“The Christian religion asks us to place our trust not in ideas, and certainly not in ideologies, but in a God who was vulnerable enough to become human and die, and who desires to be present to us in our everyday circumstances. And because we are human, it is in the realm of the daily and mundane that we must find our way to God.”
-Kathleen Norris, The Quotidian Mysteries
Dear Lord, break to me this day the ‘bread of life.’
My heart is hungry.
Save us from thinking, even for a moment, that we can feed our souls on things.
Save us from the vain delusion that the piling up of wealth or comforts can satisfy.
Help us to remember that the real quest for happiness is within.
O grant us the radiance of Thy tranfroming Presence all this day.
Amen.
-Ralph Cushman, Pocket Prayer Book, 1941
“Hospitality did not begin with Howard Johnson’s and Good Housekeeping. Hospitality, as it has been practiced from ancient days, protected people from the dangers of traveling alone. In Saint Benedict’s day there were no safe and cheap shelters for travelers. Along the way people could be brutalized, robbed, sounded, lost.
Monasteries saved lives when they opened their doors to strangers. It was not about comfort and entertainment-it was about saving lives…The spirit of saving lives is still at the root of monastic hospitality. To receive others is to expose myself to all sort of frightful dangers of attachment and rejection.
Hospitality acknowledges the vulnerability of being human, both my humanity and that of the stranger. Travelers, too (Benedict called them pilgrims), are prone to all sort of dangers. On Life’s journey each of us is a pilgrim. We aren’t sure where we come from and where we are going. We are vulnerable and we need each other.”
-Paraclete Book of Hospitality
The only condition necessary
for this state of self-surrender
is the present moment in which the soul,
light as a feather,
fluid as water,
innocent as a child,
responds to every moment of grace
like a floating balloon.
-J.-P. de Caussade
If everything is lost, thanks be to God
If I must see it go, watch it go,
Watch it fade away, die
Thanks be to God that He is all I have.
And if I have Him not, I have nothing at all.
Nothing at all, only a farewell to the wind
Farewell to the grey sky
Goodbye, God be with you, evening October sky.
If all is lost, thanks be to God,
For He is He, and I, I am only I.
— Dom Julian
Thoughts are but coins. Let me not trust, instead
Of Thee, their thin-worn images of Thy head.
From all my thoughts, even from my thoughts of Thee,
O thou fair Silence, fall, and set me free.
Lord of the narrow gate and the needle’s eye,
Take from me all my trumpery lest I die.
-C.S. Lewis
Jesus, you are the King of Glory and the King of Creation.
Teach us to recognize the ways of your kingdom that we might participate as faithful and devout residents in the space between a broken world and the coming kingdom of God.
Amen.
-Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals
“We are also called to accept with compassion and humility the particular fragility, complexity, and incompleteness of each brother. Our diversity and our brokenness mean that the tensions and friction are inevitably woven into the fabric of everyday life.
They are not to be regarded as signs of failure, Christ uses them for our conversions as we grow in forbearance and learn to let go of the pride that drives us to control and reform our brothers on our own terms.”
-Paraclete Book of Hospitality
“Standing in the dark, looking out to the light, the hallway light, I don’t know how God answers all the begging prayers.
The begging prayers of mothers who’d like to wring death’s thin neck and make that child well.
I don’t know how God hears the wail of the woman howling raw for that one man to come love her right. The ache of the daughter rejected by the icy parent. The choking breath of the man crushed hard by a weight of debt.
There is this thrumming everywhere – the tears falling, a hard rain into His bottle and He has to hear. Shalom holds me tight, our hearts beating harder against each other in the dark.
She whispers it, “God does loves us, doesn’t He, Mama?”
And I nod and this is always the question and maybe this is all our faith really is — Faith is this unwavering trust in the heart of God in the hurt of here. Unwavering trust all the time though I don’t understand all the time.
God is always good and we are always loved.
Loved enough to be shaped into goodness of Christ Himself.”
“Trust this, live in Jesus’ company, and you become a citizen of a new world, the world in which God’s rule has arrived. You will still be living in the everyday world in which many other powers claim to be ruling; but you will have become free of them, free to co-operate or not, depending on how far they allow you to be ruled by God. And what you do and say will become a sign of what is coming. Your life will give a foretaste of God’s rule; and it will be directed to inviting as many as possible to come under the same rule, and to resisting the powers (natural and supernatural) that work against God and seek to keep people in slavery.”
-Rowan Williams, Tokens of Trust
peacocks for pilgrims 