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We ourselves form part of the creative apparatus of God.

                        Evelyn Underhill

The best way to look at suffering is with gratitude, that it is happening in order to teach us some very important lesson.  It is useless to want suffering to go away.  It is impermanent, it will go away anyway, but if we don’t learn the lesson that it is trying to teach us, it will come back in exactly the same manner.

            Aya Khema  When the Iron Eagle Flies

The wine God loves is human honesty.

                        Rumi

If we have developed the necessary mental discipline and are
sufficiently aware of what is happening inside us, there is no
reason why we cannot choose to express only those thoughts
that will bring happiness to ourselves and others.  The whole
world might rise against us, but if the ability to control our mind
were well developed, we could still view everyone as our friend
rather than cower with fear and hatred.

We must die to each moment and allow life to express itself through us.  Our lives may not turn out the way in which the ego has imagined, but when we surrender to the truth of what is, we will find freedom beyond measure, as surely as the river finds its way to the sea.

                                    Matthew Flickstein from Swallowing the River Ganges

Dear God,

I give this day to You. 
May my mind stay centered on the things of spirit.

May I not be tempted to stray from love.
As I begin this day, I open to receive You.
Please enter where You already abide.

May my mind and heart be pure and true,
and may I not deviate from the things of goodness.

May I see the love and innocence in all mankind [sic],
behind the masks we all wear and the illusions of this worldly plane.

I surrender to You my doings this day.
I ask only that they serve You in the healing of the world.

May I bring Your love and goodness with me, to
give unto others wherever I go.

Make me the person You would have me be.
Direct my footsteps, and show me what You would have me do.

Make the world a safer, more beautiful place.
Bless all your creatures.

Heal us all, and use me, dear Lord, that I might know the joy of being used by You.

                                                                                                            Amen.

                                                                        Marianne Williamson from Illuminata

We are all partakers of the bread of life,
Out of the lap of Mother Earth,
And from the hands of our human benefactors;
Many a life has been given for us,
Many a body has been broken for us.

We are all partakers of the water of life,
Out of the springs and streams of the earth,
And of the blood of life,
In uncounted sacrifices made in our behalf.

In ministrations such as these hath God nourished us;
Freely we have received, freely let us give.

                                    Robert French Leavens

When we trust God with our whole heart, we don’t fill our prayers with “Give me this” or “Take this from me.”  We don’t even think of ourselves when we pray.  At every moment we trust our Father in heaven, whose love infinitely surpasses the love of all earthly fathers and who gives us more than we ourselves could ask for or even imagine.

                        Isaac of Nineveh (6^th century)

The Buddha compared being angry with picking up hot coals with bare hands and trying to throw them at one’s enemy.  Who gets burnt first?  The one who’s picking up the coals, of course—the one who is angry.  We may not even hit the target we are aiming at, because if that person is clever and practiced enough, he’ll duck—and we shall still have burnt hands.

                                    Ayya Khema from When the Iron Eagle Flies

When the righteous man (sic) searches for the nature of all things, he makes his own admirable discovery: that everything is God’s grace. Every being in the world, and the world itself, manifests the blessings and generosity of God.

When we fall on the ground it hurts us, but we also need to rely on the ground to get back up.

What in your life is calling you?
When all the noise is silenced,
the meetings adjourned,
the lists laid aside,
and the wild iris blooms by itself in the dark forest,
what still pulls on your soul?

In the silence between your heartbeats
hides a summons.
Do you hear it?
Name it, if you must,
or leave it forever nameless,
but why pretend it is not there?

Dear God,
Please bless and protect this sacred jewel,
Our vulnerable planet so besieged.
May the rivers and the oceans and the sky and the land
All be repaired somehow, dear Lord.
May the barbarism end, which threatens to destroy our priceless treasure.
For surely the earth has been our home,
The home of our parents unto all generations.
For the sake of our children, Lord,
Save this earth.
Place in all our minds a greater awe before her mysteries.
Shield her and heal her wounds.
Restore her to her former glory.
Save her Lord, from us.
Amen.

                        Marianne Williamson  from Illuminata

Watching gardeners label their plants
I vow with all beings
to practice the old horticulture
and let the plants identify me.

We awaken in Christ’s body
As Christ awakens our bodies
And my poor hand is Christ.
He enters my foot and is infinitely me.

I move my hand, and wonderfully my hand
Becomes Christ, becomes all of Him.
(for God is indivisibly whole, seamless in his Godhead.)

I move my foot, and at once
He appears like a flash of lightning.
Do my words seem blasphemous?
Then open your heart to Him

And let yourself receive the One
Who is opening to you so deeply.
For if we genuinely love Him
We take up inside Christ’s body

Where all our body, all over
Every most hidden part of it,
Is realized in joy as Him.
And He makes us, utterly, real

And everything that is hurt, everything
That seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful,
Maimed, ugly, irreparably
Damaged, is in Him transformed.

And recognized as whole, as lovely
And radiant in His light;
We awaken as the Beloved
In every last part of our body.

                        Simeon the New Theologian (Greek Orthodox Abbot, 949-1022)

Which is worth more, a crowd of thousands,
or your own genuine solitude?
Freedom, or power over an entire nation?

A little while alone in your room
will prove more valuable than anything else
that could ever be given you.

I pray, O Lord, that today I may know with keener awareness that I am in thy hands; well or ill, happy or sad, at work or at play, with others or alone, may I become increasingly conscious that I dwell within thy purposeful providence.

Illness does not mean punishment or thy disfavour.  Fun is not “secular.”  The trifles of my life do not forfeit thine interest in me.

