Spiritual Journey Thursday: Nourish

Photo by John Salzarulo

Welcome to Spiritual Journey Thursday and a special group of friends blogging each month about our spiritual journeys. Today we are sharing over at Ramona's Pleasures from the Page about her 2017 One Little Word, "Nourish."

As I typically do when thinking about a specific word, I went to my dictionary and found this:

1.   provide with the food or other substances necessary for growth, health, and good condition.
2.   keep (a feeling or belief) in one's mind, typically for a long time.

I've connected with these thoughts on several levels recently. First, I've been considering a new, somewhat mind-boggling (at least for someone who had low fat eating drilled into me for so many years) new perspective on nourishing my body. I've been listening to the Keto for Women Show podcasts by Shawn Mynar on my phone for the last month. (Just open your podcast app and type in Keto for Women). They're well-worth considering. I love her tagline: Empowering women to take charge of their health and happiness. So much wonderful information on the many issues we face in light of what the world wants to nourish us with--images of skinny models, advertisements for medicines with so many side-effects it's ridiculous, and a constant push to over-exercise and under eat in order to be accepted. I like this idea of thinking about what goes into my body as nourishing it, but even more as healing it. 

A few weeks ago, I participated in a yoga training that required my body function well for six days from 6am to 9pm with very little down time and lots of interaction with others. I needed my quiet. I needed more rest. My body managed to keep up reasonably well, but I came away with a deeper knowing that I must maintain balance. So I continue to learn. Continue to move forward. 

So, I come to definition #2: To keep (a feeling or belief) in one's mind, typically for a long time. 

We can nourish all kinds of feelings, good ones and not so good. It's a good question to ponder. What feelings/belief am I nurturing? 

I've been reading a book called Too Deep for Words: Rediscovering Lectio Divina by Thelma Hall. This quote stood out to me today. The author is quoting Thomas Merton's reply to a Sufi friend who had asked him how he prayed.

Now you ask about my method of meditation. Strictly speaking I have a very simple way of prayer. It is centered entirely on attention to the presence of God and to his will and his love. That is to say that it is centered on faith by which alone we can know the presence of God. One might say this gives my (prayer) the character described by the prophet as "being before God as if you saw him." Yet it does not mean imagining anything or conceiving a precise image of God, for to my mind this would be a kind of idolatry. n the contrary, it is a matter of adoring him as all...There is in my heart this great thirst to recognize totally the nothingness of all that is not God. My prayer is a kind of praise rising up out of the center of Nothingness and Silence...It is not "thinking about" anything, but a direct seeking of the face of the invisible, which cannot be found unless we become lost in him who is invisible.

What a beautiful way to nourish the spirit and the soul and the body.
             
Eat something wonderful to nourish your body.
                         
                         Read great words to nourish your mind.
                                         
                                           Center your attention on the presence of God to nourish your spirit.

Spiritual Journey Thursday: Finding Joy

This week the bloggers of Spiritual Journey Thursday are posting on the theme "Finding Joy," suggested by Margaret Simon over at Reflections on the Teche. Head over to Margaret's blog if you'd like to read more on Finding Joy.

When I first read the topic for the month, I thought about what it means to find something. Was it lost? Was there a lengthy search? Was it simply a random stumbling upon an unexpected treasure to be pocketed with satisfaction?

But is that the way joy comes?

I think joy is something deeper than happiness. Joy can be present when happiness is tenuous or even absent. It is the understructure, the miraculous, the unexpected sense of knowing, not just who I am, but whose I am. The essential knowing that I am loved, that it's a good thing I am alive, that I have a place in the world. It's a solid knowing at the base of my soul that I can return to when the constant barrage of comparison, disapproval, or judgment lead me, like Pilgrim, toward the "slough of despond." It's a knowing that I am enjoyed by the one who created me. It's a safe place.

from Ode to Joy
by Annonymous


Joy everlasting fostereth 

The soul of all creation, 

It is her secret ferment fires 

The cup of life with flame.

'Tis at her beck the grass hath turned 

Each blade toward the light 

and solar systems have evolved 

From chaos and dark night, 

Filling the realms of boundless space 

Beyond the sage's sight.

Spiritual Journey Thursday: Easter Symbols

Purple on Palm Sunday. 

On the first Thursday of the month, a group of bloggers reflect on aspects of the spiritual journey. Today we will all be posting about "New Life/Spring/Easter" over at Violet Nesdoly's blog.

One of my favorite visual images at Easter is color. I love the colors in the liturgical calendar, the draping of the altar and the cross during this season.
 

