"To Come Awake...To Remain Awake" (C.S. Lewis)

"We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God. The world is crowded with God. God walks everywhere incognito. And the incognito is not always hard to penetrate. The real labor is to remember, to attend. In fact, to come awake. Still more, to remain awake."

(C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly On Prayer)

"Water from the Spiritual Well" (Theresa of Avila)

"Learning to draw water up from the spiritual well is a hard labor, indeed -- at least in the beginning.

It is difficult, in the first place, to keep all of your senses recollected and focused upon total humility before God. What a tremendous difficulty that is, because our senses are so much in the habit of flitting about from one worldly distraction to another. And so you must learn to set aside what you see and hear in order to see and hear what God would pour out upon you from His invisible kingdom...

When we begin to renew our minds in this way -- that is, building the habit of constantly, deeply meditating upon the Lord Jesus -- we draw water up out of the deep wells of salvation (Isaiah 12:3)."

(The Life of Theresa of Jesus) 

What and Who Binds Us Together

I was reading along in one of the appointed Psalms this morning, Psalm 28. And I got to these words, which always delight my heart whenever I stumble upon them in the lectionary:



7 Blessed is the Lord! *
for he has heard the voice of my prayer.

8 The Lord is my strength and my shield; *
my heart trusts in him, and I have been helped;

9 Therefore my heart dances for joy, *
and in my song will I praise him.

10 The Lord is the strength of his people, *
a safe refuge for his anointed.

11 Save your people and bless your inheritance; *
shepherd them and carry them for ever.

Something struck me about those words this morning, and about my love for those words. It struck me that one reason I love the Psalms is because the writers of them, the people who prayed these words originally and wrote them down, often speak words that seem to transcend the centuries and differences of culture and just pour out of human longings that we still have in common with them today.

But just when I was feeling awed by that connection, what awed me even further was the realization that yes, we share the same longings, the same needs, the same joys, but we also share the same God. The one who heard the voice of that Psalmist's prayer? He is the one who hears the voice of my prayer today!

No wonder the communion of saints feels so tightly connected! We are connected by so many things! I sometimes imagine a golden cord that we all hold onto through the years, a cord that binds us all together and keeps us dancing in the same circle.  But the cord that binds us is not just one strand, is it? It's a thick cord of strands that includes the thickest, most golden truth of all: that we worship the same Lord, the one who made us, loves us, redeems us, and sustains us through his Spirit.

Poetry Friday: A Better Resurrection (Christina Rossetti)

April has brought both poetry month and Easter this year. I've been grateful for this coinciding, as poetry month tends to push me to reading and writing more poetry.  When my heart is moving out of the Lenten season and into the celebration of Easter, especially when the world is waking up into spring, there is a lot to ponder.

This year, there is more than ever to ponder as I am in the midst of my continued battle against cancer. I was there this time last year too, but far too exhausted and in shock (I had just finished my initial intensive chemo treatments) to do much thinking or writing. Exhaustion has become just part of the new normal landscape, but thankfully shock does wear off, and you find ways to move forward as boldly and creatively as you can. You find life in the midst of illness, beauty in the midst of brokenness, hope in the midst of worry, prayer in the midst of pain.

I could go on, but Christina Rossetti shares it all so much more profoundly in her poem "A Better Resurrection" which I've pasted below.

Today's Poetry Friday Roundup is at Tabatha Yeatts' blog The Opposite of Indifference.

A Better Resurrection

I have no wit, no words, no tears;
My heart within me like a stone
Is numb'd too much for hopes or fears;
Look right, look left, I dwell alone;
I lift mine eyes, but dimm'd with grief
No everlasting hills I see;
My life is in the falling leaf:
O Jesus, quicken me.

My life is like a faded leaf,
My harvest dwindled to a husk:
Truly my life is void and brief
And tedious in the barren dusk;
My life is like a frozen thing,
No bud nor greenness can I see:
Yet rise it shall--the sap of Spring;
O Jesus, rise in me.

My life is like a broken bowl,
A broken bowl that cannot hold
One drop of water for my soul
Or cordial in the searching cold;
Cast in the fire the perish'd thing;
Melt and remould it, till it be
A royal cup for Him, my King:
O Jesus, drink of me.

~Christina Rossetti 

Breath Prayers

Pain and discomfort have been worse this week than in a while, and I've been needing a lot of short "arrow" prayers and breath prayers.

Breath prayers are especially helpful right now, because they do help me to literally breathe -- to say words I need to say as I take a deep intake of breath, to let that breath out in a swooshing exhale and say the rest of the words from the heart.

Some of the breath prayers I've been praying the most this week include:

• More of Jesus/Less of me

• Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Father/Have mercy on me, a sinner

• The Lord is my shepherd/I shall not want

• The name of the Lord is a strong tower/the righteous run into it and they are saved

   

This morning I added this one, which is a paraphrase from an excerpt from a Jean-Pierre de Caussade reading in a Lenten devotional:

• It matters not what my abilities are/only that I belong to you, Lord 

True confession: I sometimes struggle with de Caussade's talk of surrender. It can feel so wholehearted, yes, but so hard, and sometimes I think he veers us away from some of the things I think Jesus still asks us to do, even in the midst of total surrender and reverent submission -- ask, seek, knock, persist, be bold! Things we see in Jesus' own life! Oh, and complain and lament (from Psalm 55 today, and my prayers not just for myself, but for the whole hurting world).

And yet, I always seem to find myself stumbling across something that de Caussade has written during some of the deepest and darkest times of my life, and there is always something he says that tunnels into my heart and makes me long for deeper trust and deeper surrender. And today, that was it. It doesn't really matter so much what I do (or think I can do, or somehow manage to accomplish) it matters that the Lord has hold of me. It matters that I belong to him. I think de Caussade's words were actually "It matters not what my abilities may be then, provided that I possess you, Lord."

And possess is a beautiful word, but its connotation makes me want to flip it around. For the Lord possesses me. He owns me, cherishes me, treasures me. loves me. He lives inside me and makes me his child. I am his dear possession, one he gave his life to find and keep (for I was among the lost and found). And so I belong to him forever. Thank God.