“When You don’t move the mountains I’m needing You to move
When You don’t part the waters I wish I could walk through
When You don’t give the answers as I cry out to You
I will trust, I will trust, I will trust in You”
-Lauren Daigle “Trust in You”
“Christianity is first and foremost a concern for the whole of the created order — biodiversity and business; politics and pollution; rivers, religion and rainforests. The coming of Jesus brought everything of God into the sphere of time and space, and everything of time and space into the sphere of God.”
-Bishop of Canberra, George Browning
Glory be to God for dappled things —
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced — fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
-Gerard Manley Hopkins
“Let none of all the affections of thy soul have so much life and being in them,
as those that are exercised upon God.
Worms and moats are not regarded in comparison of mountains; a drop is not regarded in comparison of the ocean. Let the being of God take up thy soul, and draw off thy observation from deluding vanities, as if there were no such things before thee.
When thou rememberest that there is a God, kings and nobles, riches and honors, and all the world, should be forgotten in comparison of Him; and thou shouldst live as if there were no such things, if God appear not to thee in them. See them as if thou didst not see them, as thou seest a candle before the sun; or a pile of grass, or a particle of dust, in comparison with the earth. Hear them as if thou didst not hear them; as thou hearest the leaves of the shaken tree, at the same time with a clap of thunder.
As greatest things obscure the least, so let the being of the infinite God so take up all the powers of thy soul, as if there were nothing else but he, when anything would draw thee from him. O if the being of this God were seen by thee, thy seducing friend would scarcely be seen, thy riches and honors would be forgotten;
all things would be as nothing to thee in comparison of Him.”
– Richard Baxter, Sermon: “The Saint’s Everlasting Rest”
I am praying again. Awesome One.
You hear me again, as words
from the depths of me
rush toward you in the wind.
I’ve been scattered in pieces,
torn by conflict,
mocked by laughter,
washed down in drink.
In alleyways I sweep myself up
out of garbage and broken glass.
With my half-mouth I stammer you,
who are eternal in your symmetry.
I lift to you my half-hands
in wordless beseeching, that I may find again
the eyes with which I once beheld you.
I am a house gutted by fire
where only the guilty sometimes sleep
before the punishment that devours them
hounds them out into the open.
I am a city by the sea
sinking into a toxic tide.
I am strange to myself, as thought someone unknown
had poisoned my mother as she carried me.
It’s here in all the pieces of my shame
that now I find myself again.
I yearn to belong to something, to be contained
in an all-embracing mind that sees me
as a single thing.
I yearn to be held
in the great hands of your heart-
oh let them take me now.
Into them I place these fragments, my life,
and you, God-spend them however you want.
-Rainer Maria Rilke “Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God”
Toward Silence
LENT
“What are you giving up for Lent?”
“You.”
“It must be something very dear.”
“Quite true.”
“What do you hope to win by it?”
“Peace.”
(As if one quenched the sun by saying,
“Cease”!)
CLOISTERED
There is a song in silence
That sound could never sing.
There is a light in darkness
That suns could never bring.
There is a love in loneliness,
That baffles ecstasy.
Call me, beloved, I shall not come,
I go…to Calvary.
-Earl Marlatt
‘Through the medium of prayer we go to our enemy, stand by his side, and plead for him to God. Jesus doesn’t promise that when we bless our enemies and do good to them they will not despitefully use and persecute us. They certainly will. But not even that can hurt or overcome us, so long as we pray for them…We are doing vicariously for them what they cannot do for themselves.’
-Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship
O Thou, who are ever the same, grant us so to pass through the doming year with faithful hearts, that we may be able in all things to please Thy loving eyes.
Amen.
-Mozarabic-A.D. 700
(watches and calendars may be placed on the table)
Lord, You who live outside of time,
and reside in the imperishable moment,
we ask Your blessing this New Years’s Day
upon Your gifts to us of time.
Bless our clocks and watches,
You who kindly direct us
to observe the passing of minutes and hours.
May they make us aware of the miracle
of each second of life we experience.
May these our ticking servants
help us not to miss that which is important,
while Your keep us from being clock watchers
and instead become time lovers.
Bless our calendars,
these ordered lists of days, weeks and months,
of holidays, holy days, fasts and feasts-
all our special days of remembering.
May these servants, our calendars,
once reserved for the royal few,
for magi and pyramid priests,
now grace our homes and our lives.
May they remind us of birthdays and other gift-days,
as they teach us the secret
that all life
is meant for celebration
and contemplation.
Bless, Lord this new year,
each of its 365 days and nights.
Bless us with new moons and full moons.
Bless us with happy seasons and a long life.
Grant to us, Lord,
the new year’s gift
of a year of love.
In Jesus,
Amen.
-Edward Hays, Prayers for the Domestic Church
This is the month, and this the happy morn,
Wherein the Son of Heaven’s eternal King,
Of wedded maid and Virgin Mother born,
Our great redemption from above did bring;
For so the holy sages once did sing,
That he our deadly forfeit should release,
And with his Father work us a perpetual peace.
-John Milton, On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity
peacocks for pilgrims 