At the end of myself let me find You.
At the end of myself let me be found.
Show me what love is.
Amen
Tag Archive: prayer
I am on the 5.08pm train to the city – dusk sees the city lights hang suspended against a purple-grey backdrop of condolence. I go into this space with high hopes and low expectations I think, but I hope I see love. I hope I see love poured out. It can be so hard to find safe spaces where you feel accepted, welcome, safe to express all of who you are. I hope there is a sense of welcome for everyone who comes tonight… including me!
Somewhere, over the rainbow, way up high
There’s a land that I heard of once in a lullaby
Somewhere, over the rainbow, skies are blue
And the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true
Someday I’ll wish upon a star
And wake up where the clouds are far behind me
Where troubles melt like lemon drops
Away above the chimney tops
That’s where you’ll find me
Somewhere over the rainbow, bluebirds fly
Birds fly over the rainbow
Why then, oh why can’t I?
…I have that moment we all have. Should I come here? Am I intruding on a private grief I have no right to?
I find a friend I know on the edge of the crowd.
“Thanks for coming.” she says.
“It’s important. I’m sorry it took something like this to bring us together”. I answer
It only needs to matter to one person. It’s not really about how it matters to me. For all those times you felt alone, you felt sad, you felt despair – can my standing with you now make up for those times? No… but it doesn’t follow that it’s insignificant now.
“May we be inspired to live differently because of our tears”
– Simon Holt
Forty-nine people have died and fifty-three others have been injured in the latest mass shooting in the US… plenty of Muslims and Christians are praying and acting in solidarity and support – these issues are engaged globally more and more. Born, raised, educated, armed in the US… can you call it an Islamist attack? SOme of my grief is with the perpetrator who must have been desperate indeed to feel belonging somewhere. But it’s the stupid idiot pastor that’s quoted as saying: “I woke up to a world with 50 less homosexuals in it and I was glad” that will be what goes viral, spreading hate and fear and violence in its wake. It’s not the the good news that is shared so often as the bad.We have a conscious choice about what we’re spreading but it seems something used more for evil than for good… what of courage and encouraging? hope and joy? We pray for those weighed down by grief – today and “all the days before”
God to whom I am but a wrinkle in time
Be a light for me when all other lights go out
Be love for me when all other loved seems unsecured
Can it not be enough to be known by You?
Called by You?
Loved by You?
Give me Your perspective that sees and weighs
what is truly important
I have no control here.
No plan.
Help me trust to Your unfolding.
What will You make?
Give me curiosity, give me wonder, give me You
so that I might never feel alone.
Talitha Fraser
The symposium ran 26-28 May 2016 – these are some notes from a few session of the 26th.
Creation Spirituality and The Problem of Natural Evil
Revd Dr Stephen Ames
This ‘problem’ of natural evil e.g. tsunamis, earthquakes, genetic disorders – how do we include this in liturgy and felt experience of God. What appears to be divine inaction, in the face of evil.
- God intervening – rational or irrational?
- Is the way the universe ‘is’, different from what you’d expect God to create?
God gave things causal power.
Good in themselves, able to bring out good in others.
Creation creates creation.
Creation came from God’s pure thought.
Can’t evaluate that. Have to go and investigate it 
using senses and rationality (without prejudice).
Maximises co-creation
“Better” type of creation (than inert or mechanical)
What purpose in mind of Creation?
“…since the carrying out of government is for the sake of bringing the governed to their perfection, that form of government will be better which communicates a higher perfection to the governed” (Aquinas, ST 1a, article 6, 6th point)
Scientific, moral and ethical problems.
- dead end universe
- creative Creation process, not just an end state, must be subject to God’s goodness >morally justified. Means must justify the ends. It must be shown there was no other way for God to create such a ‘good’ world, yet with reduced suffering and death.
- have dignity of being causes rather than the indignity of not being causes
- are not only good in themselves but also the cause of good in others
- by being co-creators bring new things into existence, including living things, including intelligent life, and especially persons.
Testimony of Jesus re God e.g. Prodigal Son.
reckless and loving vs. reckless and cruel. Giving all things created power and “dominion” (freedom to use it). Limit, overcome, transform – Jesus submits to violence (human dominion) and suffers with it… not a contradiction of what God has created “good”.
