Good day good people,
Today marks the second week of the season of Advent. And Friday was the feast of Saint Nicolas, the celebration of the fourth century Greek bishop whose profound generosity and We are now in the middle of the third week of the season of Advent. Last week, we looked out for opportunities to be of service to and share the substance we have been understudying (through conscious absorption and conscious imitation). As we move more deeply into this sacred season, let us take our collective work of creating sun within another step further by way of exploring what it might look like to wield this substance as an actual force.
Cynthia Bourgeault speaks of this idea of wielding in many of her teachings, encouraging us to not just go into situations looking for something we want or need but rather to look at what the situation is needing and to bring or wield the spiritual nutrient or substance needed. We hold the possibility of bringing it forth as a force for ourselves and for another as many of our spiritual ancestors have done.
All of our Wisdom practices are in service of stabilizing an inner body that is able to respect yet not be overcome by our valid instincts for survival, to remain present, to stand firm in our center and not bend in the midst of struggles in life, and to wield from. Of course we will continue to need to face our and our ancestral shadows, doing our psychological work to befriend our ‘inner beasts’ and bear that which divides or clouds our hearts. The arising from our work is both psychological wholeness, and the capacity to see from a clear heart that is already our intimate taproot to the fullness beyond time. We are learning to be as sturdy as a tower that will not topple over.
Pause and reflect, as Cynthia has often suggested, on what it might mean for you to “wield” these substances rather than merely “receive” them. . . to bring them as forces rather than as a reaction to life or looking to life to draw them out of you. . . even when there is no external confirmation that they are warranted. How could this impact your life? What new imaginative possibilities might this open up?
We are feeding and opening to the influence of the inner and outer sun and offering ourselves as wielders of its nourishing and affirming impact within and all around us.
Advent Love and Blessings,
Heather
Readings from last week's Daily Contemplative Pauses
*All previous readings & reflections can be found here*
Monday, December 9th with Faye
Chant: The streams of my father’s love run daily through me, the streams of my Mother’s love run daily through me, from the holy Fountain of Life to the seed throughout the whole creation (by Paulette Meier)
Tuesday, December 10th with Heather
Reading: “One of the essential paradoxes of Advent: that while we wait for God, we are with God all along, that while we need to be reassured of God's arrival, of the arrival of our homecoming, we are already at home. While we wait, we have to trust, to have faith, but it is God's grace that gives us that faith. As with all spiritual knowledge, two things are true, and equally true, at once. The mind can't grasp paradox; it's the knowledge of the soul.” — Michelle Blake
Wednesday, December 11th with Heather
Reading: “We are all meant to be mothers of God. What good is it to me if this eternal birth of the Divine Son takes place unceasingly, but does not take place within myself? And what good is it to me if Mary is full of grace, but I am not also full of grace? What good is it to me for the Creator to give birth to his Son if I do not also give birth to him in my time and culture? This, then, is the fullness of time: when the Son of God is begotten in us.” — Meister Eckhart
Chant: Inner Life of Being, bearing [grace, love, joy, peace, Christ] within me [us], come (John Tavener, Alan Krema and Darlene Franz)
Thursday, December 12th with Heather
Reading: “Advent carries a mixed message. The texts we are given for this season call for silence, vigilance, waiting, hoping, emptying. We are called to the practices of the heart making space and stillness. Meanwhile outside there is that escalating round of activities – the parties and the potlucks, the shopping and the beginning of ski season. What are we going to do? It is really important to do what the instructions say we are to do from the spiritual standpoint. Karl Rahner points the way forward in his essay, “A Theology of Christmas” when he says, in this season, We have to have the courage to be alone. Life dissipates us. It is only as we collect our heart in the mirror of a gathered stillness that we can prevent being taken apart by the demands and the crazy expectations of this season.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
Chant: Stilled and quiet is my soul, in love’s presence, I take my rest (by Sister Helen Marie Gilsdorf, RSM)
Friday, December 13th with Heather
Reading: “Have the courage to be alone. Only once you have really managed to do this, and have achieved it in a Christian way, can you hope to give the present of a heart filled with the Christmas spirit—in other words, a gently patient, courageously collected, softly tender heart—to those you are striving to love. You must allow yourselves to approach silently nearer and nearer to yourself…in this moment of silence…all the waters of your life flow away and run out and which are collected in the one basin of a heart aware of itself.” — Karl Rahner
Chant: keep within, keep within, keep within, keep within (by Heather Ruce)
Saturday, December 14th with Heather
Reading: “When we cultivate the capacity to be alone without feeling lonely, we enter into solitude where we find ourselves anew…. Each time we venture into the realm of Silence consciously, not merely by accident, our soul is strengthened and a feeling-with-clarity emerges. When we become just a bit more alert within this realm, we discover something paradoxical. This realm of Silence is filled with currents of activity. We do not enter into loneliness or isolation but into the deepest feeling of communion…. Waves of quiet move between the silences as intertwining currents. The soul of each creature, each thing, and each being unites with these currents.” — Robert Sardello, Silence
Sunday, December 15th with Heather
Reading: “Suppose this world isn’t a mistake, a myth, a fall, suppose it is precisely these conditions of fragility, finitude, density which allow the divine heart when its focused and brought to radiance in the heart of a human being who is actively courageously intelligently receptive then we have the real co-creation of the Christ, the infinite love in finite form. And that is the why of what this festival was about and it takes the whole power, profundity, human depth, physical depth of the God-barer, our earth our planet to bring forth in human form what the always uncreated brilliant light of love is like. So during this time of advent as we ourselves converge toward the Christmas, the birth of the Christic, may it not be just in a stable without but in the stable of your heart, in your own human flesh and form that the rays of this uncreated light may shine forth in you and radiate your entire ordinary life with a glow of the eternal from which it is always emerging and into which we are always returning.” — Cynthia Bourgeault, An Advent Meditation by Cynthia Unedited Transcript 2017 Center for Action and Contemplation
Chant: Light in the Dark, Dark in the Light, Lead us O Lord, by a different sight (by Henry Schoenfield)
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