Grant me the sense of thy presence, born of thine indwelling and of thine enfolding love, and let me increasingly pause to recollect that , in every circumstance, I live within thy life and am always the object of thy care.

When I rise up
let me rise up joyful
like a bird.

When I fall
let me fall without regret
like a leaf.

Work, Love and Grace

In a frantic marketing economy
Of escalated needing and assumed scarcities,
Success in life comes only through
Profits and Acquisitions.

Mistaking more and more for comfort,
Afraid of ever gaining less and less,
In fear we will compress experience
Through panic into firm belief

That Grace is scarce,
That all Love is conditional,
That our best work must be
Applied to self-redemption,

But there is no scarcity of Grace,
No shame in poverty of style or place,
For Love redeems each life and
Good work is faith in action.

The Worm’s Waking

This is how a human being can change:

There’s a worm addicted to eating
grape leaves.

            Suddenly, he wakes up,
call it grace, whatever, something
wakes him, and he’s no longer
a worm.

            He’s the entire vineyard,
and the orchard too, the fruit, the trunks,
a growing wisdom and joy
that doesn’t need
to devour.

Work is Holy

Spirit of the living God, bless the work of our hands, our minds, our hearts.
May the work we offer be a reflection of all that is good within us, in planning, in creating and doing.
Grant us courage to listen patiently for the stirring of your presence.
Grace us with joyful moments in the midst of daily routine.
Enliven our spirits with humour.
Fill us with reverence for one another, and gratitude for our diversity.
Nourish our spirits with awareness that all work is holy.
May unity, beauty and truth be the fruit of our labor.

                                                Amen.  

We are most deeply asleep at the switch
when we fancy we control
any switches at all.  We sleep
to time’s hurdy-gurdy;
we wake, if we ever wake,
to the silence of God.

Prayer to the Great Spirit

O, Great Spirit, giver of all life, you have been always, and before you, nothing has been.

Look and smile upon us your children, so that we may live this day to serve you. 
Watch over my relatives, the red, black, white and brown.

Sweeten my heart and fill me with light this day.
Give me strength of understand and the eyes to see.

Help me, Great Spirit, for without you, I am nothing.

I claim to be an average man of less than average ability….I have not the shadow of a doubt that any man or woman can achieve what I have, if he or she would make the same effort and cultivate the same hope and faith.                                                   Mahatma Gandhi

While most of us think of ordinariness as a fault or limitation, Gandhi had discovered in it the very meaning of life—and of history.  For him, it was not the famous or the rich or the powerful who would change the course of history.  If the future is to differ from the past, he taught, if we are to leave a peaceful and healthy earth for our children, it will be the ordinary man and woman who do it: not by becoming extraordinary, but by discovering that our greatest strength lies not in how much we differ from each other but in how much—how very much—we are the same.

This faith in the power of the individual formed the foundation for Gandhi’s extremely compassionate view of the industrial era’s large-scale problems, as well as of the smaller but no less urgent troubles we find in our own lives.  One person can make a difference.

                                    Eknath Easwaran  in Words to Live By

Whenever you hear that someone else has been successful, rejoice.  Always practice rejoicing for others—whether your friend or your enemy.  If you cannot practice rejoicing, no matter how long you live, you will not be happy.

                                    Lama Zopa Rinpoche from Transforming Problems into Happiness

“Love, and do what you like.”  
           St. Augustine

Instead of telling friends you are leading the spiritual life, which sometimes makes people raise their eyebrows, you can say, “I am learning to love.”  It is the same thing.  Learning to love in the way Saint Augustine is talking about is the most difficult, the most demanding, the most delightful, and the most daring of disciplines.  It does not mean loving only two or three members of your family; that can often amount to building a kind of ego-annex.  It does not mean loving only those who share your views, read the same newspapers, or play the same sports.  Love, as Jesus puts it, means blessing those that curse you, doing good to those that hate you.

Most of us do not begin by blessing those that curse us.  That is graduate school.  We start with first grade—being kind to people in our family when they get resentful.  Eventually comes high school, where we learn to move closer to those who are trying to shut themselves off from us.  College means returning good will for ill will.  Finally we enter graduate school “ Return love for hatred.”  There we learn to give our love to all—to people of different races countries, and religions, different outlooks and strata of society, without any sense of distinction or difference.

“The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours.”

                        William Wordsworth

Our modern way of life seems to be making us busier and busier about less and less.  It is only after we begin to taste the joy of simple living that we realize all this frantic activity can stand between us and our fulfillment.  The more we divide our interests, our allegiances, our activities, the less time we have for living.

Loving, loyal personal relationships take time. We cannot get to know someone intimately in a day or establish a lasting relationship during a weekend conference. If we spend eight hours a day at our job and the evening watching television, where is the time for cultivating close relationships?

If we simplify our lives, we shall find the time and energy to be together with our family and friends, or to give our time to a worthy cause that needs our contribution.  The simple life doesn’t mean bearing with a drab routine; it means giving time and attention to what is most important.

We are not like solitary billiard balls, as materialism sees us; from the very beginning we are related to everything.  Every drop of water in me has been in every spring, steam, river, lake and ocean in the world during our earth’s billions of years of existence.

We are related to every other self in the universe.  In such a world, we no longer know the limits of the possible.  Therefore we pray for whatever we feel is right and leave the outcome to God.

We live in expectation of miracles in a world reenchanted with wonder.  Intercessory prayer is a perfectly rational response to such a universe.

Intercession visualizes an alternative future to one apparently fated by the momentum of current forces.

