Preparing for meditation
Find a place to sit comfortably. Mobile phone on silent.
Take your time. Breathe in and out a few times, slowing down …
Don't try too hard. Relax. Be open.
Prayer isn't telling what God should be doing but becoming aware of what God is already doing.
"The best prayer is to rest in the goodness of God and to let that goodness reach right down to your lowest place of need." (Julian of Norwich)
When you seem ready, begin.
You don't have to finish the exercise now, or today.
If and when something arrests your attention, stay there. Savour the words. Let them speak to you.
That may be enough for the next few minutes.
Jesus came, not so much to form a new religion, but to usher in a new way of human being and relating. He does not offer us a particular way of being religious, but a universal way of being human. Deeply motivated by a profound sense of the communion we have with God and each other, he spoke of an imaginative, attractive, alternative way of living and relating – which he called the Kingdom or Reign of God.
A S J Tessimond
One day people will touch and talk perhaps easily /And loving be as natural as breathing and warm as sunlight, /And people will untie themselves, as string is unknotted….
John Paul II
[the human person] is alienated if he refuses to transcend himself and to live the experience of self-giving and the formation of an authentic human community oriented towards his final destiny, which is God.
W H Auden
to discover how to be human now
Is the reason we follow this star
What keeps you from living as a beloved child of God? What would it be like for you to live out of your own sense of your inherent worth, dignity and freedom – of “your hidden self grown strong” (Ephesians 3:16)?
Trevor Huddleston used to say “the only chosen race is the human race”. How strong is your sense of solidarity with the whole of humanity? Pope John Paul II said that the best word to translate “agape“love was “solidarity“.
What are you afraid of? What happens when you hear Jesus say: “Do not be afraid.” The paschal mystery of Jesus speaks of exchanging a living death (fear, anxiety, etc) for a dying life (freedom). We reach our proper dignity when we act freely in the service of authentic human community.
Jesus came to show us who we really are. Loving is not a duty or a chore, but an expression of our true nature. We flourish, we become fully alive and fully human, when we give ourselves away. Human beings are not isolated, independent and autonomous beings, but beings-in-relationship, marked by receptivity and hospitality, and finding who we really are and who God is in genuine self-giving.
In the next few weeks, as we reflect on being Fully Alive, Fully Human, instead of a poem we will look at some things Thomas Merton has written. He was arguably the most celebrated monk and prolific spiritual writer of the twentieth century. “He was a man crazed with caring about the human condition; a voice crying into the North Wind of indifference and despair”.. He abandoned the world- “enclosed in the four walls of my new freedom”- to discover in silence and solitude a solidarity with the “most neglected voices that proceed from [the world’s] inner depths”.
I have the immense joy of being [human], a member of a race in which God himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun….
My fall into inconsistency was nothing but the revelation of what I am. I am thrown into contradiction: to realize it is mercy, to accept it is love, to help others do the same is compassion.
Thomas Merton
