07/02/07 week of Epiphany 5
[Please remember this is a sort of "menu" from which to select. No one has to pray it all]
If you would like these meditations to come directly to your in box, please click here:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/KnitternunMeditation/
Collect
Set us free, O God, from the bondage of our sins, and give us the liberty of that abundant life which you have made known to us in your Son our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
++++++++++
Today's Scripture http://www.satucket.com/lectionary/
Psalm119:97-120; Psalm 81, 82; Isa. 59:15b-21; 2 Tim. 1:15-2:13; Mark 10:1-16
++++++++++
From Forward Day by Day: http://www.forwardmovement.org/todaysreading.cfm
2 Timothy 1:15-2:13. But the word of God is not fettered.
I open an angry email: "Do you think you know better than God?" the writer wants to know. "What gives you the right to interpret God's word?"
Ah, me. I think hard of a way to write back in a manner that is clear and respectful. To explain that everyone who has ever read scripture has interpreted it--anyone who has ever translated it, everyone who has studied it. The culture from which we come and in which we live has its say in everything we think and do. I am not a first--century Christian, a medieval one, a Victorian one.
The layers of human culture enrich the word of God. It is ancient and ever new, speaks to every age in its own tongue. God may not change, but people certainly do, instructed and called to new life through the centuries by ancient voices doing, in their day, what we must do in ours: encountering the living God.
And so a text once used to justify slavery no longer does. A letter instructing women to keep silent in church seems not to apply. Some ancient practices look quaint to us, and some downright cruel. Is this because we think we know better than God? Of course not. We just think God has the whole world--and all of its ages--in his hand.
++++++++++
Today we remember: http://satucket.com/lectionary/Calendar.htm
Feb 7 is a feria, a free day. Instead, let us pray:
Prayer of the Day
God of our hearts,
Heart of creation:
we are blessed
when we feast on your Word:
that Word which embraces us;
that Word which teaches us;
that Word which transfigures us;
that Word which grounds us.
Give us your Word.
Jesus Christ,
Heart of God's children:
we are blessed
when we have your heart:
a heart for the poor;
for the hungry;
for those who weep;
for the rejected.
Give us your Heart.
Holy Delight,
Grace's Heartbeat:
we bear fruit
when we are filled with your spirit,
the spirit of generosity,
the spirit of emptying ourselves for others;
the spirit of bearing one another's burdens.
Give us your Spirit.
God in Community, Holy in One,
may our hearts beat as one with your heart,
even as we pray as one as Jesus has taught us,
Our Father . . .
Payer by: Thom M. Shuman, Cincinnati, Ohio, US
http://www.lectionaryliturgies.blogspot.com/
++++++++++
Today in the Anglican Cycle of Prayer we pray for the Diocese of Masasi (Tanzania)
http://www.anglicancommunion.org/acp/index.cfm
++++++++++
Carmelite.com: Reflections http://www.carmelite.com/spirituality/reflection.php
In this temple of God, in this Mansion of His, He and the soul alone have fruition of each other in the deepest silence.
St Teresa of Jesus
Interior Castle, III.3
++++++++++
Reading from the Desert Christians http://www.cin.org/dsrtftin.html
Theophilus of holy memory, bishop of Alexandria, journeyed to Scetis and the brethren coming together said to abba Pambo, "Say a word or two to the bishop, that his soul may be edified in this place." The old man replied, "If he is not edified by my silence, there is no hope that he will be edified by my words."
This place was called Cellia, because of the number of cells there, scattered about the desert. Those who have already begun their training there [i.e. in Nitria] and want to live a more remote life, stripped of external things, withdraw there. For this is the utter desert and the cells are divided from one another by so great a distance that no one can see his neighbour nor can any voice be heard. They live alone in their cells and there is a huge silence and a great quiet there. Only on Saturday and Sunday do they meet in church, and then they see each other to abba Antony in his desert that there was one in the city who was his equal. He was a doctor by profession, and whatever he had beyond his needs he gave to the poor and every day he sang the sanctus with the angles.
Amma Matrona said, "There are many in the mountains who behave as if they were in the town, and they are wasting their time. It is better to have many people around you and to live the solitary life in your will than to be alone and always longing to be with a crowd."
Abba Isidore said, "If you fast regularly, do not be inflated with pride; if you think highly of yourself because of it, then you had better eat meat. It is better for a man to eat meat than to be inflated with pride and glorify himself."
