Sunday December 14: Silent But Sure

To Practice

1. Relating compassionately with our brothers and sisters in everyday life is often the greatest challenge to our spiritual lives. Over time, Centering Prayer creates a healthy inner separation from our reactions, allowing space to let go of them when they arise. The Welcoming Prayer – our “consent-on-the-go” – is a here-and-now way to become present and surrender our desire to change a situation. Using whichever practice works best to help you pause in Spirit, apply that practice to a concrete encounter during the day. Reflect on effects when you have time; journal on them if that is one of your practices. Consider: How does it make a difference when you go back to the same situation or remember the incident?

2. Listen to “O Thou That Tellest Good Tidings to Zion” from Handel’s Messiah (2:48 minutes). Allow it to speak to your inner core, your own personal Jerusalem. Then consider: How does this music affect you? Or share in the community forum your favorite music that refreshes your spirit when challenges arise.

3. Take some time to reflect upon a particular season of inner winter in your life. At what point did it turn into a new spring of insight, possibility, radical growth? How did this happen? How could you describe your life as a kind of Scripture of passages from dark to light, from confusion to clarity, from constricting assumptions to liberating openness?

If you wish, you may re-read the full email reflection here: https://mailchi.mp/coutreach/2025_word-of-the-week-dec14

Here is a song that refreshes my spirit – https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=WZ-Agbey040

All the blessings of the season, all the joy of this day, to all

 

Here is a song that inspires me and reminds me that God is REAL – no matter what.
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=N8wit0F4Ypw

Love and Light to all,
Pamela

I am ready to share the suggested practice #1 The last 6 months or more have been an intensive time where dreaming/liminal/awake times are one circular  thread, a continuous morphing from intense dreaming into liminal time of the  Welcome Prayer. Though I am not conscious of it I have spent an hour or more liminal time in the WP. When I am finally awake, I do not remember the details of dream. The dream exchange  is very real, not in details but in presence/Presence. For a brief minute, I feel the dream-unfolding thumping in my very being, but it is not be be remembered. What is important is my “feeling” evacuation! All my life I have been a collector of feelings, mine and others. I am living through a great sorting through my egoic collection. The dreams I remember point to my “now time”; I am going somewhere but not there, or, someone, usual male, is taking me on a side trip that I must see. Lately I am tolerating the side trip. ” The Welcome Prayer, our <consent on the go>- is a here-and-now way to become present and surrender our desire to change a situation” My more consoling dream is finding myself in a old situation. I am going back to a teaching position one week late at the start of a year. I encounter the principal who is rather inquisitive but not rushing me.

“The Advent mystery is the beginning of the end of all of us, that is not yet Christ.” Thomas Merton.

” Through silence, we prepare a heart that is ready, not for a distant God, but for the Christ within us, as us.”

 

2025 has been a particular season of inner winter. Now as Advent closes and hope arises again from loss, a new spring of insight awaits. I must sit a while longer in this liminal space, trusting radical growth awaits. Come, Lord Jesus. <3 linda

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