Changes to black on Good Friday

And finally a bright, glorious white on Easter Sunday. 

It's what I love about images. Not many words necessary.

Spiritual Journey Thursday: Connection

“The past,' he thought, 'is linked with the present by an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of another.' And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain; that when he touched one end the other quivered.”

― Anton Chekhov, The Witch and Other Stories

I'm not a fan of ghost stories, so I haven't read this piece from Chekhov, but it feels like the perfect quote to go with my thoughts today. It's Spiritual Journey Thursday, the first Thursday of the month, and we are reflecting on my OLW for the year--connection. If you'd like to read more thoughts on this word, follow the links below when you have a few minutes to absorb and reflect.

Yes, I know it's Tuesday! But I am headed to the mountains with my daughters and grandson for some delicious family connections and I'm not exactly sure what kind of internet connection will be available. I figured it might be wise to get this posted before I leave.

One of the things I am exploring on this topic of connection is the link (or lack thereof) between my mind and my body. It goes without saying in my vocabulary that mind is more than just the mental faculties, but also includes the deeper connection to the heart. And we're also crossing another connection with this thought--my yoga practice and my writing. I'm shaking the ends of a bunch of chains here.

First let me explain a little pain science to you. We tend to think pain is a message a muscle (or other body tissue) sends to the brain. Research shows, however, that pain is a signal the brain sends to a tissue in the body, telling that muscle or tissue to protect itself. So we stub our toe, it hurts, we walk crooked for a few days, it heals, and the pain stops. However when we're talking about chronic pain, something that has been there for more than three months, there may or may not be a corresponding injury in the tissues. The brain considers many other factors when it is deciding to send the body that pain signal--things like memories, emotions, expectations, beliefs, and environment. See Jenni Rawlings blog for a fuller explanation and links to other websites on pain science. My PT son has been trying to explain this to me for years, but I hadn't managed to wrap my brain around it until recently.

I began yoga because of chronic pain in my back. It has always been a spiritual practice for me, as well as physical. As I begin to examine those places of chronic pain in my body, I am asking the Holy Spirit to show me what is causing that pain signal. And often it's not structural damage in my body, but some unhealed, unacknowledged, unrealized memory, emotion, or belief about myself that must be brought to the light of God's presence and held there for His healing word.

So, I'm re-educating my body through conscious slow movement that integrates what I know in my spirit is true and what I feel in my tissues.

Paul's letter to the Colossians says this: that they may be encouraged in heart, knit together in love, and filled with the full riches of complete understanding, so that they may know the mystery of God, namely Christ,

I do realize I am taking this slightly out of context. But the truth is I want this connection of heart, mind, and body. I want to know the mystery of God in my physical tissues, this earthly temple of His spirit, and I don't think God has a problem with that. 

So today, I'm wishing you amazing connections! 

Leave your link below if you have connecting thoughts on your blog.

Pondering: To Rise

Photo by Sebastian Gabriel 

I'm pondering today with a community of bloggers who write about their spiritual journey on the first Thursday of the month. Each month features a host blogger who chooses the topic. Each blogger responds to the topic and links their post to the host blog. This month Leigh Anne Eck has asked us to write about her one little word for the year--RISE. (I did finally post my own OLW for the year here.)


To Rise

The heart knows more
than the mind can tell.
It sings itself
out of a well.

where it has fought
in bogs of doubt.
It hears wings beat,
lets itself out.

What dares to sing
without words, has power
to rise like hope,
faith, sun, and flower.

--Joseph Joel Keith
Poetry Magazine, August 1928, p. 260.

This is a favorite verse from Isaiah, chapter 60. Some days it feels like the whole earth is wrapped in darkness, but I choose to remember that God is in control. My hope is in him, not in a person or a government or a cause.

Wake up. Put your face in the sunlight.
God’s bright glory has risen for you.
The whole earth is wrapped in darkness,
all people sunk in deep darkness,
But God rises on you,
his sunrise glory breaks over you.

May his sunrise glory break over you today.

The Best Kind of Friend!

Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person: having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but to pour them out. Just as they are--chaff and grain together, knowing that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness, blow the rest away.

