Readings week of November 9th.
Updated: 13 hours ago
Readings from last week's Daily Contemplative Pauses
*All previous readings & reflections can be found here*
Monday, November 9th with Tom
Reading: Cutting Loose
Sometimes from sorrow, for no reason, you sing. For no reason, you accept the way of being lost, cutting loose from all else and electing a world where you go where you want to.
Arbitrary, a sound comes, a reminder that a steady center is holding all else. If you listen, that sound will tell where it is, and you can slide your way past trouble.
Certain twisted monsters always bar the path – but that’s when you get going best, glad to be lost, learning how real it is here on the earth, again and again. — William Stafford
Chant: When we are with you, what fear of loss could we possibly have, we swim in mercy, as in an endless sea — Susan Latimer
Tuesday, November 10th
Reading: “The contemplative discipline of meditation. . . doesn’t acquire anything. In that sense, and an important sense, it is not a technique but a surrendering of deeply imbedded resistances that allows the sacred within gradually to reveal itself as a simple, fundamental fact. Out of this letting go there emerges what St. Paul called our “hidden self”: “may he give you the power through his Spirit for your hidden self to grow strong” (Eph 3:16). Again, contemplative practice does not produce this “hidden self” but facilitates the falling away of all that obscures it.
“Through the experience of interior stillness [we] have joined a chorus of saints and sages who proclaim by their lives that this God we seek has already found us, already looks out of our own eyes, is already, as St. Augustine famously put it, “closer to me than I am to myself.” “O Beauty ever ancient, ever new,” he continues, “you were within and I was outside myself.”” — Martin Laird, Into the Silent Land
— The Oriental Orthodox Order in the West
Wednesday, November 11th
Chant: Sink into the taproot of your heart — Heather Ruce
Thursday, November 12th
Reading: “In imaginal causality the meaning is generated in the richness of the interplay. One can speak, properly, about a "tapestry of meaning," or in a scientific metaphor, one can say that the meaning is "an emergent property of the whole." It does not lie in any single part no matter how powerfully configured but in the way the bits and pieces speak to each other, calling each other into resonance. It is detected in the subtlety of the weave and in the energy released in the interplay among the various strands. From the center things, flow out and toward each other, creating combinations sometimes surprising but recognized by the heart as meaningfully congruent. The themes, words, symbols, and images all sound together to reveal hitherto unsuspected dimensions of depth, meaning, and beauty. The validating sense is one of coherence, of richly patterned meaning.”
— Cynthia Bourgeault, Eye of the Heart
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