++++++++++
Daily Meditation (Henri Nouwen) http://www.henrinouwen.org/home/free_eletters/
Dressed in Gentleness
Once in a while we meet a gentle person. Gentleness is a virtue hard to find in a society that admires toughness and roughness. We are encouraged to get things done and to get them done fast, even when people get hurt in the process. Success, accomplishment, and productivity count. But the cost is high. There is no place for gentleness in such a milieu.
Gentle is the one who does "not break the crushed reed, or snuff the faltering wick" (Matthew 12:20). Gentle is the one who is attentive to the strengths and weaknesses of the other and enjoys being together more than accomplishing something. A gentle person treads lightly, listens carefully, looks tenderly, and touches with reverence. A gentle person knows that true growth requires nurture, not force. Let's dress ourselves with gentleness. In our tough and often unbending world our gentleness can be a vivid reminder of the presence of God among us.
++++++++++
From the Principles of the Third Society of St. Francis:
Day Seven - the Second Aim: To spread the spirit of love and harmony.
The Order sets out, in the name of Christ, to break down barriers between
people and to seek equality for all. We accept as our second aim the
spreading of a spirit of love and harmony among all people. We are pledged
to fight against the ignorance, pride and prejudice that breed injustice or
partiality of any kind.
God, you have made your church rich through the poverty of blessed Francis:
help us, like him, not to trust in earthly things, but to seek your heavenly
gifts; through Jesus Christ our Lord
For the Third Order:
O God, who opened the eyes of blessed Francis to the vocation of those you
had called to serve you in the world, grant such grace to the members of the
Third Order that, being crucified with Christ, they may show forth the
radiance of his risen life; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy
Spirit, one God, for ever and ever
++++++++++
Upper Room Daily Reflection http://www.upperroom.org/reflections/
THERE IS NO REAL occasion for tumult, strain, conflict, anxiety, once we have reached the living conviction that God is All. All takes place within God. God alone matters; God alone is. Our spiritual life is God’s affair, because whatever we may think to the contrary, it is really produced by God’s steady attraction and our humble and self-forgetful response to it. It consists in being drawn, at God’s pace and in God’s way, to the place where God wants us to be.
- Evelyn Underhill
The Soul’s Delight
From pages 12-13 of The Soul’s Delight: Selected Writings of Evelyn Underhill edited by Keith Beasley-Topliffe.
+++++++++++
Richard Rohr's Daily Reflection
http://cacradicalgrace.org/getconnected/getconnected_index.html
"Loving the Church"
Nothing in this world is an end in itself, including Church, priests, bishops, popes, laws, Bible- nothing! Only God is an end; everything else is a means. Only God can save us, not the Church. I say that out of a great love for the Church. God saves, and the Church is that beautiful gift given by God to preach that word which will set us free. But when we preach “Church” and raise up “Church,” we are not necessarily proclaiming the Lord. We often are preaching ourselves. Jesus never preached Israel, he preached Yahweh. He preached the absolute transcendence of Yahweh and fidelity and obedience to Yahweh. At the same time Jesus never put Israel down. He loved Israel. Insofar as Israel was true to the covenant and true to prophets, Jesus was obedient to Israel, obedient to the priests, obedient to “the Church.” But he wasn’t afraid to keep knocking on the door. He kept inviting Israel to be true to itself. Jesus taught us to love the unlovely, exactly as it was. If we simply love that which is worthy of love, we will never love at all. The lord loved “the Church,” Israel, exactly as it was. You cannot love the Church as it was fifty years ago. That’s a cop-out. The only Church you must love is the Church today.
from The Great Themes of Scripture
++++++++++
From John E. Rotelle, O.S.A., Tradition Day by Day: Readings from Church Writers. Augustinian Press. Villanova, PA, 1994.
http://www.artsci.villanova.edu/dsteelman/tradition/sources.html
Come, Lord, and help me find you
Come, Lord my God, come and instruct my heart where and how to search for you, where and how to find you. Where shall I look for you, Lord, if you are absent and not here? And if you are everywhere, why are you not visible to me? But of course, your dwelling is in light inaccessible. Then where is this light inaccessible, and how can I approach it? Who will guide me and conduct me into it so that I may see you? And then, by what signs, by what visible form shall I know you? I have never seen you, I do not know what you look like, Lord my God. What is this exile of yours to do in a far-off land, O most high God, what is he to do? Banished far from your presence and distressed by his love for you, what shall your servant do? With burning desire he strives to see you, and your face is very far from him. He longs to come to you, and your dwelling is inaccessible. He wishes to find you and has no idea where you live. He wants to search for you and he does not know your face.
