Readings 26 January 2024 St Anne's Church
Opening Prayer
For peace As the fever of day calms towards twilight May all that is strained in us come to ease. We pray for all who suffered violence today, May an unexpected serenity surprise them. For those who risk their lives each day for peace, May their hearts glimpse providence at the heart of history. That those who make riches from violence and war Might hear in their dreams the cries of the lost. That we might see through our fear of each other A new vision to heal our fatal attraction to aggression. That those who enjoy the privilege of peace Might not forget their tormented brothers and sisters. That the wolf might lie down with the lamb, That our swords be beaten into ploughshares And no hurt or harm be done Anywhere along the holy mountain. Amen O'Donohue, John. Benedictus: (Kindle Locations 3291-3307). Transworld. Kindle Edition. |
Wonderfully saved by good powers, we await with confidence what may come.
God is with us evening and morning and most certainly on every new day.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Lectio 365 https://www.24-7prayer.com/resource/lectio-365/
Readings
For a new beginning
In out-of-the-way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.
For a long time it has watched your desire,
Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,
Noticing how you willed yourself on,
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.
It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the grey promises that sameness whispered,
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,
Wondered would you always live like this.
Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream,
A path of plenitude opening before you.
Though your destination is not yet clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is at one with your life’s desire.
Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.
O'Donohue, John. Benedictus: A Book Of Blessings (Transworld). Kindle Edition. Loc 422-443
This time of year we think about New Year Resolutions… is anyone still sticking to theirs?
We see new beginnings in nature - the naked trees, frosted ground with seeds of new beginnings waiting to ‘begin’ the journey into spring and the maturity of summer.
I wonder what Jesus thought of his new beginning – his baptism by John and the commencement of his ministry climaxing with the cross, and resurrection.
I wonder what Peter thought when Jesus ascended to Heaven and at Pentecost with the descent of the Holy Spirit?
New beginnings can be momentous events – such as moving house. They can also be a change in mental focus and framework. Or a new mental paradigm.
A new way of seeing God perhaps?
Being able to forgive a friend and commence a new beginning with them?
New beginnings can be full of hope and we all need hope in our lives.
Have you recently undertaken any new beginnings?
Karen G
Introduction to Silence
The Sound of Silence
A GROUP OF TEENAGE BOYS FROM AN URBAN HIGH school have been invited to spend a day in the country at a nearby convent. The elderly sisters are anxious, not without good reason, as the school is notorious for the antisocial behavior of its students. All through the day they keep an eagle eye out for any signs of trouble, but the boys seem to settle in well enough and respect the prevailing silence and stillness. At the end of the day—a day blessed with sunshine and blue skies—one of the guests, a burly six-footer, sidles up to the mother superior. “Can we come again, sister?” he asks, gruffly. She smiles her assent, and he continues. “I never heard silence before in all my life. And I never heard the birds singing, till today.”
Silf, Margaret. Compass Points: Meeting God Every Day at Every Turn (p. 212). Loyola Press. Kindle Edition.
Blessing
May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
May the clarity of light be yours,
May the fluency of the ocean be yours,
May the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
Wind work these words
Of love around you,
An invisible cloak
To mind your life.
O'Donohue, John. Benedictus: (Kindle Locations 382-389). Transworld. Kindle Edition.
Thoughts to ponder:
2 Corinthians 5:17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come:[a] The old has gone, the new is here!
Romans 12:2 Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.
Thresholds
WITHIN THE GRIP of winter, it is almost impossible to imagine the spring. The grey, perished landscape is shorn of colour. Only bleakness meets the eye; everything seems severe and edged. Winter is the oldest season; it has some quality of the absolute. Yet beneath the surface of winter, the miracle of spring is already in preparation; the cold is relenting; seeds are waking up. Colours are beginning to imagine how they will return. Then, imperceptibly, somewhere one bud opens and the symphony of renewal is no longer reversible. From the black heart of winter a miraculous, breathing plenitude of colour emerges.
The beauty of nature insists on taking its time. Everything is prepared. Nothing is rushed. The rhythm of emergence is a gradual, slow beat; always inching its way forward, change remains faithful to itself until the new unfolds in the full confidence of true arrival. Because nothing is abrupt, the beginning of spring nearly always catches us unawares. It is there before we see it; and then we can look nowhere without seeing it. Change arrives in nature when time has ripened. There are no jagged transitions or crude discontinuities. This accounts for the sure-ness with which one season succeeds another. It is as though they were moving forward in a rhythm set from within a continuum.
