Week #7 – Making Moments

Invocation
Father, give me eyes to see and a heart to respond to all which will come to me this week. Forbid that I should miss its graces by looking ahead to some other day or week. Let me accept the newness each moment brings with awareness and gratitude. In the name of the One who makes all things new, I pray. Amen.

Weekly Scripture Reading: Psalm 81

Daily Scripture Readings:
Monday Luke 24:13-35
Tuesday Mark 9:2-8
Wednesday 1 Chronicles 28:10-30
Thursday Revelation 3:14-22
Friday 1 Samuel 7:7-17
Saturday Mark 14:1-9
Sunday Matthew 17:1-13

Selections for Meditation

Personal Meditation

Prayer
Begin to pray this week that the moments of your life may themselves become prayers. Whether they are in the joy of a birthday party, in the weariness that comes from labor, in the majesty of the setting sun or in the pain that comes with tears. Pray that each in its turn will cause you to lift your voice to Him.

Hymn: “This Is My Father’s World”
by Maltbie D. Babcock

This is my Father’s world
And to my listening ears,
All nature sings, and round me rings,
The music of the spheres.

This is my Father’s world,
Oh, let me ne’er forget
That tho’ the wrong seems oft so strong,
God is the Ruler yet.
This is my Father’s world
The battle is not done;
Jesus who died shall be satisfied,
And earth and heaven be one.

Benediction:
Father, so much of my life seems to be devoid of events that can be labeled important. It’s content and quality will more likely be determined by my responses to the ordinary. Let me see Your hand in the providences and circumstances of this day. Amen.

Selections for Meditation:

* To pray is to take notice of the wonder, to regain a sense of the mystery that animates all beings, the divine margin in all attainments. Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living. It is all we can offer in return for the mystery by which we live. Who is worthy to be present at the constant unfolding of time? Amidst the meditation of mountains, the humility of flowers — wiser than all alphabets — clouds that die constantly for the sake of His glory, we are hating, hunting, hurting. Suddenly we feel ashamed for our clashes and complaints in the face of the tacit glory in nature. It is so embarrassing to live! How strange we are in the world, and how presumptuous our doings! Only one response can maintain us: gratefulness for witnessing the wonder, for the gift of our unearned right to serve, to adore, and to fulfill. It is gratefulness which makes the soul great.
-From Man’s Quest for God, by
Abraham Joshua Heschel-

* Temperance, then, is the teacher of that genial humility which is an essential of spiritual health. It makes us realize that the normal and moderate course is the only one we can handle successfully in our own power: that extraordinary practices, penance, spiritual efforts, with their corresponding graces, must never be deliberately sought. Some people appear to think that the “spiritual life” is a peculiar condition. But the solid norm of the spiritual life should be like that of the natural life. The extremes of joy, discipline, vision, are not in our hands but in the Hand of God. We can maintain the soul’s house in order without any of these. It is not the best housekeeper who has the most ferocious spring-clean, or get things from the store when she is expecting guests. “If any man open the door, I will come in to him”; share his ordinary meal, and irradiate his ordinary life. The demand for temperance of soul, for acknowledgement of the sacred character of the normal, is based on that fact — the central Christian fact — of the humble entrance of God into our common human life. The supernatural can and does seek and find us, in and through our daily normal experience: the invisible in the visible. There is no need to be peculiar in order to find God. The Magi were taught by the heavens to follow a star; and it brought them, not to a paralyzing disclosure of the Transcendent, but to a little Boy on His mother’s knee.
-From The House of the Soul and Concerning the Inner Life by Evelyn Underhill-