O Lord, you are my Lord and my God, and I have never seen you. You have made me and remade me and bestowed on me all the good that I possess, and still I do not know you. In a word, I was created to see you, and I have not yet done what I was created to do.
Anselm of Canterbury,(1033 - 1109), archbishop of Canterbury, made an outstanding contribution to the speculative thought of his day.
++++++++++
Today's reading from the Rule of St. Benedict http://www.osb.org/rb/
The tenth step of humility is that we are not given to ready laughter, for it is written:"Only fools raise their voices in laughter (Sir 21:23)."
Commentary: http://www.eriebenedictines.org/Pages/INSPIRATION/insights.html
Humor and laughter are not necessarily the same thing. Humor permits us to see into life from a fresh and gracious perspective. We learn to take ourselves more lightly in the presence of good humor. Humor gives us the strength to bear what cannot be changed, and the sight to see the human under the pompous. Laughter, on the other hand, is an expression of emotion commonly inveighed against in the best finishing schools and the upper classes of society for centuries. Laughter was considered vulgar, crude, cheap, a loud demonstration of a lack of self-control.
In the tenth degree of humility, Benedict does not forbid humor. On the contrary, Benedict is insisting that we take our humor very seriously. Everything we laugh at is not funny. Some things we laugh at are, in fact, tragic and need to be confronted. Ethnic jokes are not funny. Sexist jokes are not funny. The handicaps of suffering people are not funny. Pornography and pomposity and shrieking, mindless noise is not funny. Derision is not funny, sneers and sarcasm and snide remarks, no matter how witty, how pointed, how clever, how cutting, are not funny. They are cruel. The humble person never uses speech to grind another person to dust. The humble person cultivates a soul in which everyone is safe. A humble person handles the presence of the other with soft hands, a velvet heart and an unveiled mind.
++++++++++
If you would like these meditations to come directly to your in box, please click here:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/KnitternunMeditation/
Collect
Set us free, O God, from the bondage of our sins, and give us the liberty of that abundant life which you have made known to us in your Son our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
++++++++++
Today's Scripture http://www.satucket.com/lectionary/
Psalm119:97-120; Psalm 81, 82; Isa. 59:15b-21; 2 Tim. 1:15-2:13; Mark 10:1-16
++++++++++
From Forward Day by Day: http://www.forwardmovement.org/todaysreading.cfm
2 Timothy 1:15-2:13. But the word of God is not fettered.
I open an angry email: "Do you think you know better than God?" the writer wants to know. "What gives you the right to interpret God's word?"
Ah, me. I think hard of a way to write back in a manner that is clear and respectful. To explain that everyone who has ever read scripture has interpreted it--anyone who has ever translated it, everyone who has studied it. The culture from which we come and in which we live has its say in everything we think and do. I am not a first--century Christian, a medieval one, a Victorian one.
The layers of human culture enrich the word of God. It is ancient and ever new, speaks to every age in its own tongue. God may not change, but people certainly do, instructed and called to new life through the centuries by ancient voices doing, in their day, what we must do in ours: encountering the living God.
And so a text once used to justify slavery no longer does. A letter instructing women to keep silent in church seems not to apply. Some ancient practices look quaint to us, and some downright cruel. Is this because we think we know better than God? Of course not. We just think God has the whole world--and all of its ages--in his hand.
++++++++++
Today we remember: http://satucket.com/lectionary/Calendar.htm
Feb 7 is a feria, a free day. Instead, let us pray:
Prayer of the Day
God of our hearts,
Heart of creation:
we are blessed
when we feast on your Word:
that Word which embraces us;
that Word which teaches us;
that Word which transfigures us;
that Word which grounds us.
Give us your Word.
Jesus Christ,
Heart of God's children:
we are blessed
when we have your heart:
a heart for the poor;
for the hungry;
for those who weep;
for the rejected.
Give us your Heart.
