Category: Prayer
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Breath Prayer
Breath prayer, is a wonderfully simple form of prayer. It is sometimes known as a ‘prayer of the heart’. For me it its a physical prayer — a prayer of the body — with an emphasis more on posture and inner orientation . In this prayer we receive each breath as a gift — a…
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Responding to the divine Lover
“Prayer has far more to do with what God wants to do in us than with our trying to “reach” or “realise”, still less “entertain”, God in prayer… What we think of as our search for God is in reality, a response to the divine Lover drawing us to himself. There is never a moment…
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Longing / Home (after Köder)
How can we discern our hearts desire? How can we bring before God what is on our hearts. Prayer and meditation in their various forms can be part of this process. I’ve also found that creative expression can also play a role alone side prayer, meditation and reflection. This drawing (below) resulted from a time of…
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Who we are to become
Rowan Williams’ Silence and Honey Cakes is a joy to read and a real source of wisdom. He encourages to engage in the “patient, long-term discovery of what grace will do” to us. It is a work that “requires the kind of vulnerability to each other that can only come with the building up of trust…
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Patient Oak
There are times when the wisest option is to say nothing. There are times when we can feel we don’t trust ourselves to say anything. There are times of silence because any expression of the current situation seems inadequate or insincere. There are times of silence because of sorrow. There are times of silence because…
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Sacramental
I’m praying with eyes open today, as Peterson recommends (see ‘The Contemplative Pastor’). As I do so, I’m mulling over the psalmists concern to: “behold the beauty of the Lord and seek him in his temple.” Sacramental Made of meat, flesh on bone, dust gathering on soles of feet. Dust and stone my kith and…
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This is the day
Awake my soul The many shades of sky, crystalline white, pale mauve, a green, soft, light rests in to the blue, aqua tones found nowhere else in nature, except on the back of rare, warm water creatures. Yet here I sit staring out on a winters sky at the mid point between the equator and…
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Do you not know that we are planning a wedding feast?
This is wonderful, the (brilliant) painter Makoto Fujimura writes an open letter to north-american-churches (although I think that this also has resonances for all churches in the western world). Makoto writes about the how and why art and artists got pushed to the margins and in many cases outside the church. Of course there are…
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Waiting
We have now entered the season of Advent, the time of waiting before Christmas. It’s an important time to remember that we are waiting for the completion of what Jesus has started and is doing in the world, whilst also remembering that initial waiting for the coming of the Messiah. This is not a passive…