Reclaim your Sacred Site.
Noel Davis
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Reclaim your Sacred Site.
Clear a little space
In your crowded everyday
And every day reclaim the sacred site
There at the heart of you
Give the Sacred the space and time
To come and sit with you
To become intimate with your story.
Noel Davis
Contemplation is not, as people often mistakenly believe, chiefly a matter of advanced techniques in prayer, a secret knowledge of mysteries….It is primarily a way of looking and listening, of beholding, marveling, considering.
Sr. Margaret Magdalen CSMV
Can you set aside some time each day
to live slowly
to move simply
to look softly
to allow emptiness
to let the heart create for you?
(adapted from Michael Leunig)
Try not to be in a hurry. Take time to notice. Attend to your feelings at this time. Sit quietly. Perhaps go for a slow walk. Give yourself some room to breathe, to be yourself. The Hebrew root for “salvation” is space, spaciousness. Jesus is the space God clears for us so that divinity and humanity can live with each other, without fear, and in freedom.
God wants to communicate with you: in fact, God is always speaking to us in and through our every day. The invitation is to find God in all things.
We find ourselves addressed, and addressed, we find ourselves
Sarah Bachelard
Be prepared to waste time – to feel useless,…and to wait. “The meaning is in the waiting” (R.S.Thomas). Remember: “You are in the right place when you are poor in spirit”, when you acknowledge that you cannot pray, that you are not in control, you cannot fix things up, and you cannot understand. Jesus shows us that this can be the place of grace.
You may like to hang on to a phrase or a word or an image which helps- which allows you to focus on the goodness of God.
The best prayer is to rest in the goodness of God
and to let that goodness reach right down to our lowest place of need.
Julian of Norwich
The image at the top of this post is of the labyrinth set into the floor at Chartres Cathedral which dates back to 1205, when monks used it for contemplative moments. These days, it’s one of the world’s best-known labyrinths. Pilgrims still come from around the world to traverse it—but only on Fridays during the summer, when it’s not covered with chairs for church services. Scholars believe that the path symbolizes the human journey from sin to redemption.
For more information on the use of labyrinths in Christian contemplation visit this site.
Meet me here
Won’t you meet me here
Where the old fence ends and the horizon begins
There’s a balm in the silence
Like an understanding air
Where the old fence ends and the horizon begins
Then we’ll come to the mountain
We’ll go bounding to see
That great circle of dancing
And we’ll dance endlessly
And we’ll dance with the all the children
Who’ve been lost along the way
We will welcome each other
Coming home, this glorious day
We’ve been walking through the darkness
On this long, hard climb
Carried ancestral sorrow
For too long a time
Will you lay down your burden
Lay it down, come with me
It will never be forgotten
Held in love, so tenderly
We are home in the mountain
And we’ll gently understand
That we’ve been friends forever
That we’ve never been alone
We’ll sing on through any darkness
And our Song will be our sight
We can learn to offer praise again
Coming home to the light . .
For a printable PDF of the text of this meditation please click the link below.
1 Comment
Thank you, Philip.