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Wednesday, October 31, 2012

devotion, day 3

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

Opening Prayer:
Late have I loved you, O Beauty, so ancient and so new, late have I loved you! And behold, you were within me and I was outside, and there I sought for you, and in my deformity I rushed headlong into the well-formed things that you have made. You were with me, and I was not with you.
 
                                                                                              ~St. Augustine

Psalm for the Week: Psalm 86

Scripture for the Day: Jeremiah 17:5-14
 
Reading for Reflection:

Watch the things you shrug your shoulders over, and you will know why you do not go on spiritually.  First go—at the risk of being thought fanatical you must obey what God tells you. (My Utmost for His Highest by Oswald Chambers)

O Begin!  Fix some part of every day for private exercises.  You may acquire the taste which you have not: what is tedious at first will afterward be pleasant.  Whether you like it or not, read and pray daily.  It is for your life; there is no other way: else you will be a trifler all your days.                                                                                                                       
                                                                                                ~John Wesley


Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

Song for the Week: Lord Most High

From the ends of the earth
From the depths of the sea
From the heights of the heavens
Your name be praised

From the hearts of the weak
From the shouts of the strong
From the lips of all people
This song we raise, Lord

Throughout the endless ages
You will be crowned with praises,
Lord Most High
Exalted in every nation
Sovereign of all creation
Lord Most High, Be magnified

Closing Prayer
My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone. (Thoughts in Solitude by Thomas Merton)

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

devotion, day 2

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

Opening Prayer:
Late have I loved you, O Beauty, so ancient and so new, late have I loved you! And behold, you were within me and I was outside, and there I sought for you, and in my deformity I rushed headlong into the well-formed things that you have made. You were with me, and I was not with you.

                                                                                               ~St. Augustine

Psalm for the Week: Psalm 86

Scripture for the Day: 2 Peter 1:3-11

Reading for Reflection:

Meister Eckhart wrote: "There are plenty to follow our Lord half-way, but not the other half.  They will give up possessions, friends, and honors, but it touches them too closely to disown themselves."  It is just this astonishing life which is willing to follow Him the other half, sincerely to disown itself, this life which intends complete obedience, without any reservations, that I would propose to you in all humility, in all boldness, in all seriousness.  I mean this literally, utterly, completely, and I mean it for you and for me—commit your lives in unreserved obedience to Him.  (A Testament of Devotion by Thomas R. Kelly)

Oh be generous in your self-surrender!  Meet His measureless devotion to you, with a measureless devotion to Him.  Be glad and eager to throw yourself headlong into His dear arms, and to hand over the reins of government to Him.  Whatever there is of you, let Him have it all.  Give up forever everything that is separate from Him.  (The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life by Hannah Whitall Smith)

Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

Song for the Week: Lord Most High

From the ends of the earth
From the depths of the sea
From the heights of the heavens
Your name be praised

From the hearts of the weak
From the shouts of the strong
From the lips of all people
This song we raise, Lord

Throughout the endless ages
You will be crowned with praises,
Lord Most High
Exalted in every nation
Sovereign of all creation
Lord Most High, Be magnified

Closing Prayer
My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone. (Thoughts in Solitude by Thomas Merton)

Monday, October 29, 2012

devotion, day 1

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

Opening Prayer:
 
Late have I loved you, O Beauty, so ancient and so new, late have I loved you!  And behold, you were within me and I was outside, and there I sought for you, and in my deformity I rushed headlong into the well-formed things that you have made.  You were with me, and I was not with you.
 
                                                                             ~St. Augustine

Psalm for the Week: Psalm 86

Scripture for the Day: Colossians 2:1-7

Reading for Reflection:

Philosopher William James said: "In some people religion exists as a dull habit, in others as an acute fever."  Jesus did not endure the shame of the cross to hand on a dull habit.  If you don't have the fever, dear reader, a passion for God and His Christ, drop to your knees, and beg for it; turn to the God you half-believe in and cry out for His baptism of fire. (The Signature of Jesus by Brennan Manning)
 
 
If you are weary of some sleepy form of devotion, probably God is as weary of it as you are.
 