Praying in the Anthropocene
Dr Jan Morgan and Dr Graeme Garrett
“Triune Lord, wondrous community of infinite love, teach us to contemplate you in the beauty of the universe, for all things speak of you.”
Friedrich, Caspar David (1774 – 1840), Deutscher Maler der Romantik; “Der Mönch am Meer”; Foto: Jörg P. Anders;
Is God more real in the monastery or untamed waterlands?
- large world
- operates in unity
- man in his place
- God doesn’t want to be God without this wild uncontrollable environment
- church can’t bring about this separation
- live a bi-une faith “Maker of heaven and earth”
The city provides for my wants and needs (without my thinking about it) lights, food, fuel… everything comes out of creation. Church has also sheltered me from Creation. How can I responsibly connect with the world as God’s creation?
John Lewis Cretier – French Catholic theologian, call and response. Life filled with invitations. Traces back to God calling into “being”, calls come from all the beings that share the world with us – Visible Voice.
Augustine’s Confessions…
And how shall I call upon my God, my God and Lord, since, when I call for Him, I shall be calling Him to myself? and what room is there within me, whither my God can come into me? whither can God come into me, God who made heaven and earth? is there, indeed, O Lord my God, aught in me that can contain Thee? do then heaven and earth, which Thou hast made, and wherein Thou hast made me, contain Thee? or, because nothing which exists could exist without Thee, doth therefore whatever exists contain Thee? Since, then, I too exist, why do I seek that Thou shouldest enter into me, who were not, wert Thou not in me? Why?
Burning bush speaks to Moses, whirlwind speaks to Job, Paul on the road to Damascus – light.
Suggestions for prayer practice can be found on the Carmelite Library blog.
PRAYER OF SAINT CATHERINE OF SIENA (used at our house chat tonight)
In your nature, eternal Godhead, I shall come to know my nature. And what is my nature, boundless love? It is fire, because you are nothing but a fire of love. And you have given humankind a share in this nature, for by the fire of love you created us. And so with all other people and every created thing; you made them out of love. O ungrateful people! What nature has your God given you? His very own nature! Are you not ashamed to cut yourself off from such a noble thing through the guilt of deadly sin? O eternal Trinity, my sweet love! You, light, give us light. You, wisdom, give us wisdom. You, supreme strength, strengthen us. Today, eternal God, let our cloud be dissipated so that we may perfectly know and follow your Truth in truth, with a free and simple heart. God, come to our assistance! Lord, make haste to help us! Amen.
O Spirit Come…
Come with Your transforming power. Breathe upon and into my thoughts and actions this day. Let my work be a labour of love. May those who come into contact with me feel sheltered and cared for . May I do or say some piece of goodness that will help others feel affirmed and supported. Let Your wind and fire move me into the places where I am needed. Let me become Your breath so that I may assist You in breathing new life into places that are stale and unfruitful. Make me forceful and gentle, powerful and humble. O Spirit, come.
an excerpt from 7 Sacred Pauses (p.84)
photo credit: Johan Bergström-Allen, http://www.carmelite.org/
the gold loses its lustre
candlelight yields
a warm reflection
but these are
sacred and ordinary things
fabric, candleholders, cross
they aren’t imbued with any
special strength of their own
how then shall I love You?
the dust motes suspended
in light from the window
they are golden too
and the fine
sunlit hairs of my arms
they are golden too
let me love You on
the ordinary and extraordinary days
let me love You in
ordinary and extraordinary ways
let me love You
Talitha Fraser
Camping for Easter in the Brisbane Ranges and I have brought along Cheryl Lawrie’s beautiful Pocket Liturgies for reflection…
Gethsemane – A Meditation
The night is always our undoing.
All you knew to be certain becomes unknown.
All you knew to be right and true and good is tested against the shadows and whispers of loneliness and fear.
It comes up wanting.
How did it seem, just hours ago, in the company of friends and a little food and wine, that there was nothing the world could throw at you that you couldn’t overcome?
You know otherwise now.
The daylight reminders that life surrounds you, without thought, just simply existing, have gone.
The hum of a song, the overheard conversation, the sudden shock of sunlight caught through the corner of an eye – have drained from the air. It waits, empty, ready to be filled by a lurking tangle of powers and forces beyond our knowing.
How can the world sleep?
And in the middle of this night, all words of logic and good theology, articulated with certainty and clarity just yesterday, collapse and crumble, as you grasp for them, desperately, to make sense of what will come tomorrow.
