Dear All,
We hope the summer is going well for you. School holidays are beginning & the pattern of many people’s lives will change – change temporarily, or more permanently. Children, parents, grandparents, teachers are all adjusting to a different routine. Times of change usually mean choices. This week our attachments are loosely connected to change & choices. We hope you find something helpful here.
Our blessing this week in from ‘Fire of Love’ – it is just called ‘A Blessing’. We could pray it for our families & friends or for all those who are undergoing significant change in their lives at the moment and are challenged by it.
With our love
PS For those who choose to join us for Evening Prayer: on this coming Wednesday & Thursday we have to be away on business so no Evening Prayer in Blessed Sacrament Church on Wednesday 26th and no zoom on Thursday 27th.
Choosing Freely
One of the best things about inner freedom
is the ability to be less controlled by our emotions
or our ideas, to be able to sort them out
and to see what leads to greater good.
It is the gift of deliberately choosing
to act in a certain way,
not out of guilt, fear, coercion, manipulation,
or any other unfree motivation,
but because we want to do so.
When we have inner freedom, we are able
to dwell more quietly at our centre
because we are more true to who we really are.
Joyce Rupp
Willingness to Change
From the beginning then,
there are moments
when the word addressed to us
makes us abandon the world
of our own making,
and enter upon new life.
Dialogue is not simply
a giving and receiving of information;
it does not change a person simply
by expanding their knowledge.
Again and again
as we are in dialogue with others
we must hear the painful word
which overcomes us,
and draws forth a response in us,
that transforms life.
The word addressed to us
at those moments
reveals to us the truth
of which we are afraid.
It pierces the screen we have put up
between ourselves and reality.
Then we must either flee from this word
and hide behind defenses,
or open ourselves to it,
go through the painful passage
from our shallow understanding
to greater depth,
and receive the truth
that has been spoken to us.
Trasna – the crossing place.
The pilgrims paused on the ancient stones, in the mountain gap.
Behind them stretched the roadway they had travelled,
Already a far journey …was it a lifetime? Ahead, mist hid the track.
Unspoken the question hovered: Why go on? Is life not short enough?
Why seek to pierce its mystery:
why venture further on strange paths, risking all?
Surely that is a gamble for fools…or lovers.
Why not return quietly by the known road? Why be a pilgrim still?
A voice they knew called to them, saying: This is Trasna, the crossing-place.
Choose!
Go back if you must,
You will find your way easily by yesterday’s road,
You can pitch your tent by yesterday’s fires, there may be embers yet.
If that is not your deep desire, stand still.
Lay down your load.
Take your life firmly in your two hands,
(Gently…you are trusted with something precious),
While you search your heart’s yearnings:
What am I seeking?
What is my quest?
When your star rises deep within, trust yourself to its leading.
You will have light for your first steps.
This is Trasna, the crossing-place.
Choose!
This is Trasna, the crossing-place.
Come!
Sister Raphael Considine PBVM