prayer.

Friday, February 18th, 2022

From the Flourish Foundation:

‘With this shift in feeling, we soften the illusory crust of independence and begin to sense a natural belonging with all of life—interdependence.    From this place of infinite belonging a deeper sense of care awakens and inspires us to consider our role in the co-creation of reality.  More simply, we may choose clothes that support humane working conditions, foods that replenish the planet, a circular economy, and love toward those of a different race, country, or political party.’

Patience. Presence. Prayer. Moab. And India.

The 21st century, the United States of America, capitalism, our churches and our political parties, and all the rest are passing away. We might recall the Buddhist heart sutra “Gone, gone, entirely gone” when we watch old movies—even celebrities and stars die. We can take this as a morbid lesson, or we can receive it as the truth ahead of time, so we’re not surprised, disappointed, and angry when it happens in our generation. 

In times like these, our prayer may need to be expressive and embodied, visceral and vocal. How else can we pray with our immense anger and grief? How else can we pray about ecocide, about the death that humanity is unleashing upon Mother Earth and upon ourselves? How else can we break through our inertia and despair, so that we don’t shut down and go numb? – Fr. Richard Rohr

Walk. And pray. Contemplation.

Terry Tempest Williams

Who have we become? “This is a violation against ever woman and life-giver,” says Regina Lopez-Whiteskunk

A prehistoric petroglyph panel near Moab was defaced with the words ‘White Power’

The Bureau of Land Mangement is offering a $10,000 reward for relevant information about those who committed the vandalism

Salk Lake Tribune

Known as the Birthing Rock, the boulder features petroglyphs on all four of its accessible sides that date from the Archaic period to more modern Ute inscriptions, including dozens of ancestral Puebloan-era images, including a woman giving birth.

Sometime late Monday night or early Tuesday, however, vandals descended on the roadside rock and scratched it with obscenities, a crude penis and the words “white power” directly over the top of two anthropomorphic figures.

The Bureau of Land Management is offering a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible for the vandalism.

https://www.sltrib.com/news/environment/2021/04/28/prehistoric-petroglyph/801-237-2900/

Al Jazeera English

‘India’s devastating second wave was fuelled by a series of crowded events, including mass rallies addressed by PM Narendra Modi, religious holidays and pilgrimages on the Ganges river — in pictures.’

India opened too quickly, no masks, large gatherings, few vaccinations…by choice.

331 (M) people in the U.S. Masks eased outside. Be wise. Distance. Small groups. Oregon is surging and variants are circulating. And please. Read the science. Vaccinate. -dayle

“They had no idea the virus could spread this fast.”

Fear and Loss: Inside India’s Coronavirus Crisis

The Dailey

New York Times

Jeffrey Gettleman, The South Asia bureau chief for The New York Times, based in Delhi.

‘…under her sky.’

Washington National Cathedral is hosting a new art exhibit showcasing thousands of paper doves suspended from the Cathedral’s vaulted, 100-foot-high ceiling through May 2021. The “Les Colombes” exhibit is by German artist Michael Pendry, who has created similar works at Cathedrals around the world, and symbolizes the Biblical theme of hope and optimism heading into the new year after a very challenging 2020.

Every moment and every event of every woman’s life on earth plants something in her soul. -Thomas Merton [changes to gender, mine.]

More from Merton:

Prayer is freedom and affirmation growing out of nothingness into love. It is the elevation of our limited freedom into the infinite freedom of the divine spirit and of the divine love. Prayer is an emergence into this area of infinite freedom.

~

Keep your eyes clean your ears quiet and your mind serene. Breathe Gaia’s air. Work, if you can, under her sky.

Dear Friends,

I’ve always called myself a lover of language and of the limits of language. But this week I take no pleasure in how tongue-tied I feel, standing before the disarray and fragility of our life together. It’s hard to put words out into the world right now for so many reasons. That they’re not big enough. That they never tell the whole truth. That we live in a moment so on edge and reactive that someone will take offense, or be wounded by my words, and that feels harder than ever before to risk and to bear.

There is an insanity to our life together right now that is directly related to the tenuous hold on sanity so many of us feel after surviving this past year.  

That does not justify hatred or violence.

It does mean that we’re called to be as gentle with ourselves and others as we can possibly, reasonably muster. That sounds like such a modest contribution to the tumult all around and on our screens, but it is not.

I keep coming back in memory, and feeling in my body, to my experience of election night 2020. I observed it as someone who sees our political life together as a reflection of the human condition in all its complexity, contradiction, and mess. But I was also watching as a person who grew up in one of the “reddest” states, who now lives in one of the “bluest.” I felt a panicked sadness — this has remained my primary emotion through everything that has followed — as the cameras zoomed in and out on those maps of our country.

I saw visually what I know in life as it is lived: those maps marked up with definitive reds and blues don’t tell the truth of our alienation and its unsustainable intimacy. The fractures that actually define our nation right now do not run state to state or county to county, but neighborhood to neighborhood, family to family. They run through our dreams for our children on every side. They run through our hearts, and through our lives.

