prayer....................

 

     I would say yes to a prayer that reaches out over the companionable objects of our day, yes to prayers for more charity, resilience, good-naturedness, and also a listening kind of praying that is tucked somewhere always in our heart, mystically turning to ever greater reality.  What a woeful thing it would be to be denied prayer, to be numbed to its gratitude.  We can live without a great deal, but to live entirely without prayer would leave us lesser human beings.  Prayer changes our relationships with pretty much everything.  It the tribulation of night I turn the wheel of my prayer rope and steer my ship over woeful seas.  In the brightness of the longed-for dawn I stare east and am deep-rooted in the wallop of my amazement.

     In the end, prayer isn't something we do, it becomes something that we are.

-Martin Shaw, Liturgies of the Wild: Myths That Make Us

Let us pray.....................

 

They may love dogs, read Victor Hugo novels, and prefer suits from Savile Row, but they are not like us.

And we should pray that we are never like them.

-Michael Wade, from his latest

Checking in with........................

 

................................Matthew McConaughey:

If you cannot stop the lies, become less gullible.

With or without us the future is happening.  Tune in.

May our heart carry our feet.  Amen

Never give up your right to do the next right thing.  This is how we find our way home.

Life's a miraculous journey of false summits until the end.  Surrender to this fact.  And climb until then.

Let us play...............

 

Let us ask the gods not for possessions, but for things to do; happiness is in making things rather than in consuming them. In Utopia, said Thoreau, each would build his own home; and then song would come back to the heart of man, as it comes to the bird when it builds its nest. If we cannot build our homes, we can at least walk and throw and run; and we should never be so old as merely to watch games instead of playing them. Let us play is as good as Let us pray, and the results are more assured.

-Will Durant, as quoted here

essence........................

 

Perhaps, simply feeling grateful and living with a prayerful attitude are the essence of the entire spiritual journey.

-Brian W. Jones

humble supplication.................

 

Having thus imparted to you my sentiments as they have been awakened by the occasion which brings us together, I shall take my present leave; but not without resorting once more to the benign Parent of the Human Race in humble supplication that, since He has been pleased to favor the American people with opportunities for deliberating in perfect tranquility, and dispositions for deciding with unparalleled unanimity on a form of government for the security of their union and the advancement of their happiness, so His divine blessing may be equally conspicuous in the enlarged views, the temperate consultations, and the wise measures on which the success of this Government must depend.

-George Washington, as he concludes his inaugural inaugural address

image via

the gift.......................

 

Seventy days on the river with a confusion between river turbulence and human tribulation.  We are here to be curious not consoled.  The gift of the gods is consciousness not my forlorn bleating prayers for equilibrium . . .

-Jim Harrison, In Search of Small Gods

sever........................

 

     The only obstacle to effectual praying, in this world of spiritual fellowship, would be individual selfishness.  To want to get just for one's own self, to ask for something which brings loss and injury to others, would be to sever one's self from the source of blessings, and to lose not only the thing sought but to lose, as well, one's very self.

-Rufus Jones, The Double Search: Studies in Atonement and Prayer

Be careful what you pray for........................

 

          more fun here

Amen................................

 

Prayers...................

 Prayers to the Holy Spirit are all fundamentally a plea for the Spirit's coming. . . . The Holy Spirit is the unrestricted presence of God in which our life wakes up, becomes wholly and entirely living, and is endowed with the energies of life.

-Jürgen Moltman, The Source of Life: The Holy Spirit and the Theology of Life

Clarity.........................

      When the brilliant ethicist John Kavanaugh went to work for three months at "the house of the dying" in Calcutta, he was seeking a clear answer as to how best to spend the rest of his life.  On the first morning there he met Mother Teresa.  She asked, "And what can I do for you?"  Kavanaugh asked her to pray for him.

     "What do you want me to pray for?" she asked.  He voiced the request that he had borne thousands of miles from the United States: "Pray that I have clarity."

     She said firmly, "No, I will not do that."  When he asked her why, she said, "Clarity is the last thing you are clinging to and must let go of."  When Kavanaugh commented that she always seemed to have the clarity he longed for, she laughed and said, "I have never had clarity, what I have always had is trust.  So I will pray that you trust God."

-Brennan Manning, Ruthless Trust: The Ragamuffin's Path to God

Happy.........................

 

To the child of my child: I may not be around when you read this but I want you to know that this morning I walked on a path and I could see the full moon above the pine trees. It was very bright and round and full and it made me very happy to see it. Someday you will be watching that same moon. I hope it makes you happy too.

-Leonard Cohen

via

Useful.................

U2.................................................Lights of Home

 

     As we do before every show, we pray.

     Sometimes it can feel as if we're strangers, praying to find the intimacy of a band that could be useful to our audience this evening.  Useful? To music.  To some higher purpose.  In some strangely familiar way we are changed.  We begin our prayers as comrades; we end them as friends finding a different image of ourselves, as well as the audience we're about to meet, who will change us again.

     To be useful is a curious prayer.  Unromantic.  A little dull even. but it's at the heart of who we are and why we're still here as a band.  Men who met as boys.  Men who have broken the promise that's at the very heart of rock 'n' roll, which is that you can have the world but in return the world will have you.  You can have your messiah complex, but you must die on a cross aged thirty-three, or everyone has the right to ask for their money back.  We've turned them down so far.

     We are men who bear some scar tissue from our various struggles with the world but whose eyes are remarkably clear considering the vicissitudes and surreality of a life playing stadiums for thirty-five years.

-Bono, Surrender: 40 songs, one story

Courage.........................

  thanks Rob

really meant it........................

 Down by the lake rosy reflections of celestial vapor appeared, and I said "God, I love you" and looked up to the sky and really meant it.  "I have fallen in love with you God.  Take care of us all, one way or another."

-Jack Kerouac,  The Dharma Bums

Lead me.........................

Lead me from dreaming to waking.
Lead me from opacity to clarity.
Lead me from the complicated to the simple.
Lead me from the obscure to the obvious.
Lead me from intention to attention.
Lead me from what I'm told I am to what I see I am.
Lead me from confrontation to wide openness.
Lead me to the place I never left,
Where there is peace, and peace

-The Upanishads

      via

A prayer......................................

 Can we please lay down our swords of vitriol and venom? Might we pray for peace and it begin with me, each of us? We pray for a peace that surpasses party, personal preferences, and tightly held prejudices.

-as culled from this post

Opening paragraphs..................

 The war had not yet come to us.  We lived in fear and hope and tried not to draw God's wrath down upon our securely walled town, with its hundred and five houses and the church and the cemetery, where our ancestors waited for the Day of Resurrection.

     We prayed often to keep the war away.  We prayed to the Almighty and to the kind Virgin.  We prayed to the Lady of the Forest and to the Little People of Midnight, to Saint Gerwin, to Peter the Gatekeeper, to John the Evangelist—and to be safe we also prayed to Old Mela, who during the Twelve Nights, when the demons are let loose, roams the heavens at the head of her retinue.  We prayed to the Horned Ones of ancient days and to Bishop Martin, who shared his cloak with the beggar when the latter was freezing, so that they were both freezing and pleasing to God, for what's the use of half a cloak in winder, and of course we prayed to Saint Maurice, who had chosen death with a whole legion rather than betray his faith in the one just God.

-Daniel Kehlmann,  Tyll

Praying..........................

................................................................for another success story.

thanks