Prayer infuses the air of a time yet to be into the suffocating atmosphere of the present.

When you begin to touch your heart or let your heart be touched, you begin to discover that it’s bottomless, that it doesn’t have any resolution, that this heart is huge, vast, and limitless. You begin to discover how much warmth and gentleness is there, as well as how much space. Your world seems less solid, more roomy and spacious. The burden lightens. In the beginning it might feel like sadness or a shaky feeling, accompanied by a lot of fear, but your willingness to feel the fear, to make fear your companion, is growing. You’re willing to get to know yourself at this deep level. After awhile this same feeling begins to turn into a longing to raze all the walls, a longing to be fully human and to live in your world without always having to shut down and close off when certain things come along. It begins to turn into a longing to be there for your friends when they’re in trouble, to be of real help to this poor, aching planet. Curiously enough, along with this longing and this sadness and this tenderness, there’s an immense sense of well-being, unconditional well-being, which doesn’t have anything to do with pleasant or unpleasant, good or bad, hope or fear, disgrace or fame. It’s something that simply comes to you when you feel that you can keep your heart open.

It is not so much work that tires us, but ego-driven work. When we are selfishly involved, we cannot help worrying; we cannot help getting overly concerned about our success of failure. It is the preoccupation with results that makes us tense. Our very anxiety exhausts us.
           For the majority of us, uncertainty is worse than disaster: disaster comes to us only rarely; worry depletes us often. We never know whether we are going to get a brick or a bouquet. If we knew for certain a brick was on its way, there would be no anxiety. We would just say, “Throw it and be done with it.”
         We should learn how to handle both bricks and bouquets, praise and censure, success and defeat. When we can say, “Whatever disasters come, we will not be afraid because the Lord is within us,” this resoluteness and faith will enable us to work free from tension, agitation and fear of defeat. The person who works with this attitude is always at pace, because eh or she is not anxious about the results.

Will

Three generations back
my family had only

to light a candle
and the world parted.

Today, Friday afternoon,
I disconnect clocks and phones.

When night fills my house
with passages,

I begin saving my life.

            Marcia Falk

When you agree to be the mother of God
you make no conditions, no stipulations.
You flinch before neither cruel thorn nor rod.
You accept the tears; you endure the tribulations.

But, my God, I didn’t know it would be like this.
I didn’t ask for a child so different from others.
I wanted only the ordinary bliss,
to be the most mundane of mothers.

When I first saw the mystery of the Word
made flesh I never thought that in his side
I’d see the callous wound of Roman sword
piercing my heart on the hill where he died.

How can the Word be silenced? Where has it gone?
Where are the angel voices that sang at his birth?
My frail heart falters. I need the light of the Son.
What is this darkness over the face of the earth?

We do not pray prayers to coax God to save us from ourselves.  The fights we start we are more than capable of ending. The weapons we make we ourselves can destroy. The jobs we get or lose we can learn from. No, we do not pray to change God.  We pray so that God can change us. Those who pray prepare for the in-breaking of God in their lives.

Consider the life of trees.
Aside from the axe, what trees acquire from man is inconsiderable.
What man may acquire from trees is immeasurable.
From their mute forms there flows a poise, in silence,
a lovely sound and motion in response to wind.
What peace comes to those aware of the voice and bearing of trees!
Trees do not scream for attention.
A tree, a rock, has no pretence, only a real growth out of itself, in close communion with
the universal spirit.
A tree retains a deep serenity.
It establishes in the earth not only its root system but also those roots of its beauty and its
unknown consciousness.
Sometimes one may sense a glisten of that consciousness, and with such perspective, feel
that man is not necessarily the highest form of life.

            Cedric Wright

How wonderful, O Lord, are the works of your hands!
The heavens declare Your glory,
the arch of sky displays Your handiwork.
In Your love You have given us the power
to behold the beauty of Your world
robed in all its splendor.
The sun and the stars, the valleys and hills,
the rivers and lakes all disclose Your presence.
The roaring breakers of the sea tell of your awesome might,
the beasts of the field and the birds of the air
bespeak Your wondrous will.
In Your goodness You have made us able to hear
the music of the world.  The voices of loved ones
reveal to us that You are in our midst.
A divine voice sings through all creation.

I swear the earth shall surely be complete to him or her who shall be complete.
The earth remains jagged and broken only to him or her who remains jagged and broken.
I swear there is no greatness or power that does not emulate those of the earth.
There can be no theory of any account unless it corroborate the theory of the earth,
No politics, song, religion, behavior, or what not, is of account, unless it compare with the
         amplitude of the earth,
Unless it face the exactness, vitality, impartiality, rectitude of the earth.

            Walt Whitman

We Are Fields Before Each Other

How is it they live for eons in such harmony---
the billions of stars---

when most men can barely go a minute
without declaring war in their mind against someone they know.

There are wars where no one marches with a flag,
though that does not keep casualties
from mounting.

  Our hearts irrigate this earth.
We are fields before
each other.

How can we live in harmony?
First we need to
know

we are all madly in love
with the same
God.

            Thomas Aquinas

God created through love and for love. God did not create anything except love itself, and the means to love. He created love in all its forms. He created beings capable of love from all possible distances.

            Simone Weil

Wild air, world-mothering air,
Nestling me everywhere,
That each eyelash or hair
Girdles, goes home betwixt
The fleeciest, frailest-fixed
Snowflake, that’s fairly mixed
With riddles, and its rife
In every least thing’s life,
This needful, never spent,
And nursing element,
My more than meat and drink,
My meal at every wink,
This air, which, by life’s law,
My lung must draw and draw
Nor but to breathe its praise.