I am so grateful to have received, as I was struggling to write this, an email from Whitney Kimball Coe of the Rural Assembly and the Center for Rural Strategies. There is a whole epic story of our time in what is being gathered and created in the world she’s part of. It is in no way described or contained in a red-blue demographic lens of the “urban-rural divide.” She gave me permission to share this part of her email with you:

“I’m at home nursing my youngest, Susannah, who had a scary fall on Monday night and is now recuperating from surgery. She’s going to be fine, but my goodness, 2021 came in hard. Stream of consciousness moment:You know, our hospital experience put us directly in the path of so many wonderful East Tennesseans. Nurses and technicians and doctors, the other parents waiting in the ER, the parking attendant, the security guard. I’m sure many of them didn’t vote as I did in the last election and probably believe the events of Jan 6 were mere protests, but they responded to our trauma with their full humanity. I’d forgotten what it feels like to really see people beyond their tribe/ideology. It broke something open in me. I’ve been living in a castle of isolation these many months and it’s rotted and blotted my insides. I’m aware of contempt, anger, and maybe even paranoia coursing through my veins, and I wonder if that’s just a snippet of where we are as a nation.

Why is our righteous indignation and disgust so much easier to flame than our compassion?

It makes me realize that there is no substitute for coming into the presence of one another. No meme nor Twitter post nor op-ed nor breaking news nor TED talk can soften and strengthen our hearts like actually tending to one another. We don’t have to ignore/excuse the darkness we all carry, but we have to keep showing up so we don’t lose ourselves to bitterness.”

We cannot conjure up something so aspirational as “unity” by wishing it, and we are in fact impoverished when it comes to “common ground” between our societal trenches. 

But if I’ve heard one thing most insistently, with an infinite variety of circumstance and struggle, from absolutely every beautiful and wise human I’ve ever met, it is this: We are creatures made, again and again, by what would break us. Yet only if we open to the fullness of the reality of what goes wrong for us, and walk ourselves with and through it, are we able to integrate it into a new kind of wholeness on the other side.

Our collective need for a new kind of wholeness might be the only aspiration we can share across all of our chasms right now.

Longings, too, can be common ground. A shared desire not to be lost to bitterness. A clear-eyed commitment that what divides us now does not have to define what can become possible between us. Questions, honestly asked, about how to make that real.

-Krista

[Krista Tippett is a Peabody Award-winning broadcaster, a National Humanities Medalist, a New York Times bestselling author, and founder of On Being.]

Krista Tippett

Pre-election prayer.

Blessings from the Native American/Indigenous Ministries

of the Episcopal Church

“Come near now, saints of every tribe and clan, come closer, drawn by the flame of our prayers, called by the hearts of your family still here on Earth. You know how much we need you. You know how much these coming days mean to us. Come down from all four sacred directions, elders of every nation, come walking on the air, with your shining faces set toward the shadows, casting hope with every glance, reminding us of your presence, showing us the power of what we pray. Come near to us, you host of goodness and mercy, surround us with your love, and hold us up as we walk the blessing way, the path the Spirit has set before us, the tomorrow that waits for us to discover. Lift us up to ride your wings, that we may raise the banner of light, inviting all of your relatives to sing the hymn of hope, to begin a new dance that will not end, to be like you: unafraid and forever believing.”

The Rt. Rev. Steven Charleston

Pray for peace.

Pregare.

Pope Francis:

‘Let us pray together for doctors, hospital staff, and volunteers who are giving their own lives to save others. And for civil leaders, for those who have to make decisions at this time. All these people are the pillars defending us in this crisis.’

In Italy, one priest asks for photos from his parishioners to place them in his sanctuary as he prays for them, everyone, during this time of pandemic.

From Hailey, Idaho’s Rev. Lea Colvill: ‘This Italian priest demonstrates how we see with our hearts.’

Father Richard Rohr, at the Center for Action & Contemplation in New Mexico:

‘As we grow in the spiritual life, our life will become increasingly centered. Only a few things will really matter. Because of the coronavirus outbreak, I see a lot of people right now thinking this way. There’s a sense that we’re all in this together—every continent, country, class, religion, race, age, or gender. We’re all subject to this crisis. Suffering has an ability to pull you into oneness.’

But in these dancing tears,

what is often withheld can be found:

our strength.

Rilke

Everything Is Holy Now

‘I open myself to this time and place made holy by my contemplation. I open my heart, my mind and my very being to be present to that vast and amazing cosmic story which is still being told…a conclusion that is not yet known but continues to reveal itself in all of its creation.

I contemplate this Living Presence, and I view this vast arc of goodness, truth and beauty that my eyes behold. My very being is filled with wonder and awe of Its glory.

I am aware of that life…of that mind which was in the mind of Jesus the Christ…I am aware that that life is my life and my mind now, and from this place, I speak my word. The word that I speak is peace. The peace that heals restores and reconciles my life to all life. The peace that diffuses any perception of illusion of separation from myself or anyone or anything. I allow myself to be grounded in the experience of this peace, this beauty, this goodnesss that avails itself to each of us now.