                                                                                     ~Frank Laubach

Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

Song for the Week: Lord Most High

From the ends of the earth
From the depths of the sea
From the heights of the heavens
Your name be praised

From the hearts of the weak
From the shouts of the strong
From the lips of all people
This song we raise, Lord

Throughout the endless ages
You will be crowned with praises,
Lord Most High
Exalted in every nation
Sovereign of all creation
Lord Most High, Be magnified


Closing Prayer
My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going.  I do not see the road ahead of me.  I cannot know for certain where it will end.  Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.  But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.  And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.  I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.  And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it.  Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem lost and in the shadow of death.  I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone. (Thoughts in Solitude by Thomas Merton)

Sunday, October 28, 2012

the dance, day 7

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 149

Scripture for the Day: Psalm 150

Reading for Reflection:

Once I applied my personal rhythm of response to my prayer life, I felt a profound sense of release and relief.  Not only did I naturally respond to God’s love from the rhythm of my own way of relating, but now I had found the way that would last a lifetime!  My own natural “discipline” was deeply planted in my own inner uniqueness.  I had just never bothered to look at my uniqueness and respect it.  I did not have to “take on” or “enter into” anything.  I had only to observe the way my most fulfilling relationships worked and respond in that way in my relationship to God.
     For me, this new approach meant that I could pray sitting down and meditating in depth, or I could talk to God spontaneously through the day.  I could pray for five or ten minutes instead of an hour.  It was all right if I prayed after lunch or late in the evening instead of before breakfast.  I could walk in silence with God, listen to music with God, or exercise or dance in my living room with God. (Feed My Shepherds by Flora Slosson Wuellner)

Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

Song for the Week: Canticle of the Sun

The heavens are telling the glory of God
And all of creation is shouting for joy
Come dance in the forest, come play in the field
And sing, sing to the glory of the Lord

Closing Prayer
Lord 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)

Saturday, October 27, 2012

the dance, day 6

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 149

Scripture for the Day: 2 Samuel 6:1-23

Reading for Reflection:

The universe is dancing.  And the smallest bit of matter knows, unerringly and interiorly, the dance.  Let there be no more talk of flashing signal lights.  No more solitary figures sending out messages in quantum bottles to be picked up light years later on some distant star.  No more cumbersome cosmic intelligence network dependent on the measurable flight of photons.  The timing of this dance must take into account something more than the speed of light.  It must take in to account a “knowing” universe. (And the Trees Clap Their Hands by Virginia Stem Owens)

Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

Song for the Week: Canticle of the Sun

The heavens are telling the glory of God
And all of creation is shouting for joy
Come dance in the forest, come play in the field
And sing, sing to the glory of the Lord


Closing Prayer
Lord 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)

Friday, October 26, 2012

the dance, day 5

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 149

Scripture for the Day: Isaiah 55:9-12

Reading for Reflection:

Keep risking that your heart’s desire is trustworthy.  There is always another, deeper step you can take toward more complete trust, a more all-encompassing possibility of love.  It will be this way until consecration becomes as ordinary and natural as breathing, until every act of every day is simply sacred, until there is no more separation of life from prayer, until each precious moment, awake and asleep, is consciously, knowingly infused with love, until compassion reigns and justice pervades all things, and until life becomes what it was meant to be: sheer enjoyment and pure dancing in the spaciousness of Love. (The Awakened Heart by Gerald G. May)

Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

Song for the Week: Canticle of the Sun

The heavens are telling the glory of God
And all of creation is shouting for joy
Come dance in the forest, come play in the field
And sing, sing to the glory of the Lord

Closing Prayer
Lord 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)

the dance, day 4

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 149

Scripture for the Day: Matthew 22:1-14

Reading for Reflection:

