Sunday-Ps. 137 is a psalm of exile. It is a search for home when a stranger in a stranger land. When have you felt alone, excluded, or exiled? How can prayer help rediscover a sense of place, of home?
Monday"Healing is not so much about doing but about a way of being that lies beyond all the false divisions we make in our lives. Healing often inspires radical life changes, and brings about ways of being more in alignment with our True Self and nature."
Tuesday-This season calls us to the harvest. Seeds planted long ago create a bounty and fullness in our lives. Autumn invites me to remember the places in my life where I had a dream that once felt tiny and has now grown and ripened into fullness. The element of water reminds me of the wide expanse of the sea and in the Irish landscape the abundance of holy wells which are signs of the abundant source of life available to us.
The directions and elements are a part of an incarnational spirituality, one that honors the divine presence all around us and infusing us, and an intimate part of creation.--- Christine Valters Paintner,
Wednesday-The author of the introduction to Lamentations in my study Bible writes, "Lamentations is first and foremost an eloquent expression of grief that helped survivors come to terms with the historical calamity they had gone through." Perhaps this is the Sunday, then, to preach from it. The prophets were right. Sin has painful consequences. Exploitation, injustice, cruelty, self-centeredness and unmitigated greed won't go unchecked forever. The answer to Langston Hughes' question about what happens to a dream deferred is being answered. Hughes knew his question was a rhetorical one; how could we have been so naïve as to think it wasn't? Presbyterian Outlook"
Thursday The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise, we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them." —THOMAS MERTON
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