I am aware that we are all a center of divine consciousness in this vast whole. I know that each of us is family to our home…our mother, the Earth. I know this Presence was there at the beginning of all things. It is the Presence that sustains all things. It is the Presence that makes all things news. It is the Christ consciousness that incarnates in all creation.

This presence…the Christ consciousness…calls forth in each of us that which is good and noble. It is this Presence that invites each of us to co-create a world that is just, equitable and sustainable of all life…a world that works for all creation.

And so even now, as light gives way to darkness, I know that once again light is born from darkness. And so I am filled with gratefulness for the light that gives us warmth, that guide us and renews us. Naming it good, I call it forth by saying may it be so.’

~Ninoska Duenas

“A great American.”

Dorothy Day died Nov 29 1980. When she was a child in Chicago, Dorothy went to visit her friend Katheryn Barrett in a neighboring tenement apartment. Bursting into the kitchen she found Katheryn’s mother kneeling on the floor saying her prayers.

Day writes, “I felt a warm burst of love toward Mrs. Barrett that I have never forgotten, a feeling of gratitude and happiness that still warms my heart when I remember her. …

One pauses to consider that behind every great saint there are undoubtedly many other anonymous figures like Mrs. Barrett, who could never conceive the influence of their simple witness.

Today Day’s cause for canonization is in process. Pope Francis cited her as one of 4 “great Americans.” [Robert Elsberg, publisher, Orbis Books]

Dorothy Day:

Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed so easily.

Supreme Blessedness

In the end we will hear what we are: 

The orchard or the road leading past.

-Rilke

“Prayer is a perspective from which to behold, from which to respond to, the challenges we face. (Wo)man in prayer does not seek to impose personal life upon God; (s)he seeks to impose God’s will and mercy upon self. Prayer is necessary to make us aware of our failures, backsliding, transgressions, sins.

To pray is to open a door, where both God and soul may enter. Prayer is arrival, for Him and for us. To pray is to overcome distance, to shatter screens, to render obliquities straight, to heal the break between God and world.

A dreadful oblivion prevails in the world. The world has forgotten what it means to be human. The gap is widening, the abyss is within the self.”

-Abraham Joshua Heschel

Beatitudes of Spirit

“Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

-Gospel of St. Matthew 5:3-10

Communal prayer.

“Bless the leaders of the our land, that we may be a people at peace among ourselves and a blessing to other nations of the earth.

To all in administrative authority…Cabinet, Governors, Mayors (particularly, and currently, our Senators), grant wisdom and grace in the exercise of duties.

Give courage, wisdom, and foresight to provide for the needs of all our people, and to fulfill our obligations in the community of nations.

To the officers of our Courts give understanding and integrity, that human rights may be safeguarded and justice served.

-The Book of Common Prayer [2016], p. 733.

Vulnerable communication.

‘You and I should form the habit of taking definite time each day to pray for peace with justice, for there is not peace possible without justice. […] We should not only pray, we should act, each contributing the best they have to the common purpose, each willing to make any sacrifice necessary…for there can be no individual self-preservation without the preservation of all.’

-Ernest Holmes

︶⁀°• •° ⁀︶

In this current cultural climate and in my new position as a social justice minister, I’ve found myself continually pondering what it is that motivates us to take a stand for the rights of others. How do we do this ethically and not paternalistically? I’m discovering that my spiritual path deepens greatly when I’m connecting my own identity to the identity of the whole, realizing that who I am extends far beyond the cones of this ego self. I am the Oneness that Holmes spoke of above: Self-preservation does not exist without the preservation of all. The wellness and dignity of the whole is an inextricable truth of Oneness.

Taking action on this belief can be difficult because to be a presence for healing and equity, we must become aware of what needs to heal in us and the unconscious ways we may be perpetuating inequity without meaning to.

There are many ways in which I have been sheltered from the inequities of the world because I have grow up in a society that unconsciously perpetuates systems that benefit some to the detriment of others. In other ways, as a person of color, I have experienced what race – and ethnicity – based inequity feels like.

To be in a place where I am genuinely present to creating a world of peace and prosperity for all means that I also am invited to be in a place where I get to explore my own privileges and inequities. I get to be in conversation with people who also want to heal and be agents of helping. These conversations can be uncomfortable and painful, but they are also medicine.

I think as we strive to create a world that works for all, we are being offered an invitation to heal and to be medicine in this world through vulnerable communication with folks who have different experiences than we do.

-Re. Masando Hiraoka

Albuquerque Center for Spiritual Living in New Mexico

A prayer for today.

‘Infinite Spirit within me, Gaia, cause me to think and act kindly; constrain my mind to gentleness and peace; guide my thoughts into loving kindness and eternal forgivingness; and cause me in all my ways to follow the path of truth and justice. I judge no person and am judged by none. It is my sincere desire that everything I do or say or think will come into harmony with universal truth and justice. I judge no person and am judged by none. It is my sincere desire that everything I do or say or think will come into harmony with universal truth and peace, with love and joy. Consciously I let go of everything that is unkind and seek to so enter into communion with the Eternal Spirit that I shall reflect to my environment and manifest in all that I do the spirit of kindness, of justice, and of compassion.’

Inspire.

Let’s hold all others in our hearts. And pray. ♥

Standing.