by Christine Sine
Over the weekend someone shared this quote from St. Teresa of Avila with me: “Remember: if you want to make progress on the path and ascend to the places you have longed for, the important thing is not to think much but to love much, and so to do whatever best awakens you to love.” It resonated in my soul.
My theme for 2019 is “Let newness emerge” but I realize that the newness that emerges must be rooted in a deepening love relationship with God. Newness might be the new seedling growing, but love is the fertile soil in which it is planted.
What awakens us to love?
How do we grow into a deeper measure of the love of God?
As I look to the new year that is my prayer and my quest. The hatred and violence in our world seems to be growing. We don’t need more walls, more animosity to those who look different from us, or more self centeredness. We need more love. Love of self, love of neighbor, love of creation, and as an umbrella over it all – love of God.
Prayer is not about getting down on our knees to talk to God. Nor is it about praying for the needs of the world. It is about falling in love and staying in love with God as we converse with and interact with the One who fills every fibre of our being. One of my guides through this journey has been this prayer by Father Arrupe.
What awakens us to the love of God?
What awakens us to the love of God who formed us with loving care, transforms us with a gentle touch, sustains us with compassion and comfort? What awakens us to the love of God so that we crave that intimate place of communion with the lover of our souls, not just when we sit down in a place of retreat but moment by moment, every day in the ordinary routines and activities of life?
This is the question that I think is at the heart of the gospels. Jesus whole life is about teaching his disciples to love the God who is love. That is why James calls “love of God and love of neighbour” the royal law. That is why John, the son of thunder could become the apostle of love. That is why Jesus spent so much time drawing aside to quiet places to pray and why all the disciples longed to learn how to pray as Jesus prayed, not in a distant hands off relationship but in an intimate loving interaction that they saw permeate Jesus’ life and ministry.
How Do We Learn to Love?
Learning to love someone means spending time in their presence, becoming familiar with their voice, gazing into their face. It means loving to stand in awe of what they have made, touching, tasting and relishing their love expressed through such creativity as we see in the faces of those around us and in the wonder of creation. It means learning to love what they love.
To enter into a loving relationship with God means to desire what God loves – justice and mercy and compassion.
Love for God means that our hearts ache with the things that tear God’s heart apart – sin and disease, injustice and violence. As we deepen our love relationship with God and grow into the fullness of our experience of God’s love we are able to love others and to love God’s creation too. The outpouring of God’s love into the lives of others is I believe one of the most profound expressions of prayer that there can be.
An Exercise in Love
Heart shaped rocks
I love to collect heart shaped rocks and will often hold one in my hand while I reflect on the love of God.
Some are naturally shaped by the waves or wind. Others, like the ones in this photo have been shaped by human hands, but they are equally as precious images of the love of God for me.
Find something that is heart shaped. Hope it in your hand. Read the quote above several times. Ask yourself: Lord what do I need to do to be awakened more deeply to your love? Close your eyes and allow God to speak to you.
OR
if you don’t have something heart-shaped draw a heart on a piece of paper. Trace the heart several times with colored pencils or crayons. Read through the quote above several times. Ask yourself: Lord what do I need to do to be awakened more deeply to your love? Close your eyes and allow God to speak to you.
What awakens you to the love of God? How do you plan to grow into that love and express that love in the coming year?
Today’s poem, a beautiful one to reflect on as we draw to the close of the year, was written by Irish poet and author John O’Donohue who died in 2008. This poem is from my favorite of his books To Bless The Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings. Its beautiful poems and prayers provide a wonderful for contemplative reflection at all seasons of the day and year.
At The End Of The Year
As this year draws to its end,
We give thanks for the gifts it brought
And how they became inlaid within
Where neither time nor tide can touch them.
The days when the veil lifted
And the soul could see delight;
When a quiver caressed the heart
In the sheer exuberance of being here.
Surprises that came awake
In forgotten corners of old fields
Where expectation seemed to have quenched.
The slow, brooding times
When all was awkward
And the wave in the mind
Pierced every sore with salt.
The darkened days that stopped
The confidence of the dawn.
Days when beloved faces shone brighter
With light from beyond themselves;
And from the granite of some secret sorrow
A stream of buried tears loosened.
We bless this year for all we learned,
For all we loved and lost
And for the quiet way it brought us
Nearer to our invisible destination.