            Gerard Manley Hopkins

My brother the star, my mother the earth,
My father the sun, my sister the moon
   to my life give beauty, to my body give strength,
   to my work give goodness, to my house give peace
   to my spirit give truth, to my elders give wisdom.

We must pray for strength.
We must pray to come together.
Pray to the weeping earth,
   pray to the trembling waters
   and to the wandering rain.
We must pray to the whispering moon,
   pray to the tip-toeing stars
   and to the hollering sun.

            Nancy Wood

A New Year Prayer

O Holy of the threshold,
            This we pray:
That what comes in enters by consent, by invitation;
What passes through, crosses over with grace, with mercy;
That what dwells within, resides in delight, in integrity;
That what goes forth, merges for peace, for blessing.

Ancient One,
Who makes all things new,
May we receive with gentleness
And touch with hopefulness
And protect with fierceness
And love with tenderness;
And may we celebrate with gratefulness
And welcome with humbleness
And tend with gracefulness
All that you give into our care.

            By WG, a friend of Barbara’s

From a sermon preached on the Second Sunday of Christmas

Brothers and sisters: our faith tells us that God-immortal, invisible, God only wise—created a world that was not God, that was finite, changeable, and filled with bodily life, and therefore subject to decay and death. Our faith then tells us that God did not look down on that world and say, “Not my flesh.” “I’m not dead.” Our faith tells us that God does not laugh at us, sweep us away, or play chess with us. The Christmas message, the tidings of comfort and joy, is precisely this: that God looked down on us – helpless victims of change, nature, our own bodily limitations, and above all our own sins – and said, “My flesh.”

God became one of us, which meant that, sooner or later – in fact, it was sooner – God became a dead body: disfigured, discolored, mourned over, and buried. And our faith tells us that the story does not end there – not for him, not for us. For as Jeremiah tells us in our first reading this morning, the Lord has ransomed us, and has redeemed us from hands too strong for us; as the Letter to the Ephesians promises, God has destined us for adoption as his children, according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace that he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved. God has called all human flesh “my flesh.” Christ dies in every human death; Christ is the Shepherd of the living and the dead. Christ has sheep of many different folds; none can snatch us from his hand: he will not lose a single one.

            Gretchen Wolf Pritchard, in response to the Tsunami

Spirit of love, who moves with creation,
    drawing the threads to color and design,
    life into life, you knit our true salvation:
Come, work with us, and weave us into one.
Though we have frayed the fabric of your making,
    tearing away from all that you intend,
    yet to be whole, humanity is aching:
Come, work with us, and weave us into one.
Great loom of God, where history is woven,
    you are the frame that holds us to the truth,
Christ is the theme, the pattern you have given:
Come, work with us, and weave us into one.

Worship Workshop, WCC Assembly, Melbourne , 1991

All praise be yours through Brother Sun.
All praise be yours through Sister Moon.
By Mother Earth, the Spirit be Praised.
By Brother Mountain , Sister Sea
Through Brother Wind and Brother Air
Through Sister Water, Brother Fire
The Stars above give thanks to thee,
All praise to those who live in Peace.

All praise be yours, through Brother Wolf.
All praise be yours, through Sister Whale.
By nature’s song, the spirit be praised.
By Brother Eagle, Sister Loon
Through Brother Tiger, Sister Seal,
Let creatures all give thanks to Thee.
All praise to those who live in peace.

Ask of the beasts and they shall teach you the beauty of the Earth.
Ask of the Trees and they shall teach you the beauty of the Earth.
Ask of the Flowers and they shall teach you the beauty of the Earth.
Ask of the Wind and it shall teach you the beauty of the Earth.

            Paul Winter

Pollen

            One morning, here at my place, after a rain, when the pines were washed, I stepped outside and it smelled of the trees. The entire ground was gold with their pollen, looking as if it was the gold the Spanish imagined. I thought, yes, there is life all around. It is not so far away. It is close to us. It dwells in a moment of silence. When air touches skin, or you smell the fresh earth after a rain, then there is a moment of healing, of grace drawn to a point, a radiant, and a radiance.

            Nowadays, it seems we are always trying to match the world to ourselves instead of ourselves to it, the way it truly is. Yet human smallness is only too apparent. In such great universes as ours, we should try to match ourselves to the outside world, the faith healer called river, or a clay woman, broken, who watches over the earth. There are those who journey to retrieve the souls of the ill, to restore the breath of the world, the great store of cloud forest, the medicines in mountains, and the blue eye of the sea that closes or opens. This, the range of a world.

            When people come home after work, when the doors are locked, or the hay placed before the horses, or the deer draw near, or the cattle rest in the fields, and the plants gain an unwitnessed inch of growing, the stalagmites lengthen, the crystals of earth sharpen in dark unseen caves, where those who live in the ocean come up for air, or when those who live in air immerse themselves in water, would it be love we feel?  When our beliefs settle down to sleep and the streetlights come on, if we said matter was holy, would we then love and be joyous?

            Linda Hogan in The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir
---a highly recommended book

Every morning as we wake up, we can bless the world. We can pray to be servants today to something holy and true. We can take a deep breath and surrender ourselves to God’s plan for our lives. And when we do, we will experience miracles.