     ---George Eliot, 1819-1880

Our Home

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; 

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
          Hath had elsewhere its setting
               And cometh from afar;
          Not in entire forgetfulness,
          And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come 
               From God, who is our home:

                           --William Wordsworth

It Took a Long Time

Return of the Prodigal by Rembrandt

The Prodigal

by Elizabeth Bishop

The brown enormous odor he lived by
was too close, with its breathing and thick hair,
for him to judge. The floor was rotten; the sty
was plastered halfway up with glass-smooth dung.
Light-lashed, self-righteous, above moving snouts,
the pigs' eyes followed him, a cheerful stare--
even to the sow that always ate her young--
till, sickening, he leaned to scratch her head.
But sometimes mornings after drinking bouts
(he hid the pints behind the two-by-fours),
the sunrise glazed the barnyard mud with red
the burning puddles seemed to reassure.
And then he thought he almost might endure
his exile yet another year or more.

But evenings the first star came to warn.
The farmer whom he worked for came at dark
to shut the cows and horses in the barn
beneath their overhanging clouds of hay,
with pitchforks, faint forked lightnings, catching light,
safe and companionable as in the Ark.
The pigs stuck out their little feet and snored.
The lantern--like the sun, going away--
laid on the mud a pacing aureole.
Carrying a bucket along a slimy board,
he felt the bats' uncertain staggering flight,
his shuddering insights, beyond his control,
touching him. But it took him a long time
finally to make up his mind to go home. 

Broken Image

Spiritual Journey Thursday

Photo by Christopher

A right conception of God is basic not only to systematic theology but to practical Christian living as well. It is to worship what the foundation is to the temple.
   --A.W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy

Before the Christian church goes into eclipse anywhere there must first be a corrupting of her simple basic theology. She simply gets a wrong answer to the question, "What is God like," and goes on from there.
    --A.W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy

God is not a symbol of goodness. Goodness is a symbol of God.
   --G.K. Chesterton

Thankful Heart

Spiritual Journey Thursday

Oxford's Magdalen College - The Gates Leading to Addison's Walk. Photo by JR P.

Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise; give thanks to him and praise his name.
—Psalm 100:4

Thankfulness opens the door to My Presence. Though I am always with you, I have gone to great measures to preserve your freedom of choice. I have placed a door between you and Me, and I have empowered you to open or close that door. There are many ways to open it, but a grateful attitude is one of the most effective.

from Jesus Calling by Sarah Young

Fill this Pause

Spiritual Journey Thursday

Substitution 

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

WHEN some beloved voice that was to you
Both sound and sweetness, faileth suddenly,
And silence, against which you dare not cry,
Aches round you like a strong disease and new--
What hope? what help? what music will undo
That silence to your sense? Not friendship's sigh,
Not reason's subtle count; not melody
Of viols, nor of pipes that Faunus blew;
Not songs of poets, nor of nightingales
Whose hearts leap upward through the cypress-trees
To the clear moon; nor yet the spheric laws
Self-chanted, nor the angels' sweet ' All hails,'
Met in the smile of God: nay, none of these.
Speak THOU, availing Christ !--and fill this pause.


Discovered in Sarah Arthur's At the Still Point published by Paraclete Press.

Mute

Spiritual Journey Thursday

Mute

by Elizabeth B. Rooney

Must we use words

For everything?

Can there not be

A silent, flaming

Leap of heart

Toward Thee?

For more poems by Elizabeth Rooney, click here.

Small Things

Spiritual Journey Thursday

from "Small Things"

by Anna Kamienska (Polish, 1920-1986)

It's not from the grand

but from every tiny thing

that it grows enormous

as if Someone was building Eternity

as a swallow its nest

out of clumps of moments

Read more of Anna's book Astonishments here.

Broken Cisterns

Spiritual Journey Thursday

from "Passing Ordinary Time"

by Enuma Okoro

This ordinary time is

gifted in its quiet, marked passing

Christ slips about

calling and baptizing,

sending and affirming,

pouring his Spirit like water

into broken cisterns,

sealing cracks and filtering our senses,

that we may savor the foolish

simplicity of his grace.

Discovered in Sarah Arthur's At the Still Point published by Paraclete Press.

For writers, an excerpt from Enuma's article at Duke University's Faith and Leadership Blog, "For the love of God, Write."

I have also learned the importance of prayer. Wordsmithing is in itself a form of centering of breath, mind and prayer. Yet I speak particularly of the asking, seeking, knocking kind of prayer that beseeches God to reveal God’s self and God’s purposes for you as God’s child and for you as a writer and as one more fellow pilgrim in a broken community that groans for redemption.

Listen Sweet Dove

Spiritual Journey Thursday

Listen sweet Dove unto my song,
And spread thy golden wings in me;
Hatching my tender heart so long,
Till it get wing, and fly away with thee.
         --George Herbert (1593-1633)

Discovered in Sarah Arthur's At the Still Point published by Paraclete Press.

