What a Pentecost celebration we had! A beautiful liturgy with singing and then a brunch together. And then the long ride home.
And the reminder that God wants to pour love into our hearts. Rom. 5:5 How shall we prepare? I think we first need to acknowledge that always we stand in need of love. Never enough love in this world. Never enough forgiveness, never enough compassion, never enough peacemaking. I found this Memorial Day a day of sadness. How futile all this warring, all the getting even in this world, .all the falsity of trying to make peace by killing. I read a great book Left to Tell. A woman who survived the killing in Rwanda and all her family butchered except one brother Yet she forgave all.. Her ability to forgive came out of her deep prayer, her recognition of her utter helplessness without God.
Have we really come to know the depth of these words of Jesus: without me you can do nothing. Are we as honest as many twelve - step people who know without God nothing, Only God can deliver them. And so they turn their lives and wills over to the care of God.
WE need time to be alone before God, waiting to be touched with the love poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit.
The waiting is an active contemplative prayer. This prayer is the soul of our work, and our relationships with each other, our witnessing to the good news! Dorothy Day once said that neither work nor prayer are enough by themselves. As Americans we have no trouble keeping busy! Even if all we are doing is puttering! We do have trouble doing something that does not seem to produce a product. Yet we need to remind ourselves that without God we do nothing…
How do we make the journey to the center? By letting go and letting God. On the ego level we are in charge, we control the operation. In Meditation, we let go and let God take charge. We repeat our prayer and listen to it as a symbol of our selfless attention to the active loving Presence of God.
Sometimes it is helpful to sit a few moments and just listen to whatever sounds there are. Then to acknowledge that we are immersed in the Presence of God. Then we start our prayer word and go on listening to that within ourselves.
And we acknowledge the wisdom of the body. Which is our friend at prayer. We sit straight. We breathe deeply, we listen quietly. We have our feet on the floor and our hands loose, and our eyes gently closed. We are trusting in the transformative power of Love.
Therese Lisieux: “Let us love our littleness, let us love to feel nothing; then we shall be poor in spirit, then Jesus shall come to look for us and transform us into flames of love”
God is at our center…but we must journey through layers of obstruction and follow the lead of the Spirit. Strong and brave. A gift of God.
A gift that God is eager to give. With great trust we open our hearts and minds to the transforming power of Love for God is Love.
It always delights me that in the middle of the Lamentations of Jeremiah, so full of lament over the terrible things happening, the author burst forth in trust.: “The mercies of the Lord are new every morning. Great is thy Faithfulness, O Lord.”. Lam 3:22-23
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