Holy Delight,
Grace's Heartbeat:
we bear fruit
when we are filled with your spirit,
the spirit of generosity,
the spirit of emptying ourselves for others;
the spirit of bearing one another's burdens.
Give us your Spirit.
God in Community, Holy in One,
may our hearts beat as one with your heart,
even as we pray as one as Jesus has taught us,
Our Father . . .
Payer by: Thom M. Shuman, Cincinnati, Ohio, US
http://www.lectionaryliturgies.blogspot.com/
++++++++++
Today in the Anglican Cycle of Prayer we pray for the Diocese of Masasi (Tanzania)
http://www.anglicancommunion.org/acp/index.cfm
++++++++++
Carmelite.com: Reflections http://www.carmelite.com/spirituality/reflection.php
In this temple of God, in this Mansion of His, He and the soul alone have fruition of each other in the deepest silence.
St Teresa of Jesus
Interior Castle, III.3
++++++++++
Reading from the Desert Christians http://www.cin.org/dsrtftin.html
Theophilus of holy memory, bishop of Alexandria, journeyed to Scetis and the brethren coming together said to abba Pambo, "Say a word or two to the bishop, that his soul may be edified in this place." The old man replied, "If he is not edified by my silence, there is no hope that he will be edified by my words."
This place was called Cellia, because of the number of cells there, scattered about the desert. Those who have already begun their training there [i.e. in Nitria] and want to live a more remote life, stripped of external things, withdraw there. For this is the utter desert and the cells are divided from one another by so great a distance that no one can see his neighbour nor can any voice be heard. They live alone in their cells and there is a huge silence and a great quiet there. Only on Saturday and Sunday do they meet in church, and then they see each other to abba Antony in his desert that there was one in the city who was his equal. He was a doctor by profession, and whatever he had beyond his needs he gave to the poor and every day he sang the sanctus with the angles.
Amma Matrona said, "There are many in the mountains who behave as if they were in the town, and they are wasting their time. It is better to have many people around you and to live the solitary life in your will than to be alone and always longing to be with a crowd."
Abba Isidore said, "If you fast regularly, do not be inflated with pride; if you think highly of yourself because of it, then you had better eat meat. It is better for a man to eat meat than to be inflated with pride and glorify himself."
++++++++++
Daily Meditation (Henri Nouwen) http://www.henrinouwen.org/home/free_eletters/
Dressed in Gentleness
Once in a while we meet a gentle person. Gentleness is a virtue hard to find in a society that admires toughness and roughness. We are encouraged to get things done and to get them done fast, even when people get hurt in the process. Success, accomplishment, and productivity count. But the cost is high. There is no place for gentleness in such a milieu.
Gentle is the one who does "not break the crushed reed, or snuff the faltering wick" (Matthew 12:20). Gentle is the one who is attentive to the strengths and weaknesses of the other and enjoys being together more than accomplishing something. A gentle person treads lightly, listens carefully, looks tenderly, and touches with reverence. A gentle person knows that true growth requires nurture, not force. Let's dress ourselves with gentleness. In our tough and often unbending world our gentleness can be a vivid reminder of the presence of God among us.
++++++++++
From the Principles of the Third Society of St. Francis:
Day Seven - the Second Aim: To spread the spirit of love and harmony.
The Order sets out, in the name of Christ, to break down barriers between
people and to seek equality for all. We accept as our second aim the
spreading of a spirit of love and harmony among all people. We are pledged
to fight against the ignorance, pride and prejudice that breed injustice or
partiality of any kind.
God, you have made your church rich through the poverty of blessed Francis:
help us, like him, not to trust in earthly things, but to seek your heavenly
gifts; through Jesus Christ our Lord
For the Third Order:
O God, who opened the eyes of blessed Francis to the vocation of those you
had called to serve you in the world, grant such grace to the members of the
Third Order that, being crucified with Christ, they may show forth the
radiance of his risen life; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy
Spirit, one God, for ever and ever
++++++++++
Upper Room Daily Reflection http://www.upperroom.org/reflections/
THERE IS NO REAL occasion for tumult, strain, conflict, anxiety, once we have reached the living conviction that God is All. All takes place within God. God alone matters; God alone is. Our spiritual life is God’s affair, because whatever we may think to the contrary, it is really produced by God’s steady attraction and our humble and self-forgetful response to it. It consists in being drawn, at God’s pace and in God’s way, to the place where God wants us to be.
