Week of March 27 readings

Easter Sunday-In the spring of new life, Easter announces that the cold and dark of winter will not last. We make our great claim on souls: Death will not get the last word. Only go0d can create life from death, to make the tomb a birthplace.God is at work toward a new dawn of restoration and renewal in creation.

Monday-"Viriditas wasn’t just something evident in creation, but was reflective of the very state of our soul. We each have the capacity to bring forth new life just as the earth brings forth greenness."--- Christine Valters Paintner

Tuesday-As people of faith, we need to remember that the resurrection tosses out all standard expectations and measurements of failure and success. Neither failure nor success is good or evil; both can result in growth, stagnation, or regression. In our struggle with failure and success, we may find a hidden strength as we commend our spirits to our Creator and seek to yield our lives to love. Our challenge is to have faith—in failure, in success, in whatever life brings. The unexpected turns, the painful endings, the precarious beginnings are all part of the path of faith, where we are reminded with each step that the resurrection did not happen only once long ago—it happens each day of our lives. From "On Having Faith in Failure," Weavings: A Journal of the Christian Spiritual Life

Wednesday-"I come to realize that the opposite of despair for me is not hope, but precisely this experience of wonder. Wonder that there is anything at all, wonder that in the presence of great darkness there is also so much beauty, so much love."

Thursday-Simplicity opens wide the doors for a process of letting go, allowing us to be fully present to the graces given us in this precise moment.  When we practice simplicity, we also learn to dispose of burdens in our lives.  These might be possessions, opinions, expectations, or commitments that no longer feed us but that we continue to fulfill because of how we want to appear to others.  Simplicity invites us to make choices about our priorities and how we want to expend our limited energy.”--- Christine Valters Paintner,

Friday-"We live much of our lives rooted in habits and because they are often enacted without awareness some of these become compulsions . . . . Compulsions restrict our freedom, we act in certain ways not because we choose to, but because we feel compelled by habit or the trajectory of our lives. We begin to cling to certain beliefs, patterns, behaviors, not because we love them, but because we are afraid of losing them."--- Christine Valters Paintner,

Saturday- I can only imagine what drew each person that night to pray together rather than to choose to sit comfortably with a book and a cup of tea in their sitting rooms as the weather lashed the sidewalks and streets without. I can only imagine what hope or faith might have been stoked by the prayers and Psalms we prayed together as the shadows lengthened. The words we spoke created a space among us where we all were sheltered, if only for thirty minutes or so, in a place set apart to be human in the presence of other human beings in the presence of God. Nothing special. It happens every day, morning and evening, somewhere and has for millennia.