Good day good people,
Thank you for your presence in this Wisdom web. I am so grateful to each one of you for being here at whatever level you are able to be, whether it is engaging these emails, joining the daily online Collective Contemplative Pauses as you are able, or being on this Wisdom path in your own way. Your presence and your practice matters.
Our Wisdom practices support us in our wish to show up to our lives, and all that we are navigating as humans right now, from a center of gravity that is deeper than our ordinary consciousness. Every spiritual teacher suggests that higher meaning emerges in our awareness when we are in an embodied state that can see from and be anchored in this spiritual center of gravity. It is from here, which includes our ordinary consciousness, that we each in our own way are called to engage the complexities of this world with skillful means.
With love,
Heather
Readings from last week's Daily Contemplative Pauses
Monday, July 8th with Heather
Reading: “We meditate that we might learn to see through Christ’s eyes the divine mystery of all that surrounds us.” ― James Finley, Christian Meditation: Experiencing the Presence of God
Chant: mercy, mercy, mercy deep within and all around (by Henry Schoenfield)
Tuesday, July 9th with Heather
Reading: “Jesus saw God in all that he saw. Jesus tells us, “You have eyes to see but you do not see” (Mark 8:18). You have not learned to awaken to your God-given capacity to see the God-given, godly nature of yourselves, others, and all things. This is the source of all your sorrow and confusion. Our prayer then becomes, “Lord, that I might see your presence presencing itself and giving itself away as the intimate immediacy of the grace and miracle of our very presence and of all things in our communal nothingness without you. Help us to understand that the generosity of the Infinite is infinite and that we are the generosity of God. We are the song you sing.” ― James Finley
Chant: pour out through me, [God] of glory, [God] of grace, that all may see, Thy eternal radiant face (by Darlene Franz)
Wednesday, July 10th with Heather
Chant: in love alone, I take my rest, I dwell unafraid. in love alone, we take our rest, we dwell unafraid (by Kristy Christian)
Thursday, July 11th with Joy
Reading: “The Lord's voice invites us to follow him in letting everything go completely as the only way to be free from the illusion of all that is less or other than love alone.
Nothing we have done, or ever could do, can make God love us less. The measure of God's love for us is never in what we do or say. The sole measure of God's love for us is the measureless expanse of [God’s]self, perfectly poured out and given to us, in and as our standing when we stand, our sitting when we sit, our laughing when we laugh, our crying when we cry.
This is what Christ came to reveal: that nothing is missing anywhere. Our very life is itself the manifestation of the union with God we seek. But our ego self just doesn't get it! And so in the end we learn to extend the compassionate love of Christ to ourselves in our inability to realize how invincibly precious and one with God we are in all our wayward ways.” —James Finley
Chant: in love alone, I take my rest, I dwell unafraid. in love alone, we take our rest, we dwell unafraid (by Kristy Christian)
Friday, July 12th with Heather
Chant: Come now child, lay it down, just breathe, just be. Come be cradled in the arms of love, just breathe, just be (by Alexa Sunshine Rose)
Saturday, July 13th with Heather
Reading: Follies and Fires by Jean Elliott Junis (8-20-23)
I’m off-kilter sometimes, but I am always contained
That part of me, a sanctuary, cannot be disturbed
There may be stretching and reordering happening within me
And to that, I consent.
But external follies and foes will never touch
The well-protected fire that burns in me.
Sunday, July 14th with Heather
Reading: “Silence is not just that which happens around words and underneath images and events. It has a life of its own. It’s a phenomenon with an almost physical identity. It is a being in itself to which we can relate. Philosophically, we would say being is that foundational quality which precedes all other attributes. When we relate to the naked being of a thing, we learn to know it at its core. Silence is somehow at the very foundation of all reality. It is that out of which all being comes and to which all things return.” – Richard Rohr, https://cac.org/daily-meditations/the-gift-of-silence/
Chant: listen listen wait in silence listening, to the one from whom all mercy flows
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