Sunday- Ps. 130 is one of the great prayers.What are different ways to perceive depths? When has deep trouble most affected your prayers? When have you peered on the horizon for an answer to a prayer?
Monday-We sometimes think God will best meet our needs in demonstrations of mighty power—a miracle, a clear sign, an overpowering of our mind and spirit. Yet it is in small ways that God often comes. In bits of bread, taken and eaten, in gentle words of encouragement, God sustains us, too.
God of our sustenance, help me to listen when you speak in ways both large and small. Amen.
Bryan Woken
Tuesday-Let mystery have its place in you; do not be always turning up your whole soil with the plowshare of self-examination, but leave a little fallow corner in your heart ready for any seed the winds may bring, and reserve a nook of shadow for the passing bird; keep a place in your heart for the unexpected guests, an altar for an unknown God.-- from Amiel's Journal, translated by Mrs. Humphrey Ward
Wednesday-John Cassian, one of the ancient desert fathers, describes three renunciations he says are required of all of us on the spiritual journey. The first is our former way of life as we move closer to our heart's deep desires. The second is the inner practice of asceticism and letting go of our mindless thoughts. The third renunciation is to let go of our images of God—the idols we cling to so tightly—and to recognize that any image or pronouncement we can ever make about God is much to small to contain the divine. Even the word "God" is problematic because it carries with it so many interpretations and limits based on our cultural understandings.
Thursday-So much that we humans do, positive or negative, is automatic brain response; there is very little free-will involved. Every time we choose love, grace, and humility over our habituated brain reactions, we expand our realm of freedom. And love can only happen in the realm of freedom. Thérèse was a master at finding such freedom inside of very small spaces. Thus she called it her "little way." R. Rohr
Friday-While everybody else is in there jockeying for position and sweating it out, they can lean back, put their feet up, and like the octogenarian King Lear "pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh at gilded butterflies."Very young children and very old children also seem to be in touch with something that the rest of the pack has lost track of. There is something bright and still about them at their best, like the sun before breakfast. Both the old and the young get scared sometimes about what lies ahead of them, and with good reason, but you can't help feeling that whatever inner goldenness they're in touch with will see them through in the end.-Originally published in Whistling in the Dark
Saturday- John Calvin-“All the blessings we enjoy are Divine deposits, committed to our trust on this condition, that they should be dispensed for the benefit of our neighbors.”
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