Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Today’s reading

Philippians 1:18b-21

“For to me, living is Christ and dying is gain” (Phil 1:21).

Prayer

To what do you invite me, O Life of all the living? What is here for me in words that stir my soul from sleep in the small hours? Lightness fills body and soul with freedom and tears though the dawn is but a smug on the horizon. For I am here with you.

Most of the time I am elsewhere. My uncentered and untethered heart wanders the Earth from place to place, task to task, person to person, caught in the rushing current of belligerent ‘musts.’ I am not stayed on you, on your love for me and for all that is. You only ask me to come, to stay, to listen, to tether my heart to your own no matter where I go.

And when I am with you, I am alive. Death has no hold, nor anxiety or even the rush of living that is a kind of death in which I refuse the gift of your life. All these are replaced by a gentle lightness of being--of being with you, in you--where I live a life I know nowhere else. I am encompassed by the all-encompassing Love you are.

And though alone, I am not alone. For there in the still silence of your love is all that is, all with whom I share life and creation; every universe and cosmos is there, down to the most infinitesimal particles of the real. All of it, all of it loved, all of of it in you, as I am in you.

This is living. All else is shadow. You are life, Blessed One. To live is to know you. To die is to die into the love whom you are. What more could I need or want? Amen.