Readings week of July 13th.
- Linda Lueng
- Jul 13
- 6 min read
Updated: 13 hours ago
Readings from last week's Daily Contemplative Pauses
*All previous readings & reflections can be found here*
Monday, July 13th
Reading: “The transformative art of ripening occurs in the fundamental arenas of life. For example, when a young couple gets married, they look forward to what they hope will be a lifetime of love and happiness together. As the years go by, they ripen as they learn to surrender to a love that guides and fulfills their ongoing efforts to love each other. So, too, with the lifelong process of learning to ripen into a master teacher, or a gifted healer, or a well-seasoned artist or poet, or someone who serves the poor. Those who bless the world in the lifelong process of learning to ripen in such noble endeavors are those who have mastered the art of sustained effort, infused with a surrender to hidden sources of grace that give their efforts a richness or fullness that transcend what their efforts alone could attain.” — James Finley, Ripening in Onening, 1(2)
Chant: O Mercy, I entrust myself to you, that I may be transformed
— Suzanne Toolan, RSM & Catherine Regan
Tuesday, July 14th
Reading: “The lifelong process of ripening brings about a corresponding ripening of our ability to understand the fundamentals in a wiser, peace-giving manner. For example, when people who believe in God go through painful experiences, they are troubled. They say, “If God watches over me, how could God let this happen to me?” This is such an understandable response to suffering in the life of those who trust and believe in God’s providential care. However, as a person ripens in unsayable intimacies in God, they ripen in a paradoxical wisdom. They come to understand God as a presence that protects us from nothing even as God unexplainably sustains us in all things. This is the Mystery of the Cross that reveals whatever it means that God watches over us: it does not mean that God prevents the tragic thing, the cruel thing, the unfair thing, from happening. Rather, it means that God is intimately hidden as a kind of profound, tender sweetness that flows and carries us along in the intimate depths of the tragic thing itself—and will continue to do so in every moment of our lives up to and through death, and beyond.”
— James Finley, Ripening in Onening, 1(2)
Chant: In love alone, I take my rest, I dwell, unafraid. In love alone, we take our rest, we dwell, unafraid — Kirsty Christian
Wednesday, July 15th
Reading: “As fruit ripens, it fulfills itself in reaching its full potential to nourish and give us pleasure. We might say that, as fruit ripens, it fulfills itself in nourishing us. In a similar way, we do not undergo the transformative process of ripening for ourselves alone, but rather that our transformed presence might be a source of nurture to others.”
“Then too, there is the fruit that, in remaining unharvested, falls onto the ground and dies. The lesson here is in Jesus’ words, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone, but if it dies, it brings forth fruit a hundred fold, a thousand fold” (John 12:24). And so it is with us. As we grow old we realize that, in all we have been through, Love has been using us for its own purposes. And for this we feel immensely grateful. We know, too, that our inevitable passing away, in which we fall into the ground and die, is not the end of our ripened and transformed life. It is rather our passage into an infinite and deathless fulfillment. Saint John of the Cross talks about a windfall of delight.”
“When fruit becomes very ripe, the slightest wind can cause it to fall to the ground. This is also true of us, and not just in the sense in which we learn to be undone and fulfilled in all the unexpected little blessings that come to us throughout the day. The windfall of delight pertains as well to our last breath, which we know and trust will send us falling forever into the deathless depths of God.”
“. . . May each of us continue to ripen into this quiet fullness, for God’s pleasure, for our own pleasure, and for all whom we might help in any way we can.”
— James Finley, Ripening in Onening, 1(2)
Thursday, July 16th
Reading: “What is most characteristically human is not guaranteed to us by our species or by our culture but given only in potential. A spiritual master once expressed it this way: A person must work to become human. What is most distinctly human in us is something more than the role we play in society and more than the conditioning, whether for good or bad, of our culture. It is our essential Self, which is our point of contact with Infinite Spirit. This Spirit is not to be understood as a metaphysical assertion requiring belief, but as something we can experience for ourselves… What if you, as a human being, represent the final result of a process in which this Spirit has evolved better and better reflectors of itself? If the human being is the most evolved carrier of the Creative Spirit – possessing conscious love, will, and creativity – then our humanity is the degree to which this physical and spiritual vehicle, and particularly our nervous system, can reflect or manifest Spirit. That which is most sacred in us, that which is deeper than our individual personality, is our connection to this Spirit, this Creative Power.”
— Kabir Edmund Helminski, Living Presence: A Sufi Way to Mindfulness & the Essential Self
Chant: I am Present to the Presence, it is my only care, I am held by the Presence, the fountain of creative love — Kristy Christian
Friday, July 17th with Faye
Reading:
The alignment here takes place on a very intimate level.
And the presence of sensation in the body
becomes the doorway to that intimacy.
I allow the sensation of my entire body
to inform me better of the very simple fact that I am here.
And the more deeply I am drawn into this sensation of my body,
the more quiet and still the mind becomes.
Sensing the whole body and all of its organs.
Searching for the stillness at the bottom of each breath.
Being open to the impressions of each organ.
And seeing the way in which the organ of the blood
is connected to the subtle spiritual organs of being
in such a way that air and blood and being are not separated,
but are to be understood within sensation as a single thing.
I am the air I breathe.
I am the planet it belongs to.
I am the blood in my veins and my cells.
It is my ocean.
— Lee van Laer
Chant: I am present to the presence
Saturday, July 18th
Reading: "Humanity, take a good look at yourself. Inside, you've got heaven and earth, and all of creation. You're a world—everything is hidden in you."
— Hildegard, Causes and Cures
Sunday, July 19th with Henry
Reading: "…In the contemplative journey, as we swim down into those deeper waters toward the wellsprings of hope, we begin to experience and trust what it means to lay down self, to let go of ordinary awareness and surrender ourselves to the mercy of God. And as hope, the hidden spring of mercy deep within us, is released in that touch and flows out from the center, filling us with the fullness of God's own purpose living itself into action, then we discover within ourselves the mysterious plenitude to live into action what our ordinary hearts and minds could not possibly sustain. In plumbing deeply the hidden rootedness of the whole, where all things are held together in the Mercy, we are released from the grip of personal fear and set free to minister with skillful means and true compassion to a world desperately in need of reconnection."
— Cynthia Bourgeault, Mystical Hope, 98
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