Lord Jesus, Living Christ: We join in remembrance of your wilderness temptations in this season of Lent. A week ago today we took the mark of the cross upon our foreheads for the sake of picking up this inward cross of surrender to you and releasing more of our self. Bless our spiritual work of releasing. We are not interested in becoming good through our efforts. We are interested in discovering how we unconsciously depend on food, entertainment, people and life influences to fill our deeper spiritual hunger for you. Through this Way of release, we wish to know the Truth, so to experience more of your Life in us. Through Christ our Lord we pray. Amen.
Loving God: Seal us off this Lenten season from negative thoughts and feelings that so often run on our system. By Sacrament, Word and Spirit, quarantine this negativity lest it spread to others. We wish to have our “feeling of I” in you and not in our self, our situations or our appetites. As we fast and release our normal patterns of appeasement, reveal to us how much we satisfy ourselves with life-externals. Feed us with deeper truths than our daily doings. Feed us with your wisdom that leads to life. Through Christ our Lord we pray. Amen.
God of all Times: As contemplatives in the world of commerce, we ask for the strength to live by your holy time. Help us to order our days under the authority of truth and love, rather than hiding in the shadows of forgetfulness and negativity. We wish to use the hours of each day for our sacred work of inward transformation governed by your will, not our appetites. Help us to rise early, pray often and surrender into the silence in harmony with the cycle of the sun. Through Christ our Lord we pray. Amen.
Most loving and merciful God: During this Lenten journey, feed our deepest spiritual hunger with the bread of life as our gnawing physical fasting reminds us of our weakness and reveals more of our human condition normally y hidden by the comfort of food. In our weakness, we wish to confront ourselves and discover what is most true. Through Christ we pray. Amen.
Loving Strength of My Life: We are promised that there is a stream by which we may grow leaves in every season. We are promised that there is water available that will enable us to flourish as human beings if we drench ourselves in it day and night. Yet we are confronted by great difficulties in our daily lives. Sometimes it seems impossible such growth or flourishing could ever be. This is the purification of the desert. This is where wilderness is the means to surrender, and surrender is the way to abundance. The ancient paradox is made personal when we try to love one another: whoever wishes to come after me must deny their very self and lose it in order to gain it. Help us, Lord. We wish to use this Lenten journey to undo a lifetime of self-love. Forgive us for the ways this self-love wounds the very ones we wish to love. In and through Christ we pray. Amen.
Today, we begin a Lenten Journey marked with the passport sign of the cross in black ash smudged on the forehead. In Lent, we are given forty or so mornings to rise with Christ in rehearsal of that Sunday morning Resurrection. We are given forty or so days to walk with Christ in the wilderness in rehearsal of turning his threefold temptation in the desert into a holy triad of God-surrender, saying: No, to self-security. No, to self-adoration. No, to self-power. We are given forty or so evenings to stay awake with prayer in rehearsal of Gethsemane tears and Golgotha terror.
Lent gives leverage for the undoing of our projects for self security, success and strength. Lent gives light for the mechanical ways we go through our days, unaware of the appetites that drive us. Lent gives opportunity to die to the power of personality that lives in us, yet also smothers the abundant life hidden with God in Christ. Lent, meaning spring, gives the promise of a different kind of life emerging beyond the senses which do not discern Spirit hovering above and beneath the depths of winter’s barren bleak waiting.
Meanwhile, everything is forgiven. As you journey locked up with Flesh and Spirit in struggle with this thing called “me,” bear in mind and heart the words, “it is finished.” Yes, we are still at it, but in Christ everything is perfectly forgiven and complete. And we are in Christ. Nonetheless, Jesus demonstrated the pathway for us to follow. This is why he taught that he was “the way.” The Jesus way is narrow, and in the narrows the pressure builds. But we are propelled by this pressure too: a high pressure system driven by the Spirit who groans with us in our gestation, and transformation and formation into Resurrected Ones who are also “participants of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1.4). Ready. Get set. Go. And keep at. We are on the Way.
Lord Jesus, Living Christ: Waking from the dream of forgetfulness, we see your face and remember who we are. In remembrance, we return home to receive your embrace of welcome and love. Amen.
Beloved One and Trinity: Your hints of presence are among us. Your hidden embrace seduces many. You press into us in the silence and leave your mark of love. Let not lovers befriend other suitors, lest passions flare. Daylight hours are for truth seeking. The darkness is for God-surrender. Give yourself up to this consummation. All other pursuits and passions pale. Lent approaches. Get your inner bedchamber prepared. Amen.
Lord God of all Creation: We wish to feel your life at the center of our being. Turn our hearts of stone into vessels of love, filled with living water which you transform into the red-wine of holy love. Do this transformation in us, your oh so human vessels bearing the choice wine of living water turned into life-giving love. Amen.
In our union with Christ, we are given the Spirit, and the Spirit enables us to manifest the presence of God. This presence is what we offer when we do “ministry.” Christ’s ministry continues through you by the Spirit because, according to Jesus, the Spirit “abides with you, and he will be in you" (John 14.16-17). If the Spirit is the continuing manifestation of Christ, and if the Spirit is now here in you, then the Christian vocation is sharing the presence of God to ones who are in need of waking from the dream of forgetfulness. We aid others in coming to their senses, helping them remember who they truly are and can be.
As we consent to the Spirit, the presence of God will manifest in our life, especially in our capacity to love (1 John 1.4-6). By remaining in Christ, we remain vulnerable to the Spirit, and we are enabled to bring about even greater things than we could ever ask or imagine (Ephesians 3.21).
The implication evoked from this spiritual reality is that through a life of vulnerability to the Spirit we live lives of imitation, and through lives of imitation we continue the incarnation and bear the presence of God to a world that desperately needs and longs for the "touch of God" in the midst of deep pain and doubt.
The progressive renewal of our minds (Romans 12.1), through the developmental process of “putting on the mind of Christ” (Philippians 2.5), is the means by which we can replicate Jesus’ ministry as the Christ. Our increased illumination and awakening into the light, life and love of God in and through us is intended to lead us to further humility, obedience and self-surrender. This is the spirituality of Jesus, and it is now the spirituality of Christ’s continuing presence through and in us by the Spirit.
The purpose of this blog is to continue the articulation and embodiment of contemplative Christianity in the third millennium of Christian faith. My prayer is that through these writings, resources and reflections, you, Dear Unknown Friend, will be drawn further into the heart of God through Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit's transforming presence and action in your thoughts, feelings and embodiment.
In an era of increasing confusion, the Church is invited to an ancient alternative. We are invited to return, receive and re-discover the contemplative dimension of prayer and worship.
In an era of increasing interconnectivity, I believe that the cultivation of a meditative prayer practice is an ethical imperative, and the leading edge of how the human community can love God, humanity and all of God's glorious creation - earth, sea, sky, life and cosmos.
I believe that personal, direct, relational experiences with Love, Meaning and Purpose are possible because of the Trinity. Beyond doctrine and creed, the experience of Love and Divine Presence is available in a universe that is alive and interconnected in Christ who is our All in All.
Every blessing in the depths of divine love, and every certitude of knowing beyond the senses in this Reality of Love,
