“O Sacred Balance, poised at true, in this season when night and day are equal, by moonlight and sunlight, come with your holy searchlight as I survey the different calls on my life. Be in my discernment of time as I go between world and home today. Help me to discover my need for busyness and rest, for solitude and togetherness, for self and other. Be the deep well within me fluidly moving between discipline and mercy, that I might live in the ebb and flow of your rhythms knowing that there is a time for all things. Make me steady in my day as I set forth this morning.”
From The Celtic Wheel of the Year: Celtic and Christian Seasonal Prayers by Tess Ward
“I’ve found something so rare, So miraculous, No-one can assess How much it is worth.
It is colourless and One; It is eternal and indivisible; The waves of change never break over it; It fills every vessel.
It has no weight; it has no price; No-one can ever measure it; No-one can count it; It cannot be known Through talk or erudition. It isn’t heavy and it isn’t light. There isn’t a touchstone in any world That can reveal its worth.
I live in it; it lives in me And we are one, like water Mingled with water. The one who knows it Can never die – The one who doesn’t know it Dies again and again.”
Kabir, 15th century India
Image: Am I a Drop or the Ocean? by Kamran Khavarani
“Now I become myself. It’s taken Time, many years and places; I have been dissolved and shaken, Worn other people’s faces, Run madly, as if Time were there, Terribly old, crying a warning, “Hurry, you will be dead before—” (What? Before you reach the morning? Or the end of the poem is clear? Or love safe in the walled city?) Now to stand still, to be here, Feel my own weight and density! The black shadow on the paper Is my hand; the shadow of a word As thought shapes the shaper Falls heavy on the page, is heard. All fuses now, falls into place From wish to action, word to silence, My work, my love, my time, my face Gathered into one intense Gesture of growing like a plant. As slowly as the ripening fruit Fertile, detached, and always spent, Falls but does not exhaust the root, So all the poem is, can give, Grows in me to become the song, Made so and rooted by love. Now there is time and Time is young. O, in this single hour I live All of myself and do not move. I, the pursued, who madly ran, Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!”
“To receive this blessing, all you have to do is let your heart break. Let it crack open. Let it fall apart so you can see its secret chambers, the hidden spaces where you have hesitated to go.
Your entire life is here, inscribed whole upon your heart’s walls: every path taken or left behind, every face you turned toward or turned away, every word spoken in love or in rage, every line of your life you would prefer to leave in shadow, every story that shimmers with treasures known and those you have yet to find.
It could take you days to wander these rooms. Forty, at least.
And so let this be a season for wandering, for trusting the breaking, for tracing the rupture that will return you
to the One who waits, who watches, who works within the rending to make your heart whole.”
“You ast yourself one question, it lead to fifteen. I start to wonder why us need love. Why us suffer. Why us black. Why us men and women. Where do children really come from. It didn’t take long to realize I didn’t hardly know nothing. And that if you ast yourself why you black or a man or a woman or a bush it don’t mean nothing if you don’t ast why you here, period.
I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ast. And that in wondering bout the big things and asting bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, the more I love.”
From The Color Purple by Alice Walker, born on this day in 1944
“God of life, there are days when the burdens we carry chafe our shoulders and wear us down; when the road seems dreary and endless, the skies gray and threatening; when our lives have no music in them and our hearts are lonely, and our souls have lost their courage. Flood the path with light, we beseech you; turn our eyes to where the skies are full of promise.”
“Under pine trees in the snow, the chickadees around my head, I wept for the will of God, this hungry woman fed. All the shadows shifted while my back was turned. Once and always on my finger one soft and small gray bird. Not a twisting due to prayer, but all its own, and mine together. And so I bear the gift, carry it through time— this deepest darkness, astonishing grace.”
“Summoned from sleep in the heart of night my name is called and, like Samuel, I rise from my bed seeking the caller. Summoned from sleep I am drawn into the beating heart of the One who called me. The angel of night lights a candle in my soul inviting me to listen to the wordless song of Divine Union. Deep healing. Deep listening. Deep waiting. Deep watching. All of these become a part of my night watch. In the heart of the night you prepare me to be your deep healing for all who watch through the night of their fears.”
King Edward Street Chapel 