath draws you into greater intimacy with the Divine.

     If God has spoken to Mechtild in such beautiful, mystical language, rest assured this message is also for you.  You too have the heart and soul of a mystic.  On your pilgrim path through the hours of the day you will encounter many life-giving deaths.  Each surrender is a little dying.  Every act of love is full of life and death.  Each covenant promise requires a bittersweet yielding of the will.  Every leaning toward God is a little conversion in which you are drawn, like a magnet, to the Divine.

     You are being drawn!  Between your first breath and your last breath the poem of your life unfolds.  Every step is a dance step.  The dance of birth!  The dance of life!  The dance of death!  Surrender your need for certainty as you fall into your soul space.  You will not know whether you have found life or death as you gaze into the face of God. (Abide by Macrina Wiederkehr)


Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

Song for the Week: Alas and Did My Savior Bleed

Alas and did my savior bleed
And did my Sovereign die?
Would He devote that sacred head
For sinners such as I?

Was it for sins that I have done
He suffered on the tree?
Amazing pity! Grace unknown!
And love beyond degree!

Well might the sun in darkness hide
And shut His glory in
When Christ, the great Redeemer died
For man the creature's sin.

Thus might I hide my blushing face
While His dear cross appears,
Dissolve my heart in thankfulness,
And melt mine eyes to tears.

But drops of grief can ne'er repay
The debt of love I owe:
Here, Lord, I give myself away
'Tis all that I can do.

Closing Prayer:
Dear God,
Please untie the knots that are in my mind my heart and my life. Remove the have nots, the can nots, and the do nots I have in my mind. Erase the will nots, may nots, the might nots that may find a home in my heart. Release me from the would nots could nots and should nots that obstruct my life. And most of all, remove from my mind my heart and my life, the am nots that I have allowed to hold me back especially the thought that I am not good enough. Amen. (Author unknown)

dying, day 1

Come to Stillness: Take a few minutes to allow your mind and heart to be still before God.

Opening Prayer:
You, O Christ, are my wealth.  All those things I thought I couldn't live without "dissolve" in a glance from you.  They are nothing when considered in the larger light of your intimate presence.  How difficult it has been to come to this moment!  The moment of letting go!  I. who have learned so well to hoard, grasp, clutch, and control!  Now I want only to be grasped by you.  All my possessions are empty when they become obstacles to my union with you.  O Glance of God, prepare my heart for the Great Surrender.  Enable me to surrender my ego self so that I may put on Christ.  Then I will begin enjoying heaven on earth.  Amen. (Abide by Macrina Wiederkehr)

Psalm for the Week: Psalm 49

Scripture for the Day: Philippians 3:7-16

Reading for Reflection:

I've been learning a lot about dying lately…and I hate it.  I'm terrible at it.  I would probably never choose it on my own, it is usually chosen for me.  And I resist it almost all the time.  But it’s just unavoidable.

     Currently I am living smack dab in the center of Lent, walking the road to the cross with Jesus, knowing that much of the life I have lived—and loved—up to this point has been torn away, that on the horizon a cross awaits, and that there is some kind of new life and resurrection on the other side of it all.

     But right now the cross is looming, the sadness of loss and the stench of death keep me from the joy and excitement of what is to come. I'm convinced that whatever it is will be beautiful, but there is still more dying left to do before I can get there.

                                                                                 ~Jim Branch

                                                                                 April 2011

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

Song for the Week: Alas and Did My Savior Bleed

Alas and did my savior bleed
And did my Sovereign die?
Would He devote that sacred head
For sinners such as I?
 
Was it for sins that I have done
He suffered on the tree?
Amazing pity! Grace unknown!
And love beyond degree!
 
Well might the sun in darkness hide  
And shut His glory in
When Christ, the great Redeemer died
For man the creature's sin.

Thus might I hide my blushing face
While His dear cross appears,
Dissolve my heart in thankfulness,
And melt mine eyes to tears.

But drops of grief can ne'er repay
The debt of love I owe:
Here, Lord, I give myself away
'Tis all that I can do.

Closing Prayer:
Dear God,
     Please untie the knots that are in my mind my heart and my life.  Remove the have nots, the can nots, and the do nots I have in my mind.  Erase the will nots, may nots, the might nots that may find a home in my heart.  Release me from the would nots could nots and should nots that obstruct my life.  And most of all, remove from my mind my heart and my life, the am nots that I have allowed to hold me back especially the thought that I am not good enough.  Amen. (Author unknown)