To change is one of the great dreams of every heart – to change the limitations, the sameness, the banality or the pain. So often we look back on our patterns of behaviour or on the kind of decisions we make repeatedly and yet which always fail to serve us well, and we aim for a new and more successful path or way of living. But change is difficult for us. We opt to continue the old pattern rather than risk the danger of difference. We are also often surprised by change that seems to arrive out of nowhere. We find ourselves crossing some new threshold we had never anticipated. Like spring secretly at work within the heart of winter, below the surface of our lives huge changes are in fermentation. We never suspect a thing. Then when the grip of some long-enduring winter mentality begins to loosen, we find ourselves vulnerable to a flourish of possibility and we are suddenly negotiating the challenge of a threshold.
O'Donohue, John. Benedictus: A Book Of Blessings (Kindle Locations 881-897). Transworld. Kindle Edition.
Whereas patience is the mother of expectation, it is expectation itself that brings new joy to our lives. Jesus not only made us look at our pains, but also beyond them. “You are sad now, but I shall see you again and your hearts will be full of joy.” A man or woman without hope in the future cannot live creatively in the present. The paradox of expectation indeed is that those who believe in tomorrow can better live today, that those who expect joy to come out of sadness can discover the beginnings of a new life in the center of the old, that those who look forward to the returning Lord can discover him already in their midst.
Henri Nouwen https://henrinouwen.org/meditations/your-hearts-will-be-full-of-joy/
Stepping Stones
……I see myself standing on the banks of a fast-flowing river. I know I must cross, but there is no bridge. Then a figure, a Christ-figure, comes to me carrying a large boulder, and places it in front of me, in the river, inviting me to step out onto it. Every day he brings another boulder, another stepping stone. Every day I move farther into the waters, balancing precariously on my fragile faith.
One day he is late. I turn around, mid-river, and only then do I see where the boulders are coming from. He is systematically de-constructing my cozy little cottage on the shore, in order to turn it into stepping stones for my onward journey. He is using my past to create my future. He is asking me to reach out with both hands—one to let go of all I thought I couldn’t live without, and one to reach toward everything I thought I could never attain.
Silf, Margaret. Compass Points: Meeting God Every Day at Every Turn (pp. 224). Loyola Press. Kindle Edition.
We must learn to live each day, each hour, yes, each minute as a new beginning, as a unique opportunity to make everything new. Imagine that we could live each moment as a moment pregnant with new life. Imagine that we could live each day as a day full of promises. Imagine that we could walk through the new year always listening to the voice saying to us: “I have a gift for you and can’t wait for you to see it!” Imagine.
Is it possible that our imagination can lead us to the truth of our lives? Yes, it can! The problem is that we allow our past, which becomes longer and longer each year, to say to us: “You know it all; you have seen it all, be realistic; the future will just be a repeat of the past. Try to survive it as best you can.” There are many cunning foxes jumping on our shoulders and whispering in our ears the great lie: “There is nothing new under the sun… don’t let yourself be fooled.”
When we listen to these foxes, they eventually prove themselves right: our new year, our new day, our new hour become flat, boring, dull, and without anything new. So what are we to do? First, we must send the foxes back to where they belong: in their foxholes. And then we must open our minds and our hearts to the voice that resounds through the valleys and hills of our life saying: “Let me show you where I live among my people. My name is ‘God-with-you.’ I will wipe all the tears from your eyes; there will be no more death, and no more mourning or sadness. The world of the past has gone” (Revelation 21:2–5).
Henri Nouwen https://henrinouwen.org/meditations/a-new-beginning/
One of the most radical demands for you and me is the discovery of our lives as a series of movements or passages. When we are born, we leave our mothers’ womb for the larger, brighter world of the family. It changes everything, and there is no going back. When we go to school, we leave our homes and families and move to a larger community of people where our lives are forever larger and more expansive. Later when our children are grown and they ask us for more space and freedom than we can offer, our lives may seem less meaningful. It all keeps changing. When we grow older, we retire or lose our jobs, and everything shifts again. It seems as though we are always passing from one phase to the next, gaining and losing someone, some place, something……… And every time there are losses there are choices to be made. You choose to live your losses as passages to anger, blame, hatred, depression, and resentment, or you choose to let these losses be passages to something new, something wider, and deeper. The question is not how to avoid loss and make it not happen, but how to choose it as a passage, as an exodus to greater life and freedom.
