Come to Stillness: Take a few minutes to allow your mind and heart to
be still before God.
Opening Prayer: Lord Jesus, give us the grace and the strength
and the courage to follow your invitation downward—to the place where there is
only you and nothing else. In your name
and for your sake we pray. Amen.
Scripture Reading for the Day: Jonah 1:1-2:10
Reading for Reflection:
In Luke’s gospel passage
in which Jesus tells us, “It is an evil and adulterous generation that wants a
sign” (Luke 11:29), he then says that the only sign he will give us is the sign
of Jonah. As a good Jew, Jesus knew the
graphic story of Jonah the prophet, who was running from God and was used by
God almost in spite of himself. Jonah
was swallowed by the whale and taken where he would rather not go. This was Jesus’ metaphor for death and
rebirth. Think of all the other signs,
apparitions, and miracles that religion looks for and seeks and even tries to
create. But Jesus says it is an evil and
adulterous generation that looks for these things. That’s a pretty hard saying. He says instead we must go inside the belly
of the whale for a while. Then and only
then will we be spit upon a new shore and understand our call. That’s the only pattern Jesus promises
us. Paul spoke of “reproducing the
pattern” of his death and thus understanding resurrection (Phil. 3:11). That teaching will never fail. The soul is always freed and formed in such
wisdom. Christians call it the paschal
mystery, the necessity of both descent and ascent.
The paschal mystery is the pattern
of transformation. We are transformed
through death and rising, probably many times.
There seems to be no other cauldron of growth and transformation.
We seldom go freely into the belly of the
beast. Unless we face a major disaster
like the death of a friend or spouse or loss of a marriage or job, we usually
will not go there. As a culture, we have
to be taught the language of descent.
That is the great language of religion.
It teaches us to enter willingly, trustingly into the dark periods of life. These dark periods are good teachers. Religious energy is in the dark questions,
seldom in the answers. Answers are the
way out, but that is not what we are here for.
But when we look at the questions, we look for the opening to
transformation. Fixing something doesn’t
usually transform us. We try to change
events in order to avoid changing ourselves.
We must learn to stay with the pain of life, without answers, without
conclusions, and some days without meaning.
That is the path, the perilous dark path of true prayer. (Everything
Belongs by Richard Rohr)
Reflection and Listening: silent and written
Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself
Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself
Closing Prayer: Lord, help me to do great things as though
they were little, since I do them with Your power; and little things as though
they were great, since I do them in Your name.
~Blaise Pascal
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