A New Center

Spiritual Journey Thursday. Thoughts to consider.

We need a new center;
not a transformation but a transposition
We need the completion
not of the soul but of its radical change
A new order of life and love
A new order born of the spirit.
   --P.T. Forsythe

There is a Center in every man in which and through which God works. To that Center He speaks; through that Center He acts. When a man discovers his own divine Center, he stands at the gateway to powerful living.
   --Fr. John Gaynor Banks, The Master and the Disciple

There are three blocks to discovering one's true center. The first two have to do with the forgiveness of sin: either our failure to forgive others, or our failure to receive forgiveness from God. The third has to do with one's own inner vision of oneself and the failure to acquire the virtue of self-acceptance. However much a person lives out of diseased attitudes and feelings toward the self, to that extent he will fail to find and live from his true center where God dwells, speaks, and empowers him.
   --Leanne Payne, The Healing Presence

The Real Problem

For Spiritual Journey Thursday, I'm sharing a few quotes from C.S. Lewis that I've been meditating on this week.

What is concrete but immaterial can be kept in view only by painful effort.
       --C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

Christ says, "Give me all. I don't want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want you."
     --C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

    That is why the real problem of the Christian life comes where people do not usually look for it. It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking the other point of view, letting the other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. And so on, all day...
    We can only do it for moments at first. But from those moments the new sort of life will be spreading through our systems because now we are letting Him work at the right part of us.
     --C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Reflection

This excerpt from The Baron's Apprenticeship by George MacDonald spoke to me this week, so I thought I would share it today for Spiritual Journey Thursday. MacDonald was a Scottish author contemporary Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, also known as Lewis Carroll. The photo was taken by my son-in-law a few weeks ago while he was doing architect things in Australia.

Moon over Sydney, Australia. Photo by Espirito Meller, ©2016

The moon kept rising and brightening, slowly victorious over the pallid light of the dying sun; at last she lifted herself out of the vaporous horizon, ascended over the treetops, and went walking through the unobstructed sky, mistress of the air, queen of the heavens, lady of the eyes of men. Yet she was lady only because she beheld her sun. She beheld the source of her light, and told what she saw of him.

"When the soul of man sees God, it shines!" Richard said.

The Distant Piping

Spiritual Journey Thursday posts have definitely been sporadic. This except from The Wind in the Willows conveys such awe and wonder in the face of "a holy Other," as C.S. Lewis would describe it. It's well worth taking a moment to read and then taking a few more moments to let is soak into your skin.

"The Piper at the Gates of Dawn", frontispiece to a 1913 edition by Paul Bransom The Wind in the Willows (c1913) Graheme, K., New York : Scribner. Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10765620

Rat and Mole respond to the call of "a holy Other," (in this case the god Pan).


Then a change began slowly to declare itself. The horizon became clearer, field and tree came more into sight, and somehow with a different look; the mystery began to drop away from them. A bird piped suddenly, and was still; and a light breeze sprang up and set the reeds and bulrushes rustling. Rat, who was in the stern of the boat, while Mole sculled, sat up suddenly and listened with a passionate intentness. Mole, who with gentle strokes was just keeping the boat moving while he scanned the banks with care, looked at him with curiosity.

'It's gone!' sighed the Rat, sinking back in his seat again. 'So beautiful and strange and new. Since it was to end so soon, I almost wish I had never heard it. For it has roused a longing in me that is pain, and nothing seems worth while but just to hear that sound once more and go on listening to it for ever. No! There it is again!' he cried, alert once more. Entranced, he was silent for a long space, spellbound.

'Now it passes on and I begin to lose it,' he said presently. 'O Mole! the beauty of it! The merry bubble and joy, the thin, clear, happy call of the distant piping! Such music I never dreamed of, and the call in it is stronger even than the music is sweet! Row on, Mole, row! For the music and the call must be for us.'

The Mole, greatly wondering, obeyed. 'I hear nothing myself,' he said, 'but the wind playing in the reeds and rushes and osiers.'

The Rat never answered, if indeed he heard. Rapt, transported, trembling, he was possessed in all his senses by this new divine thing that caught up his helpless soul and swung and dandled it, a powerless but happy infant in a strong sustaining grasp.

In silence Mole rowed steadily, and soon they came to a point where the river divided, a long backwater branching off to one side. With a slight movement of his head Rat, who had long dropped the rudder-lines, directed the rower to take the backwater. The creeping tide of light gained and gained, and now they could see the colour of the flowers that gemmed the water's edge.