* Varied and rich are the methods used by individuals who have discovered the strength and the security that come from the practice of the Presence of God. Most often, these practices are very private and are a part of the intimate resources of personal religious living. To talk about such things is like living one’s private life in public. In the course of a lifetime, a person may be privileged to share the testimony in most unexpected ways.
. . . There is a friend who is in her seventies now. In her professional life she was a secretary. Each morning before breakfast she sits at her typewriter and writes a letter to God. No one else ever sees what she writes. It is part of her own private communion with Him.
There is another person well into the later years. For some months now she has been in uncertain health. Each morning when she awakes, she stops for a period of meditation. The phrase is the same each day: “This is the day that the Lord has made. I will rejoice and be glad in it.” At night, as she turns out the light over her bed, she says it a little differently because “rejoice” and “be glad” are not very restful words. So, she says, “This is the night which the Lord has made. I will relax and rest in it.” One day she had a fall, but managed to pull herself up without calling for help. She was quite shaken and was much in pain. She prepared herself for bed and with much discomfort was able to get in beneath the covers. As she turned out the light, she said, “This is the night which the Lord has made. I will relax and cry in it.” Then she realized what she had said, and her tears were all mixed with her laughter.
Varied and rich indeed are the methods used by individuals who have discovered the strength and serenity that come from the “practice of the Presence of God.”
-From The Inward Journey
by Howard Thurman-

* Alan Watts once used a royal comparison for our moving around. A king and queen are the center of “where it’s at,” so they move with easy, royal bearing. They have no place to “get.” They have already “arrived.” Looking deeply at our lineage, we see that we are of the highest royal line: the royal image of God is in us — covered over, but indestructibly there. We need rush nowhere else to get it. We mainly need to attentively relax and dissolve the amnesia that obscures our true identity.
-From Living Simply Through the Day by
Tilden H. Edwards-

* This “dark night” of disbelief lasted four bleak and barren months. Then it happened. It was the beginning of the rest of my life, the pivotal religious experience of my own personal history. In the evenings, we novices had a 15 minute examination of conscience, during which we knelt on wooden blocks, our hands resting on our desks, our minds combing through the day for failures of commission and omission in thought, word, and deed. The only thing I did well, or at least so it seemed to me, was to get that wooden block in the right place. A well-adjusted kneeler, I used to say humorously to myself, was half the battle.
It happened on a definite Friday evening in the early spring, while I was kicking that kneeler into place for the evening examination of conscience. With all the suddenness and jolt of a heart attack, I was filled with an experiential awareness of the presence of God within me. It has been said that no one can convey an experience to another, but can only offer his reflections on the experience. I am sure that this is true. I can only say, in trying to share my experience with you, that I felt like a balloon being blown up with the pure pleasure of God’s loving presence, even to the point of discomfort and doubt that I could hold any more of this sudden ecstasy.
-From He Touched Me by John Powell-

* Nothing is more reasonable, perfect or divine than the will of God. No difference in time, place or circumstance could add to its infinite worth, and if you have been granted the secret of how to discover it in every moment, you have found what is most precious and desirable. God is telling you that if you abandon all restraint, carry your wishes to their furthest limits, open your heart boundlessly, there is not a single moment when you will not be shown everything you can possibly wish for.
The present moment holds infinite riches beyond your wildest dreams but you will only enjoy them to the extent of your faith and love. The more a soul loves, the more it longs, the more it hopes, the more it finds. The will of God is manifest in each moment, an immense ocean which the heart only fathoms insofar as it overflows with faith, trust and love. The whole of the rest of creation cannot fill your heart, which is larger than all that is not God; terrifying mountains are mere molehills to it. It is in His purpose, hidden in the cloud of all that happens to you in the present moment, that you must rely. You will find it always surpasses your own wishes. Woo no man, worship no shadows or fantasies; they have nothing to offer or accept from you. Only God’s purpose can satisfy your longing and leave you nothing to wish for. Adore, walk close to it, see through and abandon all fantasy. Faith is death and destruction to the senses for they worship creatures, whereas faith worships the divine will of God. Discard idols, and the senses will cry like disappointed children, but faith triumphs for it can never be estranged from God’s will. When the present moment terrifies, crushes, lays waste and overwhelms the senses, God nourishes, strengthens and revives faith, which, like a general in command of an impregnable position, scorns such useless defenses.
When the will of God is revealed to souls and has made them feel that they, for their part, have given themselves to Him, they are aware of a powerful ally on every hand, for then they taste the happiness of the presence of God which they can only enjoy when they have learned, through surrendering themselves, where they stand each moment in relation to His ever-loving will.
-From The Sacrament of the Present Moment by Jean-Pierre de Caussade-