Henri Nouwen https://henrinouwen.org/meditations/passages-to-new-life/
For the time of necessary decision
The mind of time is hard to read.
We can never predict what it will bring,
Nor even from all that is already gone
Can we say what form it finally takes;
For time gathers its moments secretly.
Often we only know it’s time to change
When a force has built inside the heart
That leaves us uneasy as we are.
Perhaps the work we do has lost its soul
Or the love where we once belonged
Calls nothing alive in us any more.
We drift through this grey, increasing nowhere
Until we stand before a threshold we know
We have to cross to come alive once more.
May we have the courage to take the step
Into the unknown that beckons us;
Trust that a richer life awaits us there,
That we will lose nothing
But what has already died;
Feel the deeper knowing in us sure
Of all that is about to be born beyond
The pale frames where we stayed confined,
Not realizing how such vacant endurance
Was bleaching our soul’s desire.
O'Donohue, John. Benedictus: A Book Of Blessings (Kindle Locations 2239-2259).Transworld. Kindle Edition.
Will Tomorrow Ever Come?
I PHONE A FRIEND IN AUSTRALIA, HAVING FIRST carefully calculated the time difference, so as not to invade her slumber. We chat for a while, and then I find myself commenting on how good it has been to speak with a human being who has already arrived at “tomorrow.” If we should fear for our continuance, I suggest, it would always be possible to speak with an antipodean, and be reassured not only that tomorrow will surely come, but that indeed tomorrow has already come. The future lives and breathes, not in some ghostly incorporeal way, but in flesh and blood, mind and spirit. We laugh at the thought of such reassurance, given to us courtesy of the International Date Line, but underneath the laughter is a different kind of knowledge: Easter knowledge. What is it that makes us so sure that tomorrow will come—or, rather, that tomorrow is actually already here, a living reality, informing and shaping who we are, and are becoming? My conversation with Australia brings the answer to this question wonderfully into focus. What makes me so sure of tomorrow is that I know someone who is already living it. This isn’t someone I have merely heard about or bumped into in catechism or creed. It is someone even more real and present than my friend “down under.” I know, with Easter knowledge, the transforming power of his presence because I can see its effects, in myself and in others. I can even speak with him any time in prayer without having to check my watch before I call.
Silf, Margaret. Compass Points: Meeting God Every Day at Every Turn (pp. 209-210). Loyola Press. Kindle Edition.
Our next meeting will be 10.30am on Friday 23rd February at St Mary’s Church, Market Road, Plympton, PL7 1QW
God is with us evening and morning and most certainly on every new day.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Lectio 365 https://www.24-7prayer.com/resource/lectio-365/
Readings
For a new beginning
In out-of-the-way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.
For a long time it has watched your desire,
Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,
Noticing how you willed yourself on,
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.
It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the grey promises that sameness whispered,
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,
Wondered would you always live like this.
Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream,
A path of plenitude opening before you.
Though your destination is not yet clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is at one with your life’s desire.
Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.
O'Donohue, John. Benedictus: A Book Of Blessings (Transworld). Kindle Edition. Loc 422-443
This time of year we think about New Year Resolutions… is anyone still sticking to theirs?
We see new beginnings in nature - the naked trees, frosted ground with seeds of new beginnings waiting to ‘begin’ the journey into spring and the maturity of summer.
I wonder what Jesus thought of his new beginning – his baptism by John and the commencement of his ministry climaxing with the cross, and resurrection.
I wonder what Peter thought when Jesus ascended to Heaven and at Pentecost with the descent of the Holy Spirit?
New beginnings can be momentous events – such as moving house. They can also be a change in mental focus and framework. Or a new mental paradigm.
A new way of seeing God perhaps?
Being able to forgive a friend and commence a new beginning with them?
New beginnings can be full of hope and we all need hope in our lives.
Have you recently undertaken any new beginnings?
Karen G
Introduction to Silence
The Sound of Silence
A GROUP OF TEENAGE BOYS FROM AN URBAN HIGH school have been invited to spend a day in the country at a nearby convent. The elderly sisters are anxious, not without good reason, as the school is notorious for the antisocial behavior of its students. All through the day they keep an eagle eye out for any signs of trouble, but the boys seem to settle in well enough and respect the prevailing silence and stillness. At the end of the day—a day blessed with sunshine and blue skies—one of the guests, a burly six-footer, sidles up to the mother superior. “Can we come again, sister?” he asks, gruffly. She smiles her assent, and he continues. “I never heard silence before in all my life. And I never heard the birds singing, till today.”