(c) John O’Donohue To Bless The Space Between
I love this Irish Christmas blessing that I first posted a couple of years ago and thought that it needed to be coupled with this wonderfully Irish Christmas song. Enjoy and continue to enjoy the wonder of the Christmas season.
by Christine Sine
A couple of weeks ago in my Advent post Light Emerges in the Darkness I included a prayer/poem that I wrote on a recent trip to Pennsylvania. That prayer and the photos I took from the plane on that trip continue to revolve in my mind to such an extend that over the last week I had some fun putting them into this short video reflection. I have been using it to help me focus as I think about and plan for the new year. I thought you might find it helpful too.
Enjoy!
Today’s Christmas poem which Maya Angelou first read at the 2005 White House tree-lighting ceremony, makes me very aware of how much we lack peace in our world. In some ways peace is an ideal, a seemingly unattainable goal, at least in the world as a whole. Yet for each of peace is attainable every day. This is the glad and hopeful season as Maya Angelou says.
Peace is like happiness. It’s an ideal. And yet it’s not. It’s attainable everyday. I can find peace for a moment or an hour somehow, somewhere. I can actually create peace. Maybe only for a moment. Maybe only for an hour. Somehow, somewhere. Maybe more?
We can create peace. For someone. For ourselves. Maybe only for a moment. Maybe for an hour. Somehow, somewhere. Let’s do that. If we all just do that. (Daily Kos)
So whether you are reading this in Advent or in Christmas, go out and create some peace today – for yourself, for your neighbor, for our world.
Amazing Peace: A Christmas Poem by Dr. Maya Angelou
Thunder rumbles in the mountain passes
And lightning rattles the eaves of our houses.
Flood waters await us in our avenues.
Snow falls upon snow, falls upon snow to avalanche
Over unprotected villages.
The sky slips low and grey and threatening.
We question ourselves.
What have we done to so affront nature?
We worry God.
Are you there? Are you there really?
Does the covenant you made with us still hold?
Into this climate of fear and apprehension, Christmas enters,
Streaming lights of joy, ringing bells of hope
And singing carols of forgiveness high up in the bright air.
The world is encouraged to come away from rancor,
Come the way of friendship.
It is the Glad Season.
Thunder ebbs to silence and lightning sleeps quietly in the corner.
Flood waters recede into memory.
Snow becomes a yielding cushion to aid us
As we make our way to higher ground.
Hope is born again in the faces of children
It rides on the shoulders of our aged as they walk into their sunsets.
Hope spreads around the earth. Brightening all things,
Even hate which crouches breeding in dark corridors.
In our joy, we think we hear a whisper.
At first it is too soft. Then only half heard.
We listen carefully as it gathers strength.
We hear a sweetness.
The word is Peace.
It is loud now. It is louder.
Louder than the explosion of bombs.
We tremble at the sound. We are thrilled by its presence.
It is what we have hungered for.
Not just the absence of war. But, true Peace.
A harmony of spirit, a comfort of courtesies.
Security for our beloveds and their beloveds.
We clap hands and welcome the Peace of Christmas.
We beckon this good season to wait a while with us.
We, Baptist and Buddhist, Methodist and Muslim, say come.
Peace.
Come and fill us and our world with your majesty.
We, the Jew and the Jainist, the Catholic and the Confucian,
Implore you, to stay a while with us.
So we may learn by your shimmering light
How to look beyond complexion and see community.
It is Christmas time, a halting of hate time.
On this platform of peace, we can create a language
To translate ourselves to ourselves and to each other.
At this Holy Instant, we celebrate the Birth of Jesus Christ
Into the great religions of the world.
We jubilate the precious advent of trust.
We shout with glorious tongues at the coming of hope.
All the earth’s tribes loosen their voices
To celebrate the promise of Peace.
We, Angels and Mortal’s, Believers and Non-Believers,
Look heavenward and speak the word aloud.
Peace. We look at our world and speak the word aloud.
Peace. We look at each other, then into ourselves
And we say without shyness or apology or hesitation.
Peace, My Brother.
Peace, My Sister.
Peace, My Soul.
― Maya Angelou (2005)
This beautiful poem has been made into a children’s book Amazing Peace: A Christmas Poem. I have not read it yet but it is on my list for next year.
