This is a prayer which captures some of the fullness and paradox of my life in God. I hope it may speak with you.

The SLG order is an Anglican order of cloistered nuns in Oxford, England. Their website is www.slg.org.uk/

I have appreciated a number of their booklets on the contemplative life.

God, let us rise to the edges of time

and open our lives to your eternity;

let us run to the edges of space

and gaze into your immensity;

let us climb through the barriers of sound

and pass into your silence;

and then in stillness and silence

let us adore You,

You who are Life, Light, Love

without beginning and without end,

the Source, the Sustainer, the Restorer,

the Purifier of all that is;

the Lover who has bound earth to heaven

by the beams of a cross;

the Healer who has renewed a dying race

by the blood of a chalice;

the God who has taken humankind into your glory

by the wounds of sacrifice;

God... God... God... blessed be God!

Let us adore you.

Sister Ruth, SLG

Today is the Autumn Equinox

Song for the Salmon (excerpt)

For too many nights now I have not imagined the salmon
threading the dark streams of reflected stars,
nor have I dreamt of his longing
nor the lithe swing of his tail toward dawn . . .

I am ready like the young salmon
to leave his river, blessed with hunger
for a great journey on the drawing tide. ~ David Whyte

Today is the autumn equinox—a time when the sun rests above the equator, and day and night is divided equally. Recently I discovered a wonderful reflection on the gift of autumn equinox.  I offer thanks to Christine Valters Paintner for the following. I hope you find it as meaningful as I did.

The autumn equinox heralds a season filled with change, celebrates the harvest, and ushers in the brilliant beauty of death. Autumn is a season of transition, of continual movement.

At the heart of autumn's gifts are these twin energies of relinquishing and harvesting. It is a season of paradox that invites us to consider what we are called to release and surrender, and at the same time it invites us to gather in the harvest, to name and celebrate the fruits of the seeds we planted months ago. In holding these two in tension we are reminded that in our letting go we also find abundance.

In the seas all around me here in my beloved Northwest, the salmon are responding to an ancient and ancestral call. They are returning from the oceans, and making the hard and often battering journey up the rivers, to return to their birthplaces to lay eggs offering the gift of new life. This journey always ends in their own death. It is an amazing mystery as I imagine this deep longing for home the salmon must feel and the ultimate surrender they welcome while also offering a harvest of blessing for the next generation of salmon.

The season calls me to let go of false assumptions, wrests my too-small images of God from me as I enter the Mystery of dying and rising. Autumn demands that I release what I think is important to do and returns me to the only thing which matters that I remember—to love and to allow love to sculpt me, even as it breaks my heart.

But equally, this season calls us to the harvest. Seeds planted long ago create a bounty and fullness in our lives. Autumn invites me to remember the places in my life where I had a dream that once felt tiny and has now grown and ripened into fullness. I savor these places where my life feels abundant. I relish the experience of being nourished by dreams into my own growing wholeness.

The poet Rilke writes of autumn: "Command the last fruits to be full; / give them just two more southern days, / urge them on to completion and chase / the last sweetness into the heavy wine." We move toward our own ripening and in that journey we let go of what no longer serves us. Fall urges us on to our own completion and sweetness.

We live in times when it often feels like everything is coming undone. This season reminds us that the journey of relinquishing all we hold dear is also the journey of harvesting. Somehow these two come together year after year. We are invited to rest into its mystery.

What are you releasing that no longer energizes you?

What dreams do you want to harvest this season?

Christine Valters Paintner, Ph.D., is a Benedictine Oblate and the online Abbess of Abbey of the Arts, a virtual monastery without walls offering online classes and resources in contemplative practice and creative expression. She is the author of several books including her latest "The Artist's Rule: Nurturing Your Creative Soul with Monastic Wisdom" (Ave Maria Press) and "Lectio Divina -- The Sacred Art: Transforming Words and Images Into Heart-Centered Prayer" (SkyLight Paths). 

A Prayer for Leaders

A friend sent this to me and so I offer to you for reflection and insight.

For a leader

May you have the grace and wisdom

to act kindly, learning

to distinguish between what is

personal and what is not.

May you be hospitable to criticism.

May you never put yourself at the center of things.

May you act not from arrogance but out of service.

May you work on yourself,

building up and refining the ways of your mind.

May those who work for you know

you see and respect them.

