Monday, December 31, 2012

Year-ending, Year-beginning


Year-ending, Year-beginning

Elizabeth O'Connor


Use New Year's Eve or New Year's Day as a time of reflection on the year gone and the year to come:

What took place in your home relations? Your work relations? Your church relations? What events in the larger community of city, country and world most captured your attention?

Who were the significant people in your life? What books and art instructed your mind and heart?

Did you create anything this year? Did you make any new discoveries about yourself? How were you gift last year to a person, a community or an institution?

What was your greatest joy in this year gone? What was your greatest sorrow? What caused you the most disappointment? What caused you the most sadness?

In what areas of your life did you grow? Were these areas related to your joy or your pain?

What are your regrets? How would you do things differently, if you could live the year again? What did you learn?

Did you have a recurring dream? What theme or themes ran through your year?

Did you grow in your capacity to be a person in community--to bear your own burdens, to let others bear theirs? Did you have sufficient time apart with yourself?

Did you root your life more firmly in Scripture? Did you grow in your understanding of yourself? What was your most important insight? Did God seem near or far off?

How do you want to create the new year? What kind of commitment do you want to make to yourself? Your community? To the oppressed people of the world? How do the questions about commitment make you feel? Angry? Challenged? Hopeful?

Who are the people with whom you would like to deepen your relationships in the year to come? Do you have relationships that need to be healed? What can you do to heal your own heart? What can others do to assist in your healing?

Is there a special piece of inward work that you would like to accomplish? Is there a special outward work? What are the goals that seem important to you? What are your hopes? What are your fears? What are the immediate first steps that you can take toward the goals that seem important to you?

We might have a time of prayer in which to give thanks for all the events of the year gone, and to ask that the God through whose fingers they were filtered will continue to bless them to our use. They are now the bread of our life--part of all that we have to share with another when we share what is ours to give away.

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Source: Letters to Scattered Pilgrims

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Daily Meditation: God's Imagination

Henri Nouwen Society - Daily Meditation

Monday December 31, 2012   


God's Imagination

 

So much of our energy, time, and money goes into maintaining distance from one another.  Many if not most of the resources of the world are used to defend ourselves against each other, to maintain or increase our power, and to safeguard our own privileged position.

 

Imagine all that effort being put in the service of peace and reconciliation!  Would there be any poverty?  Would there be crimes and wars?  Just imagine that there was no longer fear among people, no longer any rivalry, hostility, bitterness, or revenge.  Just imagine all the people on this planet holding hands and forming one large circle of love.   We say, "I can't imagine."  But God says,  "That's what I imagine, a whole world not only created but also living in my image."

 

- Henri J. M. Nouwen  

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Text excerpts taken from Bread for the Journey, by Henri J.M. Nouwen, ©1997 HarperSanFrancisco. All Scripture from The Jerusalem Bible ©1966, 1967, and 1968 Darton, Longman & Todd and Doubleday & Co. Inc. Photo by V. Dobson.
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Sunday, December 30, 2012

Daily Meditation: Letting Go of Old Hurts

Henri Nouwen Society - Daily Meditation

Sunday December 30, 2012   


Letting Go of Old Hurts

 

One of the hardest things in life is to let go of old hurts.  We often say, or at least think:  "What you did to me and my family, my ancestors, or my friends I cannot forget or forgive. ... One day you will have to pay for it."  Sometimes our memories are decades, even centuries, old and keep asking for revenge.

 

Holding people's faults against them often creates an impenetrable wall.  But listen to Paul:  "For anyone who is in Christ, there is a new creation:  the old order is gone and a new being is there to see.  It is all God's work" (2 Corinthians 5:17-18).  Indeed, we cannot let go of old hurts, but God can.  Paul says:  "God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not holding anyone's fault against them" (2 Corinthians 5:19).  It is God's work, but we are God's ministers, because the God who reconciled the world to God entrusted to us "the message of reconciliation" (2 Corinthians 5:19).  This message calls us to let go of old hurts in the Name of God.  It is the message our world most needs to hear.

