awake, wednesday

Wednesday, May 7

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

Opening Prayer: Lord, awaken me, you whose love burns beyond the stars; light the flame of my lantern that I may always burn with love. (A Traveler Toward the Dawn by John Eagan)

Scripture Reading for the Day: 2 Kings 6:8-23

Reading for Reflection:

     Two basic emotions go with awakening: it is both a comfort and a threat.  It is a comfort because there is a sense of awakening to deeper realities of who we are and who God is.  But at the same time there is threat: in that awakening, we recognize that we are not what we ought to be and that God is something far more than we thought.  And so there is an ambivalence in genuine awakening.  Something in us hungers for this, yet something in us also resists.

     Genuine awakening is the awareness of a door being opened to a whole new dynamic of being.  We realize we have come to a threshold of some sort, and there is need of a response.  Our response may be immediate, or it may come after much wrestling and recurrence.  Some people are aroused into early stages of wakefulness and then quickly subside into sleep.  They don’t like what is out there.  It is not time to get up yet.  They will be roused up again and lie back down again, and that pattern can continue until finally they come to the point of awakening: they step across the threshold of the open door into a new relationship with God.

     Awakening is seen in the classical Christian tradition as the beginning of the process: the first step of our journey, our pilgrimage, toward wholeness. (Invitation to a Journey by M. Robert Mulholland Jr.)

Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

                                           

Closing Prayer:

i thank you God for most this amazing

day:  for the leaping greenly spirits of trees

and the blue true dream of a sky; and for everything

which is natural which is infinite which is yes…

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any--lifted from the no
of all nothing--human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and

now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

                                    ~e. e. cummings