Greetings from my Thursday night newsletter on Saturday night!  I began piecing this together Thursday evening still feeling jostled and unsettled by the debate, only to wake up Friday to even more surprising news.  Perhaps the one thing on which we can all agree is that last week was not what we expected.  I found this scripture Thursday night, and I have to say that reading Eugene Peterson’s version made me chuckle:

Lamentations 3: 22-24 (from The Message)
God’s loyal love couldn’t have run out,
    his merciful love couldn’t have dried up.
They’re created new every morning.
    How great your faithfulness!
I’m sticking with God (I say it over and over).
    He’s all I’ve got left.

Slowly, slowly, I learn to rely on God.  In terms of this endeavor, we’re switching up our rhythm every week based on your feedback, and taking turns curating news some weeks and offering contemplative and creative practices others.  This week, we’re sharing ideas of ways we can practice encouragement and healing together (but safely apart) during these challenging times:

Contemplative Practice

It’s been done and said before, but this week I want to point back toward centering prayer as a vital and anchoring practice during these turbulent times.  After many (many) years of trying to build a practice I’m finally hitting a small stride, largely because the last month so overwhelmed me that many nights I don’t feel like I have a choice:  I simply have to sit still before an altar and lay it all down.  The centering aspect helps guide the prayer for me, though I do feel the need to verbally lay out all sorts of thoughts and context to God before I can actually get to the centering (external processor here).  Try not to let perfectionism hinder the healing practice of just sitting for 10-20 minutes at a time in silence and prayer, however that looks for you.  This video of Father Thomas Keating was encouraging that way, and these guidelines to approaching centering prayer provide breadcrumbs for your journey.

Something we can do together, apart:

Jim Cotter’s Healing continues to draw me back over the course of the pandemic, and a section about anointing with oil caught my eye.  Cotter mentions a passage from Bede of Jarrow that describes oil being blessed in church then “taken home by the people, where they administered anointing to one another.”  A small use of oil has become part of my daily prayer practice, and I wonder if it could be adapted for use from minister to congregants or incorporated in group prayer practice.  Cotter’s commentary felt particularly rich to me as I’ve watched a number of people I care deeply about suffer intensely over the past 7 months, one friend as a result of a freak accident, a few friends in difficult and prolonged struggles with mental health issues, and others with the constant barrage of re-ignited racial trauma our country is being called to engage and heal.  Each suffering intensely in their own way, and the whole world suffering around us with the implications and ramifications of the pandemic.  Here Cotter speaks of the what it is to support, acknowledge and anoint each person as they engage suffering, and the role of those outside of this suffering (affirming, anointing) to support one moving through it:

We cannot follow one another into these places.  There are depths which even the wisest cannot plumb.  When someone we love is so suffering, we are like the disciples of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane.  We cannot go with him in his unique struggle.  The most we can do is to watch and pray.  “I will be here for you, on the edge, and I may even fall asleep, but I will be here.”

The anointing with oil can then be understood as a consecration on the way of one’s deepest truth, going through a Gethsemane alone.  To be anointed is to seek the courage to lay oneself open completely to the love and will of God, even if it involves a cup that you would choose not to drink.

Faith may strengthen us in such circumstances, trust in the reliability and grace of God, faith that we shall touch no ground where Christ has not been.  We have to go our own way of the cross, but the depths of pain and loss have been sounded for us.  And in the midst of it all we may sense Christ’s sustaining presence.  So the oil of anointing becomes the oil of gladness and rejoicing.  Lamps are lit in the darkest of places, in the deepest of dungeons of all, where maybe even Satan yearns to become again an angel of light.

And the one who is anointed may be the one to anoint us in our turn.  The sufferer may heal us, a thought which hardly ever crosses our minds in the days of our strength.  The trust and openness of the mentally disabled may bring a grieving widow out of her isolation, and together they may know something of the peace which passes understanding.

Little more can be said.  We are on holy ground.  We have reached the point in our praying where we fall silent before a great mystery, that of suffering redeemed, not by being taken away, not by magic, but by going through it until it yields to joy.

Memorization/Meditation:
Engaging our hearts and brains on the journey:

This week’s verse: Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. (Lamentations 3:22-23)

This week’s poem:   Rabindranath Tagore published this poem in India in 1910, but it felt like the song our country might need this week….