But there is no sense to be made of this, at least none that holds up to the rigour of testing in the cold, dark garden of night.
You try to pray to the God you knew yesterday.
Every noise becomes sharper, has a meaning beyond itself. That footstep must belong to an intruder, or an army. A voice calling is that of an accuser, a coin falling will be the herald of betrayal. A branch snapping is an echo of a soul breaking.
Any way but this one, God.
The shadows reach out, tempting, and for a moment it seems easier to succumb, to walk into all they may hold – terror, of course, but certain terror, of your own making.
But that’s not the way of this night.
You wait as the world sleeps around you.
Loneliness is your only companion,
and fear is that which knows you best.
[p.70, Hold This Space Pocket Liturgies by Cheryl Lawrie]
PRAYER
[p.31]
Lord Jesus, now that beneath those world-forces you have become truly and physically everything for me, everything about me, I shall gather into a single prayer both my delight in what I have and my thirst for what I lack; and following the lead of your great servant I shall repeat those enflamed words in which, I firmly believe, the christianity of tomorrow will find its increasingly clear portrayal:
‘Lord, lock me up in the deepest depths of your heart; and then, holding me there, burn me, purify me, set me on fire, sublimate me, until I become utterly what you would have me be, through the utter annihilation of my ego.’
[p.33]
Glorious Lord Christ: the divine influence secretly diffused and active in the depths of matter, and the dazzling centre where all the innumerable fibres of the manifold meet; power as implacable as the world and as warm as life; you whose forehead is of the whiteness of snow, whose eyes are of fire, and whose feet are brighter than molten gold; you whose hands imprison the stars; you who are the first and the last, the living and the dead and the risen again; you who gather into your exuberant unity every beauty, every affinity, every energy, every mode of existence; it is you to whom my being cried out with a desire as vast as the universe, ‘In truth you are my Lord and my God’.
‘Lord, lock me up within you’: yes indeed I believe – and this belief is so strong that it has become one of the supports of my inner life.
[p.34]
This is the criterion by which I can judge at each moment how far I have progressed within you. When all the things around me, while preserving their own individual contours, their own special savours, nevertheless appear to me as animated by a single secret spirit and therefore as diffused and intermingled within a single element, infinitely close, infinitely remote; and when locked within the jealous intimacy of a divine sanctuary, I yet feel myself to be wandering at large in the empyrean of all created being: then I shall know that I am approaching that central point where the heart of the world is caught in the descending radiance of the heart of God.
***
Through a marvellous combination of your divine magnetism with the charm and the inadequacy of creatures, with their sweetness and their malice, their disappointing weakness and their terrifying power, do you fill my heart alternately with exaltation and distaste; teach it the true meaning of purity: not a debilitating separation from all created reality but an impulse carrying one through all forms of created beauty; show it the true nature of charity: not a sterile fear of doing wrong but a vigorous determination that all of us together shall break open the doors of life; and give it finally – give it above all – through an ever-increasing awareness of your omnipresence, a blessed desire to go on advancing, discovering, fashioning and experiencing the world so as to penetrate ever further and further into yourself.
[p.35]
It is to your body in this its fullest extension – that is, to the world become through your power and my faith the glorious living crucible in which everything melts away in order to be born anew; it is to this that I dedicate myself with all the resources which your creative magnetism has brought forth in me: with the all too feeble resources of my scientific knowledge, with my religious vows, with my priesthood, and (most dear to me) with my deepest human convictions. It is in this dedication, Lord Jesus, I desire to live, in this I desire to die.
I woke at 5am today, I am trying not to fight that but listen in my body or for You.
I rise and go out to the garden and read Seven Sacred Pauses by the light of my phone.
I will keep vigil with You. Quiet and still. Peaceful… and still a blue-beat of JOY from the soccer pitch…
I come back in passing Hawo – she has washed in purifying preparation for her own morning prayers on the mat in the lounge facing Mecca. It occurs to me that, perhaps by the time Hawo has prayed, Maria and her son will rise to say their morning Catholic prayers together before the icons on her dressing table… Bron working, a vigil of her own through the night, healing and helping.
We are a prayerful house. Not together, but prayerful seeking to talk with You and to listen.
Let us listen, and speak and keep watch, all the hours of the day.
Amen
itellyouarise 