Sunday June 11: The Sacred Pilgrimage of Each Day

To Practice

• Reread these passages aloud in the prayerful manner of Lectio Divina, sensing and feeling them in your whole being. What phrase arises as an intention to carry with you and practice this week? Or perhaps you may wish to choose one from last week’s list of interpreted commandments?
• Each day, set an intention for yourself. Pray for help and guidance. Nonjudgmentally notice what happens and what you learn. No success or failure, just becoming.

If you wish to re-read this week’s reflection, you may do so here: https://mailchi.mp/coutreach/word-of-the-week-june11

Intentions: I have started facilitating a contemplative writing group. Each week, I offer the participants a “writing prompt”: a poem, a story, a short text. The prompt is meant to evoke a thought, memory, idea that then becomes a written piece. Prompts can uncover surprises, challenges, new depths. Since I started this group, everything I see and experience and read has become a potential prompt. Not only a prompt for the group, but an everyday prompt that invites me to see the sacred everywhere, and often write about it. A surprising and often delightful (sometimes unnerving) development.

Unexpectedly, on Sunday, the reading about setting an intention for the day hit me like a ton of bricks. It was clear as a bell Monday what my intention needed to be. Yesterday, yes, I knew I was called to hold my tongue….and be conscious of why I interrupt people so much. It’s my exaggerated need for connection (affection ).  again, this morning:I hear: “curb your greediness for experience. Cull all the opportunities for engaging the world so as to maintain a spacious soul.”All my intentions this week have to do with lifelong challenges….and humiliating failures.

Even if  I fail miserably, I am trying my best. These intentions landing on me are like messages from the beyond. Pete Seegers’s lyrics sound in my  ears:  Because I love you, I’ll give it one more try…

God used my sewing machine and a quilt project to allow me to see I can become greatly frustrated while remaining calm. Can one love theoretically inanimate objects? Yes, if one believes the Christ energy permeates all molecules. The quilt is in the process of becoming God’s love to someone. I am in the process of becoming the calm center amidst life’s storms. Thank You, Abba. <3 linda

thank you, Linda. I so appreciate your perspective. Kathy/Kathleen

Somewhere this year INCARNATION has moved from being just a word,  INTO A LIVING PRESENCE where God is swooping us all into collective heart. Further in this  Visio Divina engagement,  I became aware that life can be lived in rectangle or square kinds of segments.  Peering intently into  the earthy left rectangle I saw many faces, some in a collective gathering, some just individuals, then a Butterfly over several. The segment to the right the SPIRIT breathing over the chaos (Genesis 1) into the segment on the left. The flowing blue separating segments, the glue of the INCARNATION, the blue that exudes serenity, intentionality,  a calming balm, much more that a window  into God’s heart. With each breath I am in God’s heart – we are all in God’s heart, each a living  flame,  clusters of living flames are glued together.

 

[Author]

Posts