     In the little blue book, on page 115, in the readings for week 17, where I would have started in with my father had I started in when he gave me the book and the note, there is this sentence written by Nikos Kazantzakis: “Only he who obeys a rhythm superior to his own is free.”
     More than a decade has now passed since I first read that sentence.  I did not even highlight it then, the way I did so many sentences in the book.  I was not seeking anything like that at the time and could not have had any idea what such a sentence might mean to me or anyone else.
     Nothing in my life is the same now.  I do not live in the same house or even with the same people.  Most of the material possessions that I had then are long gone, not by some great devout sacrifice on my part, but torn from my grasping hands by bankruptcy or divorce or other crisis.  I fight a constant battle against depression, and I live a life that pretty much keeps me out of the mainstream most of the time.  I am not complaining, nor am I bragging.  I am simply trying to make the point that since the day I said yes to the tune that called me to the Dance, nothing has ever been the same.  That is not to say, as some would have you believe, that everything has gone along swimmingly after my grand experience of the Transcendent.  Much of it, most of it, has been really hard.
     But from this vantage point, I can look back across those days and see that the rhythm of the Dance had begun to call me.  It was so new to me then that I did not recognize it for what it was, and for what it is.
     A life of prayer—or the spiritual life or the interior life, whatever term one uses for this journey that we have undertaken—is not completely linear, any more than one’s intellectual or emotional life is linear.  It is cyclical; it turns and turns again, and carries us along with it.
     It is that turning that caught my attention then.  It is that turning, that Dance, if you will, and its rhythms and steps and habits and joys and sorrows that draws me now.
     If we are to live lives that enable us to hear more clearly who we really are, then we will have to learn to move to a rhythm that is superior to the ones we have fashioned for ourselves, or the ones a consumer society has foisted upon us.  We will have to discover the rhythms of prayer and life that can be found in the steps of the Ancient of Dance of the Ancient of Days: the liturgy, the Eucharist, the calendar and the mass, the prayers of confession and intercession and recollection and contemplation, the habits of reading and retreat and working with our hands, the practices of hospitality and forgiveness and being with the poor.
     Our lives must be shaped by the same rhythms that shaped the ancients, those who have gone before us.  Only then will we be able to take up our places and join the general Dance. (Living Prayer by Robert Benson)


Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

Song for the Week: Canticle of the Sun

The heavens are telling the glory of God
And all of creation is shouting for joy
Come dance in the forest, come play in the field
And sing, sing to the glory of the Lord

Closing Prayer
Lord 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)

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

the dance, day 3

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 149

Scripture for the Day: Luke 7:24-35

Reading 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 written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

Song for the Week: Canticle of the Sun

The heavens are telling the glory of God
And all of creation is shouting for joy
Come dance in the forest, come play in the field
And sing, sing to the glory of the Lord

Closing Prayer
Lord 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)

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

the dance, day 2

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 149

Scripture for the Day: Luke 7:24-35

Reading for Reflection:

What is serious to man is often very trivial in the sight of God.  What in God might appear to us as “play” is perhaps what He Himself takes most seriously.  At any rate the Lord plays and diverts Himself in the garden of His creation, and if we could let go of our own obsession with what we think is the meaning of it all, we might be able to hear His call and follow Him in His mysterious, cosmic dance.  We do not have go very far to catch echoes of that game, and of that dancing.  When we are alone on a starlit night; when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment where they are really children; when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet Basho we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash—at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the “newness,” the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.
     For the world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness.  The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast.  The more we persist in misunder- standing the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness, absurdity and despair.  But it does not matter much, because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there.  Indeed, we are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst of us, for it beats in our very blood, whether we want it to or not.
     Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join in the general dance. (New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton)

Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

Song for the Week: Canticle of the Sun

The heavens are telling the glory of God
And all of creation is shouting for joy
Come dance in the forest, come play in the field
And sing, sing to the glory of the Lord

Closing Prayer
Lord 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)

Monday, October 22, 2012

the dance, day 1

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 149

Scripture for the Day: Jeremiah 31:1-14

Reading for Reflection:

The cosmic dance of the universe is perhaps best articulated in the last three paragraphs of New Seeds of Contemplation, Merton’s most popular and best-loved book.  The basic image is a favorite of the mystics, the image of God as bridegroom dancing with his bride, that is, all of creation, at a wedding feast.  How often we’ve seen at a wedding reception the bridegroom with an enormous smile and tender love sweep his bride into his arms and out onto the dance floor; then the other couples follow.  So also our cosmic God of creation.  He is so deeply in love with his whole creation, especially us his rational creation, that he is engaged in a joyous dance daily with us, the work of his hands.  This dance is going on all the time around us and in us, in every breath we draw and in every heartbeat.  To live fully then is to tap into this reality that lies below the surface of things and to touch this rich river of joy and love that is being poured out into this world. (A Traveler Toward the Dawn by John Eagan)

Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

Song for the Week: Canticle of the Sun 

The heavens are telling the glory of God
And all of creation is shouting for joy
Come dance in the forest, come play in the field
And sing, sing to the glory of the Lord


Closing Prayer
Lord 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)