Reflection for April 27, 2010

“…the angel spoke, and he said to the women, “Thee is no need for you to be afraid. I know you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here, for he has risen…..”

Mark 28:5-6

There must be always remaining in everyone’s life some place for the singing of angels, some place for that which in itself is breathlessly beautiful and, by an inherent prerogative, throws all the rest of life into a new and creative relatedness, something that gathers up in itself all the freshest of experience from drab and commonplace areas of living and glows in one bright white light of penetrating beauty and meaning – then passes. The commonplace is shot through with new glory; old burdens become lighter, deep and ancient wounds lose much of their old, old hurting. A crown is placed over our heads that for the rest of our lives we are trying to grow tall enough to wear. Despite all the crassness of life, despite all the hardness of life, despite all the harsh discords of life, life is saved by the singing of angels.

Deep is the Hunger by Howard Thurman

Reflection for April 20, 2011

The Vessel

Formed from the earth (clay)

Trusting our vision……………………………….our intuition

Having courage……………………………………..taking risks

Saying yes, to helping hands

Turning upside down …………………………... different perspective

Creating what we like ……………………………daring to think large

Right timing to polish the clay with smooth stone until it shines

Repetition.………………………………………….……like a long mantra

Going through fire.……………………………….. becoming more solid

Coming to the right place.…………………………. community effort

Arms digging a grave and gentle laying down the clay bodies

Being together in the same hole.………..leaning on each other

Trusting my choice of adding sea wheat, orange- and banana peels

to the saw dust and fire wood layers that fill the grave

Trusting others and the experienced teacher

Blessing ritual and letting go!

Surrendering all creations to another fire (in the ground)

Waiting with patience………an evening and a whole night!

In the morning taking away the cover…taking away the stone

Looking what’s left in the ashes

Many hands carefully lift up, what we had given up

Hearts beating …… hands working ……eyes looking

Hallelujahs ___ sounds of joy and amazements

Seeing the images of transformation

Forming our stories

Do you see what I see?

Reflection for April 13, 2011

Nurture You

to

Nurture the World

Reflection for April 6, 2011

© C van Swearingen

It's possible I am pushing through solid rock

in flintlike layers, as the ore lies, alone;

I am such a long way in I see no way through,

and no space everything is close to my face,

and everything close to my face is stone.

I don't have much knowledge yet in grief-

so this massive darkness makes me small.

You be the master: make yourself fierce, break in:

then your great transforming will happen to me,

and my great grief cry will happen to you.

Rainer Maria Rilke

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