 

- Henri J. M. Nouwen  

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Text excerpts taken from Bread for the Journey, by Henri J.M. Nouwen, ©1997 HarperSanFrancisco. All Scripture from The Jerusalem Bible ©1966, 1967, and 1968 Darton, Longman & Todd and Doubleday & Co. Inc. Photo by V. Dobson.
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Saturday, December 29, 2012

The Mystery of Christmas


The Mystery of Christmas

N. Gordon Cosby


We struggle to describe the mystery of Christmas. We say God came. What came? Who came? There is no adequate name for God, only hints of God's Being, God's Reality. We say Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Prince of Peace. All hint at something ineffable, beyond, infinite--that which we cannot grasp and know but have received intimations of, and a few times have even experienced directly.

This Beyond reality, whatever name and other descriptors we give it, is Love. We know it is Love because it wants to be close to us--to be deeply connected with all that has been created. The infinite galaxies, the endlessly fascinating space we call Earth, all the multiple expressions of Life, including what we call human life, was brought into being because that is what Love does. It is the nature of Love to beget, to become, to bring together.

Several minutes ago (or in human time, about 2000 years) God said, "Love compels me to get closer. I must be amongst this life I've created and loved from the beginning. I must find a way to be even more deeply connected and let my people know me and enter more deeply into their true nature, which is deeper and deeper unity with one another. They are by nature ONE. I must let them know." The awesome claim of Christmas is that this ineffable Reality that brought it all into being wanted to be more deeply involved with the created, wanted to be with us, be one of us.

"I will make a new covenant with my people. I will remove the heart of stone that shuns this closeness, and I will replace it with a heart of flesh which wants no separateness. I will come into their midst, assuming total vulnerability alongside them and will establish this new covenant of union. Together my people and I will live in this ecstatic union and draw all creation toward the joy of it."

That's the culmination of the work of the Babe in Bethlehem's manger. Joyful union of all creation with the God of our beginning.

Source: sermon

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Daily Meditation: A Ministry that Never Ends

Henri Nouwen Society - Daily Meditation

Saturday December 29, 2012   


A Ministry that Never Ends

 

Reconciliation is much more than a one-time event by which a conflict is resolved and peace established.  A ministry of reconciliation goes far beyond problem solving, mediation, and peace agreements.  There is not a moment in our lives without the need for reconciliation.  When we dare to look at the myriad hostile feelings and thoughts in our hearts and minds, we will immediately recognize the many little and big wars in which we take part.  Our enemy can be a parent, a child, a "friendly" neighbor, people with different lifestyles, people who do not think as we think, speak as we speak, or act as we act.  They all can become "them."  Right there is where reconciliation is needed.

 

Reconciliation touches the most hidden parts of our souls.  God gave reconciliation to us as a ministry that never ends.

 

- Henri J. M. Nouwen  

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Text excerpts taken from Bread for the Journey, by Henri J.M. Nouwen, ©1997 HarperSanFrancisco. All Scripture from The Jerusalem Bible ©1966, 1967, and 1968 Darton, Longman & Todd and Doubleday & Co. Inc. Photo by V. Dobson.
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Friday, December 28, 2012

The Singing of Angels


The Singing of Angels

Howard Thurman


There must be always
remaining in every life,
some place for the singing of angels.

Some place for that
which in itself
is breathless and
beautiful.

Old burdens become lighter
deep and ancient wounds
lose much of their old hurting.

Despite all the crassness of life,
all the hardness and
harsh discords,
life is saved by
the singing of angels.

Source: The Mood of Christmas

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Daily Meditation: Being Safe Places for Others

Henri Nouwen Society - Daily Meditation

Friday December 28, 2012   


Being Safe Places for Others

 

When we are free from the need to judge or condemn, we can become safe places for people to meet in vulnerability and take down the walls that separate them.   Being deeply rooted in the love of God, we cannot help but invite people to love one another.  When people realise that we have no hidden agendas or unspoken intentions, that we are not trying to gain any profit for ourselves, and that our only desire is for peace and reconciliation, they may find the inner freedom and courage to leave their guns at the door and enter into conversation with their enemies.

 

Many times this happens even without our planning.  Our ministry of reconciliation most often takes place when we ourselves are least aware of it.  Our simple, nonjudgmental presence does it.

 

- Henri J. M. Nouwen  

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Text excerpts taken from Bread for the Journey, by Henri J.M. Nouwen, ©1997 HarperSanFrancisco. All Scripture from The Jerusalem Bible ©1966, 1967, and 1968 Darton, Longman & Todd and Doubleday & Co. Inc. Photo by V. Dobson.
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