Quiet Space 28th June 2020
Welcome to Quiet Space
A meditation for Midsummer in a time of change
Stilling
Take a moment to dim the lights and to sit still with your breathing in the silence.
Praising
All praise and honour and blessing to you
For shining forth your love in all your creatures
Praised be you for Mother Earth,
Nourishing with her goodness, enlivening my senses.
Luscious flesh of fruit to taste, delight of eye at petal’s palette
Sound of midsummer breeze through tree’s fat leaves,
tissues of memory in smell of freshly mown grass,
touch of ground on newly browned skin.
Praise be you for Sister Senses to perceive you.
Reading - Luke 9:57-62
As they were going along the road, someone said to him, ‘I will follow you wherever you go.’ And Jesus said to him, ‘Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.’
To another he said, ‘Follow me.’ But he said, ‘Lord, first let me go and bury my father.’ But Jesus said to him, ‘Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.’
Another said, ‘I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home.’ Jesus said to him, ‘No one who puts a hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.’
Meditation 1: This Is Where I Am
Not everyone is able to walk, but most people can, which makes walking one of the most easily available spiritual practices of all. All it takes is the decision to walk with some awareness, both of who you are and what you are doing. Where you are going is not as important, however, counterintuitive that may seem. To detach the walking from the destination is one of the best ways to recognise the altars that you are passing right by all the time. Most of us spend so much time thinking about where we have been or where we are supposed to be going that we have a hard time recognising where we actually are. When someone asks us where we want to be in our lives, the last thing that occurs to us is to look down at our feet and say “Here, I guess, since this is where I am.”
Silence
Meditation 2: Extract from Foxhole
Rooted immovably in the heart attuned to its own transience is the certainty that when the time of parting arrives, it will be love that infuses the grief with thanksgiving, and love that enables the road ahead once again to come alive with hopeful possibility.
So here in this cherished place, bag in hand, I will give thanks. I will not envy the fox its carefully dug hole nor the birds of the air their nests. Love, portable and resilient, is itself the rootedness; another change of scene can only deepen the truth of it. So now, together with the Son of Man, and in the most excellent of company, I once again turn to face the road.
Blessing
May the blessing of the Creator from whom we all come,
radiate though all that is above, beneath and around me
and shed kind beam on all my Kindred Creatures
as we rest together under cloak of Sister Night
and as I walk another mile with them in the company of Brother Day.
Sources:
Tess Ward, The Celtic Wheel of the Year
Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World
Jenny Gaffin Foxhole