And don’t forget as an Amazon Affiliate I do get a small amount if you purchase through this link)
Today’s poems are by African American theologian Howard Thurman (November 18, 1899 – April 10, 1981) an influential American author, philosopher, theologian, educator and civil rights leader. He was Dean of Chapel at Howard University and Boston University for more than two decades, wrote 21 books, and in 1944 Thurman cofounded San Francisco’s Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples, the first integrated, interfaith religious congregation in the United States. I am posting both because they are so powerful I could not choose between them. They are from the book The Mood of Christmas and Other Celebrations
“The Work of Christmas”
When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among people,
To make music in the heart.
in The Mood of Christmas & Other Celebrations (1985)
Christmas Is Waiting to be Born
Where refugees seek deliverance that never comes
And the heart consumes itself as if it would live,
Where children age before their time
And life wears down the edges of the mind,
Where the old man sits with mind grown cold,
While bones and sinew, blood and cell, go slowly down to death,
Where fear companions each day’s life,
And Perfect Love seems long delayed.
CHRISTMAS IS WAITING TO BE BORN:
In you, in me, in all mankind.
The Mood of Christmas & Other Celebrations (1985)
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by Lilly Lewin
I love that the season of Christmas really starts on December 25th and runs til Epiphany on January 6th when we celebrate the Light coming to the Gentiles and the arrival of the Magi. It gives us all extra time to consider this Light, the Prince of Peace who comes for all the world.
How are you receiving the Light so far this Christmas? If you are like me, you are still in recovery mode from family festivities and you need more space to reflect on Jesus and all the Incarnation actually means for yourself and our planet.
How are you receiving the Prince of Peace? How do you need to receive Him? Pause. Consider how you can receive his peace today.
Take a few minutes to breathe in the peace of Jesus before you read on. Picture Jesus placing a blanket of peace and protection on your shoulders, surrounding you in his love. What color is the blanket? What’s the texture like? How does this blanket make you feel? Breathe in his peace, breathe out any stress or fear you may be carrying in your body. This may take several deep breaths and several minutes to actually sink in. Receive the Prince of Peace.
What does it look like to bring Light and Peace to our broken world today?
Do you know what it really means to be a peacemaker in your neighborhood, in your city, your family, etc?
I know that Jesus says that peacemakers are blessed, but I’m not sure I really know how to live this out well in my everyday world. One of the people who is teaching me more about peacemaking and bringing peace to our world is Jon Huckins. Jon is the co-founder of the Global Immersion project. The mission of Global Immersion Project “is training people of faith to engage our divided world in restorative ways.” Jon lives in San Diego and crosses the border on a regular basis. He has built friendships with Border Agents, refugees and the people on the ground working in Mexico and the States. Jon leads teams to the border to learn more and listen to real people, to see and hear their stories, not just the sound bites on the news.
Today Jon posted this on facebook:
“As we celebrate the birth of a deliverer born in Bethlehem (Palestine) under the weight of violent occupation, I am grateful for my dear Palestinian friends who show us what peace looks like as they follow Jesus under occupation in Bethlehem today. We see you and, in you, we see Jesus.
As we celebrate the selfless courage of a mother, Mary, fleeing violence while seeking safety, hope and welcome, I am grateful for immigrant friends who teach me to trust in the liberating power of Jesus in ways I can hardly imagine. We see you and, in you, we see Jesus.
The Jesus story didn’t just happen. It is happening. It isn’t only a passive celebration of the past, it is an active participation in God’s (and our) future.
May we have the eyes to see Jesus born in and around us everyday. May our seeing disrupt our assumptions of who is “in” and who is “out,” uncover our false allegiances to any kingdom other than God’s and liberate us to live like the Jesus we talk about.”
That’s my prayer this Christmas and the New Year ahead. To have the eyes to see Jesus born in and around me everyday! I want to see Jesus in the people and places I go in my neighborhood. I want to have eyes to see and ears to hear what Jesus hears and see what Jesus sees, not be blind, and not just see what my bias and privilege sees.
I want to BE a peacemaker not just wish for peace! and I want live in the reality that everyone is welcome at the manger!
If you want to learn more about peacemaking, check out Mending the Divides: Creative Love in a Conflicted World by Jon Huckins and Jer Swigart
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