Silf, Margaret. Compass Points: Meeting God Every Day at Every Turn (p. 212). Loyola Press. Kindle Edition.
Blessing
May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
May the clarity of light be yours,
May the fluency of the ocean be yours,
May the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
Wind work these words
Of love around you,
An invisible cloak
To mind your life.
O'Donohue, John. Benedictus: (Kindle Locations 382-389). Transworld. Kindle Edition.
Thoughts to ponder:
2 Corinthians 5:17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come:[a] The old has gone, the new is here!
Romans 12:2 Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.
Thresholds
WITHIN THE GRIP of winter, it is almost impossible to imagine the spring. The grey, perished landscape is shorn of colour. Only bleakness meets the eye; everything seems severe and edged. Winter is the oldest season; it has some quality of the absolute. Yet beneath the surface of winter, the miracle of spring is already in preparation; the cold is relenting; seeds are waking up. Colours are beginning to imagine how they will return. Then, imperceptibly, somewhere one bud opens and the symphony of renewal is no longer reversible. From the black heart of winter a miraculous, breathing plenitude of colour emerges.
The beauty of nature insists on taking its time. Everything is prepared. Nothing is rushed. The rhythm of emergence is a gradual, slow beat; always inching its way forward, change remains faithful to itself until the new unfolds in the full confidence of true arrival. Because nothing is abrupt, the beginning of spring nearly always catches us unawares. It is there before we see it; and then we can look nowhere without seeing it. Change arrives in nature when time has ripened. There are no jagged transitions or crude discontinuities. This accounts for the sure-ness with which one season succeeds another. It is as though they were moving forward in a rhythm set from within a continuum.
To change is one of the great dreams of every heart – to change the limitations, the sameness, the banality or the pain. So often we look back on our patterns of behaviour or on the kind of decisions we make repeatedly and yet which always fail to serve us well, and we aim for a new and more successful path or way of living. But change is difficult for us. We opt to continue the old pattern rather than risk the danger of difference. We are also often surprised by change that seems to arrive out of nowhere. We find ourselves crossing some new threshold we had never anticipated. Like spring secretly at work within the heart of winter, below the surface of our lives huge changes are in fermentation. We never suspect a thing. Then when the grip of some long-enduring winter mentality begins to loosen, we find ourselves vulnerable to a flourish of possibility and we are suddenly negotiating the challenge of a threshold.
O'Donohue, John. Benedictus: A Book Of Blessings (Kindle Locations 881-897). Transworld. Kindle Edition.
Whereas patience is the mother of expectation, it is expectation itself that brings new joy to our lives. Jesus not only made us look at our pains, but also beyond them. “You are sad now, but I shall see you again and your hearts will be full of joy.” A man or woman without hope in the future cannot live creatively in the present. The paradox of expectation indeed is that those who believe in tomorrow can better live today, that those who expect joy to come out of sadness can discover the beginnings of a new life in the center of the old, that those who look forward to the returning Lord can discover him already in their midst.
Henri Nouwen https://henrinouwen.org/meditations/your-hearts-will-be-full-of-joy/
Stepping Stones
……I see myself standing on the banks of a fast-flowing river. I know I must cross, but there is no bridge. Then a figure, a Christ-figure, comes to me carrying a large boulder, and places it in front of me, in the river, inviting me to step out onto it. Every day he brings another boulder, another stepping stone. Every day I move farther into the waters, balancing precariously on my fragile faith.
One day he is late. I turn around, mid-river, and only then do I see where the boulders are coming from. He is systematically de-constructing my cozy little cottage on the shore, in order to turn it into stepping stones for my onward journey. He is using my past to create my future. He is asking me to reach out with both hands—one to let go of all I thought I couldn’t live without, and one to reach toward everything I thought I could never attain.
Silf, Margaret. Compass Points: Meeting God Every Day at Every Turn (pp. 224). Loyola Press. Kindle Edition.
We must learn to live each day, each hour, yes, each minute as a new beginning, as a unique opportunity to make everything new. Imagine that we could live each moment as a moment pregnant with new life. Imagine that we could live each day as a day full of promises. Imagine that we could walk through the new year always listening to the voice saying to us: “I have a gift for you and can’t wait for you to see it!” Imagine.
