Monday, November 20, 2006

Today’s reading

Philippians 3:10-11

“I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I might attain the resurrection from the dead” (Phil. 3:10-11).

Prayer

I hear the cry of the everlasting hills, and I know: I am not alone. I have many sisters and brothers. The Earth is my brother. The ancient desire of every stony outcrop on this rock hurtling through space is to know you. The trees in the yard are my sisters. They strain to the heavens, stretching for the Infinite Source of life, singing your praise in dazzling delight before falling asleep to wait again the resurrection spring.

Your servant, Paul, too, is my brother. The everlasting cry of all life, which he voices, long ago took residence in my soul. It possesses me with insatiable hunger that only you can satisfy. I want to know you, the life you are. I want to enter the fullness of resurrection so that death’s power--the fear that distorts and disfigures my life, that so tenaciously clings to my heart--may evaporate like the morning mist. I long to breathe the sweet, fresh dawn of everlasting day.

I hunger for that day when every brother and sister of earth, who have been so badly denied the mercy that is your desire for every soul and every hamlet, breathes the gentle air of eternity, newly free from the ravenous prowl of death and despair that daily haunts them body and soul.

But entry into your fullness, Risen One, knows only one road: to share your struggle to love the world beyond its hatreds and violence, beyond the deadly logic of self-protective power and retribution, beyond calculating self-interest and chilly apathy. You invite us into your holy labor of loving the world to life, where the only ethic is to love as you love, giving life, your life, for friend and foe alike, where our prayer belongs as much to those who hate us as to our most dearly beloved.

This is the struggle of Life for life, the struggle of you who are Life with all that destroys and disfigures the beauty of what you continue to create. This is where I seek to be found, despite my fears, sharing your suffering, so that with this world so beloved to you, I, too, may enter into the desire of the everlasting hills. Amen.