            Marianne Williamson

As a newborn babe I crawl from my mother’s womb
And stand on wobbly legs in the new world;
Wash the new body that has just been
So tenderly born from a lifetime labor,
And walk to stand before the fire.
I raise my face to your infinite sky
And feel your touch of grace:
Your gentle raindrops kissing my skin,
Your singing wind the moves the trees,
The hot breath of your dancing fire,
Your wet, rich earth beneath my feet,
O Spirit, I recognize you now:
My father, my mother, my unseen lover—
You’ve been here always in all things;
In all things has your spirit loved me.
Through all things your spirit touched me.
Through all things has your spirit touched me.
And never was I left alone, nor could I be
In this truer world of holy people
And living stone.

            Rochelle Wallace

If the Angel deigns to come it will be because you have convinced her, not by tears but by your humble resolve, to be always willing to be a beginner.

            Rainer Maria Wilke

When I am able to hear the voiceless invitation of the seasons of the earth, I am almost always called into prayer. I’m not referring to formal prayer but rather a natural prayer that rises spontaneously from a heart that has learned to listen to the moments. It is the prayer of being thee. The seasons are more dear to me than any book I’ve ever read. Some unseen holy spirit turns the pages for me each year. My privilege is to be there. Being there is very easy and very difficult. Sometimes it’s the easy tasks that are most difficult. The distractions that pull me away are many. The season of spring has a special ability to awaken me to joy, gratitude, and praise. The prayer of praise is an attitude of gratitude toward life. One of the things I’ve noticed about myself is that when I am grateful I feel almost impelled to reach out to others. I am pulled out of myself and long to find ways to bring joy to those around me. This prayer of praise fills me and surrounds me every spring. When I am connected with the beautiful, I feel called to give praise to the One from whom all this beauty has come.

            Macrina Wiederkehr

O Awakening Dawn

Come! Come like the day star rising out of the east.
Come bearing the sparkling rays of your sunbeams.
Come carrying baskets of flowers and green-laced leaves.
Call forth blossoms sleeping in the garden of our lives.
O Come!

Joyce Rupp and Macrina Widerkehr

We’ve created a God in our own image: angry and judgmental because we are. God Himself is merciful and all-loving, but we have projected onto Him our fear. This separates us from His love, from His healing, and from each other. When we change our perception from a God of wrath to a God of mercy, we will realize God is a divine physician. Our pain is the pain of hell, or separation from love. It isn’t God who sends us to hell for being bad, it’s God who delivers us from hell after the ego told us we are bad. Hell is when you think you’re a terrible person and you never do anything right; God is the One who reminds you of the innocence in which you were created and to which He will help you return. Hell is when you feel you’re a complete and utter failure who will never succeed; God is the One who reminds you that He lives within you and that in Him all things are possible. Hell is when you think you can never escape your past mistakes; God is the One who makes all things new. It is the ego—not God—who casts us into the “fires of hell.” It is God who lifts us out of them.

            Marianne Williamson

            Radical forgiveness is not a lack of discernment or the product of fuzzy thinking. It is a “selective remembering.” We choose to remember the love we experienced, and to let go the rest as the illusion it really was. This doesn’t make us more vulnerable to manipulation or exploitation; in fact, it makes us less so. For the mind that forgives is a mind that is closer to its true nature. The fact that I forgive you doesn’t mean you “won.” It doesn’t mean you “got away with something.” It simply means I’m free to go back to the light, reclaim my inner peace, and stay there.

            Marianne Williamson

God’s love will always find a way to express itself. One of the reasons we grasp at good things is because we think if we don’t, we’ll be left out of the joy in life. But of course the controlling and needy behavior that results from such a belief is sure to keep our good at bay. It’s when we settle into the depths of who we are, knowing that’s enough, and let other people be whoever they need to be and go wherever they need to go that the universe delivers our optimal good in a way we can receive it.

Marianne Williamson

Part One  Prayer of Acceptance 

Eternal One who circles the seasons with ease, teach me about Earth’s natural cycle of turning from one season to another. Remind me often of how she opens herself to the dying and rising rotations, the coming and the going of each of the four seasons. Open me today to the teachings of the season on autumn.

When I accept only the beautiful and reject the tattered, torn parts of who I am, when I treat things that are falling apart as my enemies,

walk me among the dying leaves, let them tell me about their power to energize Earth’s soil by their decomposition and their formation of enriching humus.

When I fear the loss of my youthfulness and refuse to accept the reality of aging,

turn my face to the brilliant colors of autumn trees, open my spirit to the mellow resonance of autumn sunsets and the beauty of the changing land.

Part Two Prayer of Acceptance

When I refuse to wait with the mystery of the unknown, when I struggle to keep control rather than to let life evolve,

wrap me in the darkening days of autumn and encourage me to wait patiently for clarity and vision as I live with uncertainty and insecurity.

When I grow tired of using my own harvest of gifs to benefit others,

take me to the autumn fields where Earth shares the bounty of summer and allows her lands to surrender their abundance.

When I resist efforts to warm a relationship that has been damaged by my coldness,

let me feel the first hard freeze of autumn’s breath and see the death it brings to greening, growing things.

When I neglect to care for myself and become totally absorbed in life’s harried pace,

give me courage to slow down as I see how Earth slows down and allows her soil to rest in silent, fallow space.

Part Three  Prayer of Acceptance

When I fight the changes of unwanted, unsought events and struggle to keep things just as they are instead of letting go,

place me on the wings of traveling birds flying south, willing to leave their nests of comfort as they journey to another destination.

When I fail to say “thank you” and see only what is not, instead of what is,

lead me to gather all the big and little aspects of my life that have blessed me with comfort, hope, love, inner healing, strength, and courage.

Maker of the Seasons, thank you for all that autumn teaches me. Change my focus so that I see not only what I am leaving behind, but also the harvest and the plenitude that my life holds. May my heart grow freer and my life more peaceful as I resonate with, and respond to, the many teachings this season offers to me.