Is it possible that our imagination can lead us to the truth of our lives? Yes, it can! The problem is that we allow our past, which becomes longer and longer each year, to say to us: “You know it all; you have seen it all, be realistic; the future will just be a repeat of the past. Try to survive it as best you can.” There are many cunning foxes jumping on our shoulders and whispering in our ears the great lie: “There is nothing new under the sun… don’t let yourself be fooled.”
When we listen to these foxes, they eventually prove themselves right: our new year, our new day, our new hour become flat, boring, dull, and without anything new. So what are we to do? First, we must send the foxes back to where they belong: in their foxholes. And then we must open our minds and our hearts to the voice that resounds through the valleys and hills of our life saying: “Let me show you where I live among my people. My name is ‘God-with-you.’ I will wipe all the tears from your eyes; there will be no more death, and no more mourning or sadness. The world of the past has gone” (Revelation 21:2–5).
Henri Nouwen https://henrinouwen.org/meditations/a-new-beginning/
One of the most radical demands for you and me is the discovery of our lives as a series of movements or passages. When we are born, we leave our mothers’ womb for the larger, brighter world of the family. It changes everything, and there is no going back. When we go to school, we leave our homes and families and move to a larger community of people where our lives are forever larger and more expansive. Later when our children are grown and they ask us for more space and freedom than we can offer, our lives may seem less meaningful. It all keeps changing. When we grow older, we retire or lose our jobs, and everything shifts again. It seems as though we are always passing from one phase to the next, gaining and losing someone, some place, something……… And every time there are losses there are choices to be made. You choose to live your losses as passages to anger, blame, hatred, depression, and resentment, or you choose to let these losses be passages to something new, something wider, and deeper. The question is not how to avoid loss and make it not happen, but how to choose it as a passage, as an exodus to greater life and freedom.
Henri Nouwen https://henrinouwen.org/meditations/passages-to-new-life/
For the time of necessary decision
The mind of time is hard to read.
We can never predict what it will bring,
Nor even from all that is already gone
Can we say what form it finally takes;
For time gathers its moments secretly.
Often we only know it’s time to change
When a force has built inside the heart
That leaves us uneasy as we are.
Perhaps the work we do has lost its soul
Or the love where we once belonged
Calls nothing alive in us any more.
We drift through this grey, increasing nowhere
Until we stand before a threshold we know
We have to cross to come alive once more.
May we have the courage to take the step
Into the unknown that beckons us;
Trust that a richer life awaits us there,
That we will lose nothing
But what has already died;
Feel the deeper knowing in us sure
Of all that is about to be born beyond
The pale frames where we stayed confined,
Not realizing how such vacant endurance
Was bleaching our soul’s desire.
O'Donohue, John. Benedictus: A Book Of Blessings (Kindle Locations 2239-2259).Transworld. Kindle Edition.
Will Tomorrow Ever Come?
I PHONE A FRIEND IN AUSTRALIA, HAVING FIRST carefully calculated the time difference, so as not to invade her slumber. We chat for a while, and then I find myself commenting on how good it has been to speak with a human being who has already arrived at “tomorrow.” If we should fear for our continuance, I suggest, it would always be possible to speak with an antipodean, and be reassured not only that tomorrow will surely come, but that indeed tomorrow has already come. The future lives and breathes, not in some ghostly incorporeal way, but in flesh and blood, mind and spirit. We laugh at the thought of such reassurance, given to us courtesy of the International Date Line, but underneath the laughter is a different kind of knowledge: Easter knowledge. What is it that makes us so sure that tomorrow will come—or, rather, that tomorrow is actually already here, a living reality, informing and shaping who we are, and are becoming? My conversation with Australia brings the answer to this question wonderfully into focus. What makes me so sure of tomorrow is that I know someone who is already living it. This isn’t someone I have merely heard about or bumped into in catechism or creed. It is someone even more real and present than my friend “down under.” I know, with Easter knowledge, the transforming power of his presence because I can see its effects, in myself and in others. I can even speak with him any time in prayer without having to check my watch before I call.
Silf, Margaret. Compass Points: Meeting God Every Day at Every Turn (pp. 209-210). Loyola Press. Kindle Edition.
Our next meeting will be 10.30am on Friday 23rd February at St Mary’s Church, Market Road, Plympton, PL7 1QW