Saturday, October 25, 2014

Week of Oct 26 thoughts

Sunday-Ps. 90 is one of the great psalms of penance. I rarely have this much remorse or contrition in me that is evidenced in this great prayer. Few of us have a sense of sin as an affront to God, or consider the “wrath” of god.. Note that it starts the fourth book of the edited Psalter, so it may well be answering the pleas of people facing the destruction of Jerusalem, including the temple.

Monday-(Idea from Kent Groff) Praying the news past ignoring it or getting depressed.I have not watche dht enews before going to bed for most of my adult life. Its parade of horrors cuts and cuts deeply. Sometimes when I see a miracle like the Berlin Wall falling without violence, I wonder if prayer was the force that brought it down.

Tuesday-O Gracious and Abiding Presence,We prepare now to let go our control of this day as we hand over to you the fruits of our labors. Soon sleep will close our eyes and empty our hands and minds of work. Each time this happens we practice our departure into death. May the sacrament of sleep teach us not to fear death but to trust in your compassionate care for it is, in you, that we sleep and take our rest. Lord of Day and Night, of Life and Death, into your hands we entrust our lives. In Christ's name we pray…

Wednesday-I am getting ready for John 2:13 as we go through the Gospel of John in the 9:30 bible Class. Here is  a parade example of John’s gospel being out of sync with the other gospels, as Jesus has his symbolic demonstration in the start of his mission, not the conclusion.

Thursday-From Abbey of the Arts-The darkness embraces everything, / It lets me imagine  / a great presence stirring beside me. / I believe in the night.  ---Rainer Maria Rilke in Book of Hours-The Christian feasts of All Saints and All Souls on November 1st and 2nd honor the profound legacy of wisdom our ancestors have left to us and continue to offer. In some denominations, we celebrate and honor the dead for the whole month of November. In the Northern hemisphere the world is entering the dark half of the year. The ancient Celtic people believed this time was a thin space, where heaven and earth whispered to one another across a luminous veil and those who walked before us are especially accessible in these late autumn days. These moments on the great turning of the year’s wheel offer us invitations and gifts for our spiritual journeys.

Friday-God needs to catch us by surprise because our very limited pre existing notions keep us and our understanding of God small. We are still trying to remain in control and we still want to “look good”! God tries to bring us into a bigger world where by definition we are not in control and no longer need to look good. A terrible lust for certitude and social order has characterized the last 500 years of Western Christianity, and it has simply not served the soul well at all. Once we lost a spirituality of darkness as its own kind of light, there just wasn’t much room for growth in faith, hope, and love. (Richard Rohr)

Saturday-Anytime you can walk in another persons shoes, the world is a slightly better place. ~ (Anthony Bourdain) Empathy goes beyond sympathy as we do attempt to see the world from another’s point of view/.It is perhaps our greatest act of imagination, to encounter another.

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