Readings week of June 22nd.

Readings from last week's Daily Contemplative Pauses

*All previous readings & reflections can be found here*

Monday, June 22nd

Reading: ”This thing you call your life, it is a living thing. Made of spirit and bone. Suppleness, softness, and severity. Notice the music of it. The air between notes. The silence in the breath of the melody. If you do not sing your life, it will not be alive. All living things are made of song and hunger for song. If you do not harvest your sorrows and make bread, your sorrows will make mountains and bury you. If you play games with truth, truth will swallow you. Truth does not play. Undress. Right here. Right now. You have been taught to perform. Now is the time for you to touch your suffering and heal into your own unique authenticity. Do not look left or right. They are not you. Look into your soul. See your reflection in its shimmering surface. There are two ways you can do this thing you call your life. You can be harm, or you can be the immeasurable element called Love. Your life is flooded with countless rivers leading nowhere, for they are made by humans lost in a human nightmare. Your life is also flooded with the only river that leads to the ocean of Peace. Your Peace. Our Peace. Maybe now is the time to stand on something towering high in the sky and look out over the landscape of your entire life. Behold your journey. Do something right now that makes your heart cry happiness. Do it now. Even if you are sitting, you can move and dance. Look at you. Look at what you have done. All these rivers and you chose Love.” — Jaiya John, All These Rivers and You Chose Love. 2023.

Chant: With you is the well of [Love, Peace] and in your [Love, Peace] we [are Love, Peace] 

— Susan Latimer

Tuesday, June 23rd

Reading: “Life has its own natural sacredness, which shines through most brightly when we get out of the way—when we set aside old stories and beliefs that contribute to oppositional mind-sets, pitting "self" against the world as "other." In those moments when we can step outside the struggle between self and other, and simply open ourselves to what is, we begin to perceive the natural, sacred order-of earth and sky, life and death, mind, heart, and body-behind all the seeming chaos of the world. When "the doors of perception are cleansed" in this way, we can appreciate the magnificence of the whole play of reality, in which self and other are but provisional, shifting points of view.

“Human existence is sacred as well because our intelligence is naturally attuned, deep within, to the power and magic of the natural order, the pattern that connects heaven and earth. We intuitively know what is wholesome and life-promoting, and can distinguish that from what is corrupt and life-negating. When we appreciate the simple beauty and power at work in all of creation, and choose to live in alignment with that larger vision, we tap into our basic human wisdom. And we discover sacred vision.”

— John Welwood, Journey of the Heart, p. 138

Wednesday, June 24th

Reading: “CONTEMPLATION is the highest expression of human's intellectual and spiritual life. It is that life itself, fully awake, fully active, fully aware that it is alive. It is spiritual wonder. It is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being. It is gratitude for life, for awareness and for being. It is a vivid realization of the fact that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent and infinitely abundant Source. Contemplation is, above all, awareness of the reality of that Source. It knows the Source, obscurely, inexplicably, but with a certitude that goes both beyond reason and beyond simple faith. For contemplation is a kind of spiritual vision to which both reason and faith aspire, by their very nature, because without it they must always remain incomplete. Yet contemplation is not vision because it sees "without seeing" and knows " without knowing." It is a more profound depth of faith, a knowledge too deep to be grasped in images, in words or even in clear concepts. It can be suggested by words, by symbols, but in the very moment of trying to indicate what it knows the contemplative mind takes back what it has said, and denies what it has affirmed. For in contemplation we know by "unknowing!" Or, better, we know beyond all knowing or "unknowing."" — Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 1

Chant: Inner Life of Being, bearing [Source] within me, come

— John Tavener, lyrics by Alan Krema and Darlene Franz

Thursday, June 25th

Reading: “Contemplation is beyond aesthetic intuition, beyond art, beyond poetry. Indeed, it is also beyond philosophy, beyond speculative theology. It resumes, transcends and fulfills them all, and yet at the same time it seems, in a certain way, to supersede and to deny them all. Contemplation is always beyond our own knowledge, beyond our own light, beyond systems, beyond explanations, beyond discourse, beyond dialogue, beyond our own self. To enter into the realm of contemplation one must in a certain sense die: but this death is in fact the entrance into a higher life. It is a death for the sake of life, which leaves behind all that we can know or treasure as life, as thought, as experience, as joy, as being…”

— Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 2

Chant: When were you ever made less by dying? You are the Ocean and the Ocean is you

Friday, June 26th with LeMel

Reading: “At its core, the Trinity portrays God – the Birthing, Creating Source of All – in a dance of mutual self-giving, of mutual pouring out one into another into another — The Creating, the Breathing Life that holds all of life together in love — the Holy One is active, pouring, flowing…In other words, living from the life of mutual self-giving that the Trinity bears witness to might be a bit less of a rigid relationship, a hierarchical relationship and more like an egalitarian relationship of mutual vulnerability, support, trust, and love…For when we ground our way of relating, our way of being in this reality, we can help each other to see through the surface of our lives to the deep that dwells within… the very face of the Divine.“ 

— Henry Schoenfield

Chant:

“I know that every bit of this life,

if it be of beauty or not,

is an open archway where love flows in;

and when I soften, joy,

soft as water,

flows into me.”

— Patricia Van Ness

Visit LeMel's Youtube and Substack for daily readings and chants.

Saturday, June 27th 

Reading: “What we most need is what we already are: our essential Self. There is no escape; there is only coming home. When we really begin to see the state of our lives, we will also understand that we must turn most of our lives around if we wish to be ourselves. It is our own personality that must be reoriented and developed in order for us to escape the tyranny of our own false self. The ego is not to be discarded or demeaned; after it has been taken down from its commanding position, it may become a useful servant. The personality can then be guided by an inner discrimination and can begin to act in response to the needs of the moment, not from compulsion or misguided self-interest. The submission of the lower self to the higher Self, of the self to the Whole in each moment, becomes the central fact of existence. Submission is to live for one's Self-the eternal I—not for one's ego.” — Kabir Helminski, Living Presence, p. 71-72

Chant: Deeply descend into I Am, deeply descend into One

— The Oriental Orthodox Order in the West

Sunday, June 28th 

Reading: “In my contacts with the world, an image of “I” is formed at the same time as the contact. I am attached to this image because I take it as being me. I try to affirm and protect it. I am the slave of this image. Being so attached and taken in these reactions, I have no attention left to know that I am also something else. . . So I have no reference with which to measure myself, and live exclusively according to “I like” or “I don’t like.” I value only myself and live passively according to what pleases me. This valuing of my ordinary "I" blinds me. It is the biggest obstacle to a new life. . . “I try to see how I am in a state of identification, to experience how I am when I am identified. I need to know the enormous power of the force behind identification and its irresistible movement. ”

— Jeanne de Salzmann, Reality of Being, p. 17

Chant: Don’t go away, come near. Come to the root of the root of your Self. 

— Joy Andrews Hayter

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