Dear All,
We have chosen some pieces that ask the question, ‘how am I living my life?’ It is quite a stark question that stopped me in my tracks. Am I just ‘getting through’ life or is it more than that? Do I need to renew my purpose, my intention and to live with more enthusiasm? We hope some of you will find something here helpful.
This week our blessing will be ‘A Blessing’ from Margaret Rizza’s ‘Fire of Love’ CD. Hoping you have a good week ahead.
With love
Choose Life
Henri Nouwen
Jesus says, “Think about the Kingdom first and all the other things you are so worried about will fall into place. Why are you so worried? Why are you so preoccupied? Why are you so afraid? I would like to make you free. I would like you to follow the Lord in whose presence there is life. I want to give you life. If you hold on to your own things you get enemies. You get walls. You get death. There is destruction, war, and violence. But I am the Lord of life. Choose life! Choose me in whose presence there is abundance.”
Incarnation
I will not die an unlived life,
I will not go in fear
Of falling or catching fire.
I choose to inhabit my days,
To allow my living to open to me,
To make me less afraid,
More accessible,
To loosen my heart
Until it becomes a wing,
A torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my significance:
To live.
So that which came to me as a seed,
Goes to the next as blossom,
And that which came to me as blossom
Goes on as fruit.
Dawna Markova
Journey to the Beginning of Creation
Some people travel in straight lines:
Sat in metal boxes, eyes ahead,
Always mindful of their target,
Moving in obedience to the coloured lights & white lines,
Mission accomplished at journey’s end.
Some people travel round in circles:
Trudging in drudgery, eyes looking down,
Knowing only too well their daily unchanging round,
Moving in response to clock and habit,
Journey never finished yet never begun.
I want to travel in patterns of God’s making:
Walking in wonder, gazing all around,
Knowing my destiny, though not my destination,
Moving to the rhythms of the surging of God’s spirit,
A journey which when life ends, in Christ has just begun.
Julia McGuiness
Who Will Live Your Life?
by Mark Nepo
This is what the great choice comes down to – the great conflict between first-hand experience and tradition, between spontaneity and decorum, between compassion and obligation. Other life forms have no part in this. It’s strictly a human affair. The sapling doesn’t look to its elders for approval, it just grows toward the light. The bee feels its hunger and finds its honey.
When I speak of these things, distrustful minds, against all intention of getting involved, blurt out: but we have to live in the real world. After a long silence, I offer: you must meet the outer world with your inner world or existence will crush you.
And so it begins, continues, ensues: Who will live your life? The answer is obvious. Yet the difficulty is not in knowing the course, but in accepting the many ways we give our life away, accepting the many ways we abdicate the one outright gift we have.
Too often, we’re told that to live in the real world we must give up our dreams in service of a survival that looms as pragmatic. In truth, it’s the opposite. Living in the world in a real way requires the evolution of an interior life, and much of our health depends on how we, at our porous best, negotiate the infiltration of outer and the release of inner.
Kabir, the great mystic poet of India, suggests that the soul is merely a portion of ocean gathered in our pitcher of a life:
Take a pitcher full of water and set it down on the water –
now it has water inside and water outside.
We mustn’t give it a name,
lest silly people start talking again
about the body and the soul.
When we tend our soul, we tend to our portion of ocean. When we give complete attention to our portion of God’s Being, we take up space and emanate the depths of our original energy. It’s how we shine within. And at the edge, where the individual soul meets the world, where the pitcher meets the ocean, where inner light meets outer light, there is a kinetic border we can’t resist, a rim called wonder that draws us back into the Whole.