Readings from the pauses June 19th — 25th.
There was no email sent out this week.
From the Daily Contemplative Pauses
Monday, June 19th with Tom
“Hence my false self is not something to be eradicated so that my real self can emerge; rather it is my own inner ground of becoming from which I will bring myself forth when the flint is struck before the divine face...
I have come to suspect that this same principle is at work in the striving between psyche and spirit in the human person. “Wholeness is born out of the acceptance of the conflict of human and divine in the individual psyche,” writes Helen Luke in a passage I have been much taken with. But this acceptance- and hence the emergence of the elusive “Real I”- is in fact a breaking forth into a new dimensionality of myself through my yielding. This practice makes the practice of surrender not at all a dreary exercise in acquiescence, but a bold participation in God's ongoing creativity and love. Only in resignation do I become truly fertile unto myself, the good ground of transforming love.”
— Cynthia Bourgeault from her article on Jacob Boehme in the Gnosis magazine Fall 1997
Tuesday, June 20th with Tom
Someone put You on a slave block And the unreal brought You
Now I keep coming to your owner Saying, ‘This one is mine.’
You often overhear us talking And this can make your heart leap With excitement.
Don’t worry, I will not let sadness Possess you.
I will gladly borrow all the gold I need
To get you Back.
— Tom Amsberry
Thursday, June 22nd with Lacey
"Yeshua says…
I am the light shining upon all things. I am the sum of everything, for everything has come forth from me, and towards me everything unfolds. Split a piece of wood, and there I am. Pick up a stone and you will find me there."
— Logion 77, Gospel of Thomas
Friday, June 23rd with Lacey
"[In] contemplative experience… I enter the cave of the heart and discover there that God is alive and interpenetrating, in, of, and around, illumining and enflaming all. My own heart is a hologram of the divine triune heart, love in motion, and the finite and infinite realms are connected by an unbreakable bond of mutual yearning. This “in here” vision of God is not only closer to the vision of Jesus and the mystics; it is also increasingly confirmed by the discoveries of contemporary scientific understanding. As Episcopal preacher and theologian Barbara Brown Taylor writes…
Where is God in this picture? God is all over the place. God is up there, down here, inside my skin and out. God is the web, the energy, the space, the light - not captured in them, as if any of those concepts were more real than what unites them - but revealed in that singular, vast net of relationships that animates everything there is."
— Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, p. 76
Saturday, June 24th with Catherine
“I am quite confident that even as the oceans boil, and the hurricanes beat violently against our once safe shores, and the air sweats with the heat of impending doom, and our fists protest the denial of climate justice, that there is a path to take that has nothing to do with victory or defeat: a place we do not yet know the coordinates to; a question we do not yet know how to ask. The point of the departed arrow is not merely to pierce the bullseye and carry the trophy: the point of the arrow is to sing the wind and remake the world in the brevity of flight. There are things we must do, sayings we must say, thoughts we must think, that look nothing like the images of success that have so thoroughly possessed our visions of justice. May this new decade be remembered as the decade of the strange path, of the third way, of the broken binary, of the traversal disruption, the kairotic moment, the posthuman movement for emancipation, the gift of disorientation that opened up new places of power, and of slow limbs. May this decade bring more than just solutions, more than just a future - may it bring words we don't know yet, and temporalities we have not yet inhabited. May we be slower than speed could calculate, and swifter than the pull that the gravity of words can incarcerate. And may we be visited so thoroughly, and met in wild places so overwhelmingly, that we are left undone. Ready for composting. Ready for the impossible. [Welcome to the decade of the fugitive.]”
— Báyò Akomolafe
Sunday, June 25th with Catherine
BEGINNERS But we have only begun to love the earth. We have only begun to imagine the fullness of life. How can we tire of hope? -- so much is in bud. How can desire fail? --we have only begun to imagine justice and mercy, only begun to envision how it might be to live as siblings with beast and flower, not as oppressors. Surely our river cannot already be hastening into the sea of nonbeing? Surely it cannot drag, in the silt, all that is innocent? Not yet, not yet -- there is too much broken that must be mended, too much hurt we have done to each other that cannot yet be forgiven. We have only begun to know the power that is in us if we would join our solitudes in the communion of struggle. So much is unfolding that must complete its gesture. So much is in bud.
— Denise Levertov