Joyce Rupp and Macrina Wiedekehr

God is Not Your Gopher

Sometimes we talk to God as though we’re giving Him our Shopping list. Please do this for me, and that. Amen.

            Which is not to say we shouldn’t ask for what we want, but even more important, we should ask God what He wants. Placing ourselves in service to God is the single most important key to finding right relationship with everyone and everything.

            We can’t save the world without God, but God can’t save the world without us. In making ourselves available to His plan, we can’t always see how our part fits into the overall scheme of things. But we don’t need to. What we need, perhaps more than anything else, is enough faith in ourselves to appreciate His faith in us. He doesn’t create small spirits, and he doesn’t have small plans. He created us in greatness, and He has greatness in Mind for us. Mediocrity has no place in God’s creation.

            Marianne Williamson

            There have been times in my life when I backed away from something extraordinary, thinking, “Who am I to do such a thing?” But in reality, who was I not to do something if God had placed it in front of me? Like everything else, we have humility and arrogance completely upside down. It’s not humble to think you can’t do what God is asking you to do; it’s arrogant to think you know yourself better than the One who thought you up.

            Whatever it is you are guided to do, don’t be concerned about your own readiness; just be consistently aware of His. Once you’ve asked to be the conduit through which God operates, your only job is to relax into the Holy Instant and allow the Holy Spirit to guide your thoughts and actions. We’re only the faucet; God is the water.

            Marianne Williamson

An Autumn Blessing—Part One

Blessed are you, autumn,
chalice of transformation,
you lift a cup of death to our lips
and we taste new life.

Blessed are you, autumn,
season of the heart’s yearning,
you usher us into places of mystery
and, like the leaves, we fall trustingly
into eternal, unseen hands.

Blessed are you, autumn,
with your flair for drama
you call to the poet in our hearts,
“return to the earth, become good soil;
wait for new seeds.”

Blessed are you, autumn,
you turn our faces toward the west.
Prayerfully reflecting on life’s transitory nature
we sense all things moving toward life-giving death.

Blessed are you, autumn,
you draw us away from summer’s hot breath.
As your air becomes frosty and cool
you lead us to inner reflection.

An Autumn Blessing—Part Two

Blessed are you autumn,
season of so much bounty.
You invite us to imitate your generosity
in giving freely from the goodness of our lives,
holding nothing back.

Blessed are you autumn,
your harvesting time has come.
As we gather your riches into our barns,
reveal to us our own inner riches
waiting to be harvested.

Blessed are you, autumn,
season of surrender;
you teach us the wisdom of letting go
as you draw us into new ways of living.

Blessed are you, autumn,
season of unpredictability.
You inspire us to be flexible
to learn from our shifting moods.

Blessed are you, autumn,
feast of thanksgiving.
You change our hearts into fountains of gratitude
as we receive your gracious gifts.

Joyce Rupp and Macrina Widerkehr

Obedience to God means a willingness to follow the dictates of love: thoughts and behavior prescribed for us by a force that wants only our happiness and good, as opposed to thoughts and behavior masquerading as our self-interest but that are in fact our own self-destructiveness.

This makes for a radical departure from a traditional notion of God as stern, frowning, judgmental, or narrow. The purpose of our lives is to be happy; God wants us to be happy, far more than we seem to want it for ourselves. It’s contrary to much of traditional religious teaching to believe that surrender to God is surrender to something with only our highest good in mind. To the ego, suffering looks somehow more important, more substantial than happiness. The ego realizes that suffering changes things, but the Holy Spirit realizes that joy changes things too. Watching babies at play; are we not moved to smile? Being loved by our mate, are we not moved to smile? Achieving a creative task, are we not moved to smile? What could be more natural than joy?

            Marianne Williamson

            I often hear people talk about spring cleaning, which involves anything from going through closets and downsizing to cleaning the house from top to bottom. I personally like to use the season of autumn to do this. It fits well with the house cleaning that nature is doing. For the past few years, it has become my custom in autumn to evaluate what needs to be relinquished in my life. Sometimes possessions weigh me down. At other times it is my character flaws that burden not only me but everyone who lives with me as well. I look into my closet and my heart each autumn and ask, “Is there anything I could surrender that would help me become a better person?

            Macrina Wiederkehr

                 One of the things I enjoy about autumn is that, unlike myself, it looks like it’s having fun surrendering. There is a playfulness about it. All those bright colors and falling leaves!  As a child I used to stand in the midst of dancing leaves on a windy autumn day. My face turned upward, my hands stretched out, I would gather the leaves in my arums like birds falling from the sky. On some days I would try to keep my eye on a single leaf, following it wherever it led me, which was sometimes over the fence into the neighbor’s pasture. One day, having worn myself out, my mother found me asleep in a big pile of leaves. The memory is a good one and I find myself wishing I would wear myself outplaying a bit more in my adult years.

            Macrina Wiederkehr

O Antiphons for Autumn
            Part One

O SEASON FULL OF REMEMBERING,

Come! Come with your golden shawl.
Come scattering the beauty of well-aged leaves.
Strengthen us for changing our old patterns.
Give us memories that sustain our dreams.
O Come!

O COOLING BREATH OF AUTUMN,

Come! Come with your natural paradox.
Show us our fullness and emptiness.
Breathe into us a spirit of gracious acceptance.
Tame our desire to have summer stay forever.
O Come!

O SEEDS SPRUNG LOOSE FROM DYING PLANTS,

Come!  Come teach us to be generative.
Carry us to places where we can take root.
Encourage the seed of our love to fall freely.
Gift us with the grace of surrender.
O Come!