Rest well, enjoy a peaceful Sunday-

Grace and love,

MLC

PS- this is a bottle of oil from a groovy apothecary in Germany and has proved an ideal (and pretty long lasting) take-home size

The post Anointing with Oil appeared first on 787 Collective.

I know this was an Easter many of us will never forget.  The beauty of the Easter Sunday, at least in Central Austin, was so incredible and refreshing after the rain of the past few days.   Here are a few thoughts and ideas for practices to ease you into the new week.  We hope you are finding practices that provide grounding in the midst of change, as we all work to find life-giving rhythms and craft a new sense of routine into our weeks.

Centering Prayer with an Eastertide focus:

Since Eastertide lasts 50 days, consider finding a word that you would like to hold as an intention particularly during this time and incorporate it into a Centering Prayer practice.  Contemplative Outreach lays out the process of Centering Prayer simply and beautifully here.  I haven’t had time to watch this recording myself yet, but was super excited to find this Zoom tutorial Contemplative Outreach recorded around facilitating meaningful prayer and other facilitated group experiences during the Pandemic.  Perhaps it could be helpful for folks in our midst.  If you try centering prayer and you like it, you can support and be supported by Contemplative Outreach right here in Austin by contacting or connecting with our local chapter, Heart of Texas Contemplative Outreach.   The Contemplative Outreach website, and the brief workshop I took on Centering Prayer years ago, both suggest engaging in Centering Prayer twice a day, for 20 minutes each session.  That is my #aspiration, but we all have to start somewhere, and my somewhere will likely be closer to 5 minutes, three times a day (no one tell Thomas Keating!).

Something we can do together, apart:

Last week I shared a link to a piece in The New Yorker by Catherine Ceb, and an excerpt from the article got me thinking:

“(My father) also handed out bulletins in the narthex and delivered the faithful to the altar for Communion, but my favorite of all the tasks he performed was ringing the bell, at the start of worship and at the end, but also near the middle of the service. Later in life, when I took a more meaningful interest in the liturgy and all its components—learning such wonderful things as why we share the peace before the Sacrament of Communion (so that we make peace with one another before God makes peace with us), and why the elements include water for weakening the wine (so that even the poor can bring an offering unto God)—it finally occurred to me to ask my pastor why we rang the bell when we did, during the Lord’s Prayer. In response, he asked if I could name any of the farmers who were not there for worship because of the harvest or recall any of the homebound who could no longer make it to services. We ring the bell for them, he told me, so that they know when we have gathered and when we are sent back into the world, and so that, no matter how far they are from the sanctuary, they can join us in reciting the words that Jesus taught us to pray. For almost as long as the Church has existed, bells have called Christians together when they have to be apart.”

The author goes on to name how, after moving to a large city, she learned to consider other sounds that were more frequent than church bells (like ambulance sirens) as a call to prayer.  Consider what your own personal call to prayer will be over the next week or weeks, and try implementing it in your daily practice.  Or connect with your community and covenant to a corporate call to prayer.  Maybe it’s just the chimes on your phone set for three specific times a day, or maybe there’s an old, underused bell laying somewhere in a china cabinet (I’ve got one I brought my kids back as a souvenir from Indiana).  If there are children in your house, they could probably come up with their own brilliant substitutes, and when in doubt, there is always the old glass-and-spoon (the thinner the glass, the clearer the sound).  Perhaps it’s just the act of ringing the bell in solidarity, knowing that it’s calling people of faith together in spirit when our physical bodies must remain distanced, reminding us that we are not alone.  Or maybe, like Catharine Ceb, it’s an environmental noise.  Every time you hear bird song, or a helicopter, or a wind chime.  Anything works that calls us to pay closer attention to the world around us and the time we are passing in it, inviting us to a more habitual and intentional prayer practice individually and together.

Memorization/Meditation:

We are trucking along with these verses at my house but committing the poetry to memory is still a work in progress.  This week’s poem is pretty epic, so perhaps consider zoning in on a few lines or a stanza. I’ve included an excerpt below:

This week’s verse: “The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.” (Psalm 19:1)
This week’s poem:  The very long, very rich, very intense “East Coker” by T.S. Eliot.  Find a section of lines that resonate with you and commit them to memory. Here’s an excerpt, or you can read the whole (again, very long but very brilliant) poem here.

…There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,

A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

Easter joy and courage to you this week, and many blessings,

MLC

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