
Readings from last week's Daily Contemplative Pauses
*All previous readings & reflections can be found here*
Monday, December 30th with Heather
Chant: I am present to the presence
Reading: Ancient One who makes all things new, may we receive with gentleness and touch with hopefulness and protect with fierceness and love with tenderness; and may we celebrate with gratefulness and welcome with humbleness and tend with gracefulness all that you give into our care. — Jan Richardson, Night Visions p. 97
Tuesday, December 31st with Heather
Reading: Abba Anthony said, “A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him saying, ‘You are mad, you are not like us.’ ”
…Has the world gone mad? Indeed, it often seems that way. Our past century in particular has seen more than its share of a [strange epidemic], between two world wars, the holocaust, recurrent genocide, nuclear warfare, the wanton destruction of natural species and cultural monuments, and our seeming incapacity to pull the plug on our fossil fuel addiction even in the face of irrefutable evidence of escalating climate change. There seems to be a collective madness that our human species cannot ultimately surmount. Even as we prepare to celebrate the birth of the “prince of peace,” we wonder in our heart of hearts if anything will really ever change.
I’m sure you’re familiar with that old Cherokee tale about our human predicament. “There are two wolves fighting inside each person,” the grandfather explains to his grandson: “One is... anger, envy, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other is... is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith.”
“Which wolf will win?” asks the grandson.
“It depends on which one you feed.”
“In a world perpetually careening toward madness, we like the desert fathers and mothers can choose unhesitatingly to feed the “good wolf.” To commit to our cosmic calling as a fundamental commitment to bring forth what is highest in a human being, to model our lives on the new evolutionary benchmark set in Jesus Christ. While like all human beings, we run the gamut of temperaments and personality types, our common quest is for a set of values that are “truly human”: that create a life marked by balance, interior freedom, and compassion. Again and again throughout the ages, as both individuals and cultures go through cycles of excess and disintegration, these core desert virtues — simplicity, humility, mindfulness, “roundness” — keep resurfacing as the enduring models for human sustainability.
“Counterintuitive? Yes. Against the grain? Definitely. But mad? I think not. Or if mad they be, on just such “madness” our planet depends.” — Cynthia Bourgeault, language has been slightly changed to include us
Wednesday, January 1st with Henry
Reading: The Body is Like Mary by Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi, trans Daniel Landinsky
The body is like Mary, and each of us has a Jesus inside.Who is not in labour, holy labour? Every creature is.
See the value of true art, when the earth or a soul is inthe mood to create beauty;
for the witness might then for a moment know, beyondany doubt, God is really there within,
so innocently drawing life from us with Her umbilicaluniverse – infinite existence …
though also needing to be born. Yes, God also needsto be born!
Birth from a hand’s loving touch. Birth from a song,from a dance, breathing life into this world.
The body is like Mary, and each of us, each of us has a Christ within.
Chant: The body is like Mary and each of us has a Christ within. (Henry Schoenfield)
Thursday, January 2nd with Joy
Reading: PRAYER OF AWARENESS by John Philip Newell
Light within all light
Soul behind all souls at the breaking of dawn
at the coming of day we wait and watch.
Your Light within the morning light
Your Soul within the human soul
Your Presence beckoning to us from the heart of life.
In the dawning of this day
let us know fresh shinings in our soul.
In the growing colours of new beginning all around us
let us know the first lights of our heart.
Great Star of the morning
Inner Flame of the universe
let us be a colour in this new dawning.
Chant: I am what I Am, and that is enough, with you as my guiding star, I Am always enough/My Off’ring is enough (by Joy Andrews Hayter)
Friday, January 3rd with Joy
Reading: Known: A Blessing by Jan Richardson
First we will need grace.
Then we will need courage.
Also we will need some strength.
We will need to die a little to what we have always thought, what we have allowed ourselves to see of ourselves, what we have built our beliefs upon.
We will need this and more.
Then we will need to let it all go to leave room enough for the astonishment that will come should we be given a glimpse of what the Holy One sees in seeing us, knows in knowing us, intricate and unhidden
no part of us foreign no piece of us fashioned from other than love
desired, discerned, beheld entirely all our days.
Chant: At the still point of the turning world, there I will know, as I am known
Saturday, January 4th with Heather
Reading: "A Light of utmost splendor glows on the eyes of my soul. Therein have I seen the inexpressible ordering of all things, and recognized God's unspeakable glory – that incomprehensible wonder – the tender caress between God and the soul...the unmingled joy of union, the living love of eternity as it now is and evermore shall be." — Mechthild of Magdeburg from Meditations with Mechthilde by Woodruff, p.46
Chant: with you is the well of life, and in your light we [are] light (by Susan Latimer)
Sunday, January 5th with Heather
Reading: “To be hopeful in [toxic] times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places— and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is [toxic] around us, is itself a marvelous victory.” — Howard Zinn, A Power Goverments Cannot Suppress
Chant: be right here in the heart of God (by Henry Schoenfield)
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