O HARVESTER OF WISDOM,

Come!  Come fill us with the waters of wisdom.
Show us the beauty of aging with grace.
Prepare us for the long, dark nights.
Gather from our lives all that has potential.
O Come!

O Antiphons for Autumn
            Part II

O GLEANER OF GARDENS AND FIELDS,

Come! Come gather what is most precious in us.
Urge us to embrace our cornucopia of goodness.
Stir up gratitude and a sense of wonder.
Move us to give freely of our abundant harvest.
O Come!

O RUSTLING LEAVES FALLING FROM THE TREES,

Come! Come live inside our aching goodbyes.
Teach us the truth of life’s impermanence.
Empty us of all that does not bless others.
Draw us into the waiting soil of wintertime.
O Come!

O RISING HARVEST MOON,

Come! Come dance your beauty into our world.
Carve a path of light between night shadows.
Soften our transitions with your moonbeams.
Shine on all weary travelers of the heart.
O Come!

O FIRST WHITE FINGERS OF DEADENING FROST,

Come! Come with your touch of mortality.
Carry us into the heart of deepest truth.
Befriend that which needs to die in us.
Teach us to be ready for the great letting go.
O Come!

Joyce Rupp and Macrina Wiederkehr

            Each of us has a well of wisdom from which to drink. Each of us has an individual source that waits for us to discover it and draw from it in order to fill our thirsting spirits. This does not man we are to disregard the wisdom contained in the wells of others. Rather, it is an encouragement to trust our own resources, to believe that what is held within our own well is also of immense value and worth. Too often we are led to believe that the wisdom of someone else’s well is better than ours. We can so easily treasure their wisdom and discount the marvelous source of spiritual and intellectual nourishment within ourselves.

            Joyce Rupp and Macrina Widerkehr

On Being A Well

What makes this world so lovely is that somewhere it hides a well.
Something lovely there is about a well so deep unpiped and real filled with buckets and buckets of that life-giving drink. 
A faucet will do in a hurry, but what makes the world so lovely is that somewhere it hides a well!
Sometimes people are like wells deep and real natural (unpiped) life-giving calm and cool refreshing.

They bring out what is best in you
They are like fountains of pure joy
They make you want to sing, or maybe dance.
They encourage you to laugh even, when things get rough.
And maybe that’s why things never stay rough when you’ve found a well.

Some experiences are like wells too.
People create them
They are life-giving happenings
They are redeeming experiences
They are wells, wells of wonder wells of hope.
When you find a well and you will some day,
Drink deeply of the gift within.
And then maybe soon you’ll discover that you’ve become what you’ve received, and then
you’ll be a well for others to find.

So lift up your eyes and look all around you.
Over the mountains, down in the valley
out in the ocean, over the runways
into the cities, into the country
sidewalks and high ways
paths in the forest
into the hearts of a thirsty people.

Look!
And I beg you don’t ever stop looking because what makes this world so lovely is that somewhere it hides a well, a well that hasn’t been found yet.

And if you don’t find it maybe nobody will!
And if you don’t be one maybe nobody will find you!

            Macrina Widerkehr

“Listening to Winter”

“I am listening” may be added between each stanza.

The trees have shed their colorful autumn robes.
Winter is raging through the dark, empty branches and I am listening.
I am listening to the roar and to the quiet of winter.
I am listening to a beauty that sometimes remains unseen.

I am listening to the seed hidden in the earth.
I am listening to the dark swallowing up the light.
I am listening to faith rising out of doubt.
I am listening to the need to believe without seeing.

I am listening to the season of contemplation,
   to the urgency of our world’s need for reflection.
I am listening to all that waits within the earth, to bulbs and seeds,
   to deep roots dreaming.
I am listening to the sacred, winter rest.

I am listening to long nights, comforting darkness, fruitful darkness, beautiful darkness.
I am listening to the darkness of the winter season.
I am listening to the sparks of hope within the darkness.

I am listening to storms raging out my window; to storms raging in my heart.
I am listening to all that makes me pull my cloak a little tighter.
I am listening to trust buried deep in the ground of my being.

I am listening to the kind permission of the season to rest more often,
   to reflect more deeply, to pray without words.
I am listening to the sacrament of non-doing.

I am listening to my dreams and inner visions,
   to the unknown wrapped in the mystery of my life,
   to tears trapped in underground streams of my being,
   to seeds watered daily by those tears.

I am listening to the quiet life in winter’s womb.
I am listening to winter, nurturing spring.
I am listening to brilliant winter sunsets and lovely frosty mornings.
I am listening to snowflakes flying through the air,
to the cold winds that often blow out there,
   to bare trees, so lovely in their emptiness,
to one leaf that never did let do.

I am listening to winter handing over spring.
I am listening to the poetry of winter.

I am listening.

            Macrina Wiederkehr

Winter’s Cloak

This year I do not want the dark to leave me.
I need its wrap of silent stillness, its cloak of long lasting embrace.
Too much light has pulled me away from the chamber of gestation.

Let the dawns come late, let the sunsets arrive early,
let the evenings extend themselves while I lean into the abyss of my being.

Let me lie in the cave of my soul,
     for too much light blinds me,
     steals the source of revelation.

Let me seek solace in the empty places of winter’s passage,
those vast dark nights that never fail to shelter me.

            Joyce Rupp         

            O Antiphons for Winter

O Frosty Season,

Come! Come etch your face onto our windowpane.
Light a candle in our hearts each morning.
Reveal to us the beauty of waiting in the darkness.
Keep vigil with us in this nurturing season.
O Come!

