Reflection for March 30, 2011

ORDINARY MYSTICISM

What the medieval mystics found is our invitation too. Not to seek out dramatic experience for the sake of dramatic experience. But to look at what is around us, to look again, to look more closely, to open ourselves to the God who lives among all this and who invites us to see differently.

In her essay on mysticism, in Amazing Grace, Kathleen Norris writes, “I find that I appreciate mysticism best in it’s most ordinary manifestation, as a means for tapping into the capacity for holiness that exists in us all.”

BLESSING

In the midst of your life:

the daily of it,

the ordinary of it,

the noontime and night of it,

let there be moments

that open to you

the hallowed and holy of it.

Jan L. Richardson, In the Sanctuary of Women, A companion for Reflection & Prayer: The Book of Hildegard of Bingen(Nashville, Upper Room Books, 2010), p.191.

Reflection for March 23, 2011

What is a blessing? A blessing is a circle of light drawn around a person to protect, heal, and strengthen. Life is a constant flow of emergence. The beauty of blessing is its belief that it can affect what unfolds.

To be in the world is to be distant from the homeland of wholeness. We are confined by limitation and difficulty. When we bless, we are enabled somehow to go beyond our present frontiers and reach into the source. A blessing awakens future wholeness. We use the word foreshadow for the imperfect representation of something that is yet to come. We could say that a blessing "forebrightens" the way. When a blessing is evoked, a window opens in eternal time.

Our longing for the eternal kindles our imagination to bless. Regardless of how we configure the eternal, the human heart continues to dream of a state of wholeness, a place where blindness will transform into vision, where damage will be made whole, where the clenched question will opening the house of surprise, where the travails of a life's journey will enjoy a homecoming. To invoke a blessing is to call some of that wholeness upon a person now.

John O'Donohue

To Bless The Space Between Us

Article at the end of the book, "To Revive the Lost Art of Blessing"

Music: In The Moment

Alasdair Fraser

Natalie Haas

Reflection for March 16, 2011

She who reconciles the ill-matched threads of her life

And weaves them gratefully into a single cloth

It's she who drives the loudmouths from the hall

And clears it for another celebration

Where the one guest is you.

In the softness of the evening

It's you she receives.

You are the partner of her loneliness,

The unspeaking center of her monologues

With each disclosure you encompass more

And she stretches beyond what limits her,

To hold you.

Rilke

Reflection for March 9, 2011

ASH WEDNESDAY

-for Jerry

All year I've had your ashes

here on the living room hearth

in a box artfully crafted

and lovingly finished;

it's time now to return the box

to the woodworker and return you

to the ground out of which you came.

We will bury the ashes here

in the garden where you,

over the years, dug resting places

for one small dog and another,

and keep your ashes sealed so that

when the angels come for you

at the Resurrection

they will find you all of a piece.

Everything of life points to endings

and beginnings. We live the in-between.

I hold you there. You

created one summer night on the prairie

from the rise of familiar desire; you

brought home from the hospital to

sleep four-in-a-bed in a homesteader shack;

you formed over the years

by love and hard work

and faith in the everlasting.

The box is borrowed. It's all borrowed.

We claim what we can.

I will keep your ashes in the garden

and mark them with something that grows.

—Donna Hardy March 2011

Reflection for March 2, 2011

The Word That is a Prayer

One thing you know when you say it:
all over the earth people are saying it with you;
a child blurting it out as the seizures take her,
a woman reciting it on a cot in a hospital.
What if you take a cab through the Tenderloin:
at a street light, a man in a wool cap,
yarn unraveling across his face, knocks at the window;
he says, Please.
By the time you hear what he’s saying,
the light changes, the cab pulls away,
and you don’t go back, though you know
someone just prayed to you the way you pray.
Please: a word so short
it could get lost in the air
as it floats up to God like the feather it is,
knocking and knocking, and finally
falling back to earth as rain,
as pellets of ice, soaking a black branch,
collecting in drains, leaching into the ground,
and you walk in that weather every day.

Ellery Akers

If the only prayer you ever say in your whole life is "thank you,"

that would suffice.

Meister Eckhart