- Evelyn Underhill
The Soul’s Delight
From pages 12-13 of The Soul’s Delight: Selected Writings of Evelyn Underhill edited by Keith Beasley-Topliffe.
+++++++++++
Richard Rohr's Daily Reflection
http://cacradicalgrace.org/getconnected/getconnected_index.html
"Loving the Church"
Nothing in this world is an end in itself, including Church, priests, bishops, popes, laws, Bible- nothing! Only God is an end; everything else is a means. Only God can save us, not the Church. I say that out of a great love for the Church. God saves, and the Church is that beautiful gift given by God to preach that word which will set us free. But when we preach “Church” and raise up “Church,” we are not necessarily proclaiming the Lord. We often are preaching ourselves. Jesus never preached Israel, he preached Yahweh. He preached the absolute transcendence of Yahweh and fidelity and obedience to Yahweh. At the same time Jesus never put Israel down. He loved Israel. Insofar as Israel was true to the covenant and true to prophets, Jesus was obedient to Israel, obedient to the priests, obedient to “the Church.” But he wasn’t afraid to keep knocking on the door. He kept inviting Israel to be true to itself. Jesus taught us to love the unlovely, exactly as it was. If we simply love that which is worthy of love, we will never love at all. The lord loved “the Church,” Israel, exactly as it was. You cannot love the Church as it was fifty years ago. That’s a cop-out. The only Church you must love is the Church today.
from The Great Themes of Scripture
++++++++++
From John E. Rotelle, O.S.A., Tradition Day by Day: Readings from Church Writers. Augustinian Press. Villanova, PA, 1994.
http://www.artsci.villanova.edu/dsteelman/tradition/sources.html
Come, Lord, and help me find you
Come, Lord my God, come and instruct my heart where and how to search for you, where and how to find you. Where shall I look for you, Lord, if you are absent and not here? And if you are everywhere, why are you not visible to me? But of course, your dwelling is in light inaccessible. Then where is this light inaccessible, and how can I approach it? Who will guide me and conduct me into it so that I may see you? And then, by what signs, by what visible form shall I know you? I have never seen you, I do not know what you look like, Lord my God. What is this exile of yours to do in a far-off land, O most high God, what is he to do? Banished far from your presence and distressed by his love for you, what shall your servant do? With burning desire he strives to see you, and your face is very far from him. He longs to come to you, and your dwelling is inaccessible. He wishes to find you and has no idea where you live. He wants to search for you and he does not know your face.
O Lord, you are my Lord and my God, and I have never seen you. You have made me and remade me and bestowed on me all the good that I possess, and still I do not know you. In a word, I was created to see you, and I have not yet done what I was created to do.
Anselm of Canterbury,(1033 - 1109), archbishop of Canterbury, made an outstanding contribution to the speculative thought of his day.
++++++++++
Today's reading from the Rule of St. Benedict http://www.osb.org/rb/
The tenth step of humility is that we are not given to ready laughter, for it is written:"Only fools raise their voices in laughter (Sir 21:23)."
Commentary: http://www.eriebenedictines.org/Pages/INSPIRATION/insights.html
Humor and laughter are not necessarily the same thing. Humor permits us to see into life from a fresh and gracious perspective. We learn to take ourselves more lightly in the presence of good humor. Humor gives us the strength to bear what cannot be changed, and the sight to see the human under the pompous. Laughter, on the other hand, is an expression of emotion commonly inveighed against in the best finishing schools and the upper classes of society for centuries. Laughter was considered vulgar, crude, cheap, a loud demonstration of a lack of self-control.
In the tenth degree of humility, Benedict does not forbid humor. On the contrary, Benedict is insisting that we take our humor very seriously. Everything we laugh at is not funny. Some things we laugh at are, in fact, tragic and need to be confronted. Ethnic jokes are not funny. Sexist jokes are not funny. The handicaps of suffering people are not funny. Pornography and pomposity and shrieking, mindless noise is not funny. Derision is not funny, sneers and sarcasm and snide remarks, no matter how witty, how pointed, how clever, how cutting, are not funny. They are cruel. The humble person never uses speech to grind another person to dust. The humble person cultivates a soul in which everyone is safe. A humble person handles the presence of the other with soft hands, a velvet heart and an unveiled mind.
++++++++++
posted by Gloriamarie Amalfitano @ 6:30 AM
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