O Season of the Sheltered Seed,

Come! Come call us to be guardians of life.
Smile through the darkness of long nights.
Remind us that each seed needs a winter.
Invite us to trust what is shrouded in mystery.
O Come!

O Season of the Long Darkness,

Come! Come with your misty grey cloak.
Cast your dark robe over all that needs sleep.
Surround us with faith in the unknown.
Protect us from too much light.
O Come!

O Wise Season of Reflection,

Come! Come with your teachable moments.
Summon our spiritual powers.
Invoke our interior strength.
Heal our reluctance to wait for spring.
O Come!

O Season of Billiant Sunsets,

Come! Come to all that has grown dim in us.
Sing your winter chants to our reluctant hearts.
Cast beauty into our winter world.
Reveal to us our own gift of being light in darkness.
O Come!

O Season of Mystery and Contemplation,

Come!  Come into the fallow ground of our being.
Allure us from doing into non-doing.
Reveal to us the hidden wisdom in our souls.
Restore what is out of balance in our lives.
O Come!

O Wintry Storybook Season

Come! Come lift memories out of darkness.
Create new stories that have never been told.
Stir through the golden pages of our lives.
Recite poetry to us: tell us our names.
O Come!

O Season of Hidden Life,
Come! Come teach us humility.
Cut through the frozen ground of our being.
Soften that which as become hard and unfeeling.
Free all that resists the silent waiting.
O Come!

            Joyce Rupp and Macrina Wiederkehr

            Already the days are noticeably longer; before we lose the sense of the dark as part of this season of winter, let us reflect on the gifts of enriching darkness.

Kinds of Enriching Darkness
nurturing darkness
 comforting darkness
 sheltering darkness
restful darkness
 restorative darkness
protective darkness
supporting darkness
love-making darkness
tender darkness
 soft, gentle darkness
clarifying darkness
 emancipating darkness
transforming darkness

            Joyce Rupp and Macrina Widerkehr

Waiting God

This is a way
Strange and beautiful,
Full of wild hope
And quiet fear
At the inevitability
Of it all.

For God is there
And God will watch,
Tirelessly wait
All my life,
For me, for me
To come,
And the way is there—
Though only dimly comprehended.

But God—this patient God,
Will never
Give up.

            Edwina Gately

What If

What if everyone rose in the morning and sat down to pray?
What if everyone asked to be aligned with your Spirit,
to carry your peace in their hearts?
How could anyone go forth and
     cheat a business associate,
     abuse a child,
     order more weapons for war,
     ignore the hungry?
How could anyone do anything that would harm
     your holy creation—human or otherwise?
Wouldn’t we all want to hold each other and marvel— 
     at the beauty of the world,
     at the love in the heart of all mystery?

            Barbara Schlachter

Eternal Spirit, living God,
            in whom we live and move and have our being,
                  all that we are, have been, and shall be is known to you,
to the very secret of our hearts, and all that rises to trouble us.

Living flame, burn into us,
            Cleansing wind, blow through us,
Fountain of water, well up within us.

Womankind service, St. James Episcopal Church Diocese of Washington

Water

I listen to the water
washing oh so softly
upon the rocks and stones
strewn upon the beach.
And, as I listen to the constant rhythm,
I know that God,
in unending  desire,
so washes over us,
desirous to soak and moisten
dry spaces and hard edges,
never ceasing, never pausing,
only changing rhythm,
in the constant pursuit
of gathering us in
the great embrace.

            Edwina Gately

Sweet Darkness

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb
tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.

            David Whyte

Holy Mystery, you are the life force that courses through my soul.  When my world is spinning like a top, cradle me in your arms like a newborn.  When confusion abounds, be my compass.  When I am caught up in a hurricane of activity, draw me into the eye, so I may find peace amidst the chaos.  For I would so love to skip with you along life’s byways.  Amen.

Dear Men and Women

In the quiet before cockcrow when the cricket’s
Mandolin falters, when the light of the past
Falling from the high stars yet haunts the earth
And the east quickens, I think of those I love—
Dear men and women no longer with us.

And not in grief or regret merely but rather
With a love that is almost joy I think of them,
Of whom I am part, as they of me, and through whom
I am made more wholly one with the pain and the glory,
The heartbreak at the heart of things.

I have learned it from them at last, who am now grown old
A happy man, that the nature of things is tragic
And meaningful beyond words, that to have lived
Even if once only, once and no more,
Will have been—oh, how truly—worth it.

The years go by: March flows into April,
The sycamore’s delicate tracery puts on
Its tender green; April is August soon;
Autumn, and the raving of insect choirs,
The thud of apples in moonlit orchards;

Till winter brings the slant, windy light again
On shining Manhattan, her towering stone and glass;
And age deepens—oh, much is taken, but one
Dearer than all remains, and life is sweet
Still, to the now enlightened spirit.

Doors are opened that never before were opened,
New ways stand open, but quietly one door
Closes, the door to the future; there it is written,
“Thus far and no farther”—there, as at Eden’s gate,
The angel with the fiery sword.

The Eden we dream of, the Eden that lies before us,
The unattainable dream, soon lies behind.
Eden is always yesterday or tomorrow,
There is no way now but back, back to the past—
The past has become paradise.

And there they dwell, those ineffable presences,
Safe beyond time, rescued from death and change.Though all be taken, they only shall not be taken—
Immortal, unaging, unaltered, faithful yet
To that lost dream world they inhabit.

Truly, to me they now may come no more,
But I to them in reverie and remembrance
Still may return, in me they still live on;
In me the