Sunday March 3: Seeing Clear-Eyed

To Practice

• Pray these passages again in the manner of Lectio Divina, speaking them out loud to engage your senses and affirm them in your being.  What speaks to your journey now?
• Watch this short video from Rose Meyler, “Learning to Understand the Human Condition,” about one minute long. The “Voices of Grace and Gratitude” series is being highlighted on the website homepage for 2024 in celebration of Contemplative Outreach’s 40th anniversary.
• Practice “standing under” a situation or person with humility, letting it land in a new place in you. How can you open and receive it in a new way? The Welcoming Prayer practice may be helpful with any triggered sensations or resistances. Remember, there is no need for agreement, just acceptance of what is.
• This Friday begins the United in Prayer Day vigil via Zoom, March 8-9. The schedule has now been posted here. No registration is necessary. Pray with the world, for the world.

If you wish, you may re-read the full email reflection here: https://mailchi.mp/coutreach/word-of-the-week-march3

I’m reacting  to the Wendell Berry passage:

To reach out to someone despite his grandiosity and meanness, despite his having wiped out a woodland

Yes – the man is broken and at  bottom, clinging to the illusion that it’s ok when he knows it’s not.

I could reach out knowing that he could do no harm.  No more woodlands to bulldoze.

But there are those also with grandiosity and meanness who are not broken.   Who have many woodlands to devour.

“…there is no need for agreement, just acceptance of what is.”  I’ve been learning this,  over and over, since I was a novice….and that’s many decades now!   This acceptance is really and simply surrender.

1)We have a God who loves us unconditionally,  and if that God has either willed, or permitted, a situation,  then my surrender is to say “yes”,  not necessarily in agreement,  but in acceptance.

2) “Change the direction you’re looking in for happiness”  (Thomas Keating)…does my true happiness really depend on this situation being the way I want it to be,  even the way it perhaps should be?

3) The letting-go of the Welcoming Prayer is a development of the letting go I experience in Centering Prayer.

4) In surrendering,  I may discover that I really didn’t see all the angles and aspects of the situation or the inner struggles of the people involved.

My surrender reminds me, over and over again, that there is but one God….and it’s not me.

So beautifully articulated, Marlene.  Thank you for your being. – Pamela

I am “walking a mile in another’s shoes”, committing my intention and attention to a loved one’s health journey. I am humbled by the grace God has bestowed on us both, through scares and setbacks, victories small and large. I have been willing to take it in and pray willingness to continue. <3 linda

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