the year of patience, meekness, love and good deeds

As of last week, June 29th to be specific, we have been in Wisconsin exactly one year. Some of my highlights have been to learn to be more patient, meek and to do good things - like support the Christian Science Reading Room, write an article, volunteer for a school project, comfort a friend, be more accessible to help others with healing through prayer and to pray for the world. I learned to be more mindful of things. Taking things more slowly - appreciating the details.

I have a new friend who is also a chaplain who works at the hospital where I volunteer on the prayer team. Prior to this work, she spent over a dozen years as a cloistered nun. We had lunch one day at my urging. I definitely wanted to know her take on prayer for the world and how she felt that prayer impacted the world. Her life, it seemed to me, fully embraced that life of patience, meekness, love and good deeds. Here is just a smattering of the ideas we talked about - in no particular order:

• When asked how she prays, she responded, "I pray as if the world depended on it. "
• When asked why she chose the contemplative life for that period of time, she acknowledged that she was called into it and called out of it toward other things. But the love behind answering that call to the contemplative life came from a deep desire to get to the heart of the matter. If she was going to pray, she needed to aim right at its heart.
• There is a website for the Carmelite sisters of Indianapolis,who are cloistered and contemplative, and are engaged in active prayer for the world.
• "The distinctive human capacity for reflection and intentional choice carries a corresponding moral responsibility to care for one another and the planet. We are the ones we have been waiting for." David Korten
• Spiritual growth has three stages: to purify, to illuminate and then to commune with God.
• Thomas Merton, Trappist monk, mystic and contemplative author, was asked how he prayed. His response: "I breathe in and I breathe out."
  

Prayer is like breathing. You receive and take in God's thoughts. These nourish and sustain you and bring you to action. Then you breathe out, let go and move on to the next idea.

Our prayer for the world can take on these three stages of spiritual growth as we purify our concept of the world and let this light shine. This brings about the whole world's communion with God. We breathe in, we breathe out. We breathe in and let God's inspirations form our lives into lives of patience, meekness, love and good deeds and we breathe out, letting go and trusting that love will continue to grow until we all breathe in as one and breathe out as one.





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