'Clearer and nearer still,' cried the Rat joyously. 'Now you must surely hear it! Ah—at last—I see you do!'

Breathless and transfixed the Mole stopped rowing as the liquid run of that glad piping broke on him like a wave, caught him up, and possessed him utterly. He saw the tears on his comrade's cheeks, and bowed his head and understood. For a space they hung there, brushed by the purple loose-strife that fringed the bank; then the clear imperious summons that marched hand-in-hand with the intoxicating melody imposed its will on Mole, and mechanically he bent to his oars again. And the light grew steadily stronger, but no birds sang as they were wont to do at the approach of dawn; and but for the heavenly music all was marvellously still.

...

Slowly, but with no doubt or hesitation whatever, and in something of a solemn expectancy, the two animals passed through the broken tumultuous water and moored their boat at the flowery margin of the island. In silence they landed, and pushed through the blossom and scented herbage and undergrowth that led up to the level ground, till they stood on a little lawn of a marvellous green, set round with Nature's own orchard-trees—crab-apple, wild cherry, and sloe.

'This is the place of my song-dream, the place the music played to me,' whispered the Rat, as if in a trance. 'Here, in this holy place, here if anywhere, surely we shall find Him!'

Then suddenly the Mole felt a great Awe fall upon him, an awe that turned his muscles to water, bowed his head, and rooted his feet to the ground. It was no panic terror—indeed he felt wonderfully at peace and happy—but it was an awe that smote and held him and, without seeing, he knew it could only mean that some august Presence was very, very near. With difficulty he turned to look for his friend and saw him at his side cowed, stricken, and trembling violently. And still there was utter silence in the populous bird-haunted branches around them; and still the light grew and grew.

Perhaps he would never have dared to raise his eyes, but that, though the piping was now hushed, the call and the summons seemed still dominant and imperious. He might not refuse, were Death himself waiting to strike him instantly, once he had looked with mortal eye on things rightly kept hidden. Trembling he obeyed, and raised his humble head; and then, in that utter clearness of the imminent dawn, while Nature, flushed with fullness of incredible colour, seemed to hold her breath for the event, he looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper; saw the backward sweep of the curved horns, gleaming in the growing daylight; saw the stern, hooked nose between the kindly eyes that were looking down on them humourously, while the bearded mouth broke into a half-smile at the corners; saw the rippling muscles on the arm that lay across the broad chest, the long supple hand still holding the pan-pipes only just fallen away from the parted lips; saw the splendid curves of the shaggy limbs disposed in majestic ease on the sward; saw, last of all, nestling between his very hooves, sleeping soundly in entire peace and contentment, the little, round, podgy, childish form of the baby otter. All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.

'Rat!' he found breath to whisper, shaking. 'Are you afraid?'

'Afraid?' murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. 'Afraid! Of HIM? O, never, never! And yet—and yet—O, Mole, I am afraid!'

Then the two animals, crouching to the earth, bowed their heads and did worship.

Simply Dance

Welcome. Today for Spiritual Journey Thursday we are sharing thoughts about Linda Kulp 's ONE LITTLE WORD for 2016: SIMPLIFY.

In my yoga classes this week, we have been working with the breath. We can be totally unconscious of the breath, and that's a good thing. It keeps us alive without conscious thought. Or we can control the breath with exercises to consciously still the mind and the body and slow the heart rate. But there is a lovely place in the middle where we are conscious of the breath but not controlling it, where we are simply being breathed. 

Becoming attuned to your breath is like learning to dance the waltz with another person. At first you have to become familiar with your dance partner – how he moves, when he moves, and where he moves. To be a good dance partner with the breath you must be suggestible and let the wisdom of the breath guide all of your movements. As you learn to follow the lead of the breath, you will know what to do next.                        

--Donna Farhi, Yoga Mind, Body & Spirit

There is such a wonderful correlation between this image and our walk with the Holy Spirit in life. It sounds simple enough, but you would be surprised how often you may 

find yourself holding your breath, trying to maintain control, resisting the dance.

My life has been anything but simple this last week as I have navigated hospital/nursing home/hospice decisions for my mother. I have encountered confusion, manipulation, frustration and sadness. I often found myself holding my breath in the midst of the circumstances.

How does one simplify in the midst of a very difficult situation, when the clutter is emotional rather than physical? For me it has been coming back to this dance. Letting my body relax with the breath, letting my soul find my dance partner, moving in concert with the Holy Spirit who resides within.