May you learn to cultivate the art of presence

in order to engage those who meet you.

When someone fails or disappoints you,

may the graciousness with which you engage

be their stairway to renewal and refinement.

May you treasure the gifts of the mind

through reading and creative thinking

so that you continue as a servant of the frontier

where the new will draw its enrichment from the old,

and you never become a functionary.

May you know the wisdom of deep listening,

the healing of wholesome words,

the encouragement of the appreciative gaze,

the decorum of held dignity,

the springtime edge of the bleak question.

May you have a mind that loves frontiers

so that you can evoke the bright fields

that lie beyond the view of the regular eye.

May you have good friends

to mirror your blind spots.

May leadership  be for you

a true adventure of growth.

                ~ John O'Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us

Ivy Thomas

Consider the spider

On a recent windy day I watched a spider, in the center of her web, being tossed about by the wind. The web had 2 anchors on a wall and 2 on the branches of a bush. The spider was really flying!

I imagined myself on a carnival ride doing the same movements .... when the nausea abated .... I was left in awe of the web’s strength and flexibility, and the spider’s capacity to ride out the up, down and sideways of the wind. I also noticed that it was the web, acting like a sail, which created the experience for the spider. And that this was all just normal life for her.

So in our time honored way of deriving spiritual wisdom by analogy ....

-you and I are the spider,

-the web is that network of personal history, spiritual practice, supportive people ...

-and the wind could be the events of life, or the ravaging push of the Holy Spirit.

Then the suggestion of the spider would be to keep your web strong and flexible, and your seat belt buckled!

Suggestions to think about.

How is your “web” with personal support, spiritual direction, meditation and prayer?

Are you buckled up and “ready for the ride” this fall?

How might you “feel the winds of God”? Are you ready to set your sails and surrender to the wind?

Not-Knowing

I’m sitting on the deck at the hermitage with a cup of tea as a result of remembering something last week.  What I remembered what something I used to know, but I forgot it.

This is what I remembered: a clergy-woman who was dying of cancer who looked at me, at the end of my first year of ministry, and said passionately, “You are killing yourself.  If you keep up like this you will be no good for yourself or anyone else.  Right now, tell me how you’re going to get a day off for retreat, next week.”

And this is what I remembered: my spiritual director saying, “An hour a day, a day a month, a week a year.”  That’s the golden rule for keeping balance—that much time just silent, just listening.

I did this when I was serving a church—half a day a week at a silent place, sometimes doing little more than sleep or watch the ocean.  I teach this when people come on retreats or work in spiritual direction.  But somehow I forgot to do it myself these last months.  It took a friend telling me that I looked “fragile” to know there was a problem.  So that’s why I’m on the deck with a cup of tea and no phone, no internet, no agenda for the day; watching the robin look for worms, listening to the dog across the creek bark, looking for the bear that walks through the back field, waiting for the silence to flash back into my soul.

Therese DesCamp

Come and Find the Quiet Centre

How do we find the quiet centre when calamity hits?

How do we find the quiet centre when all around us we are being reminded, in the news, and in conversations on the radio and in many circles, that our world is filled with fearful happenings?

I’ve spent the past few months moving from one test to another, always aware, sort of, that I may be harboring something fearful in the cells of my body.  I say ‘sort of aware’ because through it all I was never overcome with fear.  In fact, I don’t think I ever really even acknowledged the possibility that at the end of it all I would not be all right.  And, finally, I am at a place where I am at peace.  I have found the quiet centre.  In fact, I think it was because I was always centred in the certain knowledge of Holy Love, holding me and strengthening me and sustaining me, that I may not have really acknowledged the possibility of an other outcome.

We cannot deny the reality of fearful happenings.  On Sept 9 - as we are all so very aware of ‘9/11’ - we must acknowledge that fearful things happen.  But the gifts that we have been given in ‘9/12’ and ‘9/13’ and ‘9/14’ and all the days that follow are invitations to us to do as Shirley Erena Murray’s hymn proclaims:

Come and find the quiet centre in the crowded life we lead,

find the room for hope to enter, find the frame where we are freed:

clear the chaos and the clutter, clear our eyes that we can see

all the things that really matter, be at peace, and simply be.

Friends, on this weekend of 9/11, ten years later, come and find the quiet centre wrapped in the arms of God’s utterly dependable and unstoppable love.

Sharon Copeman

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.


Poet, essayist, farmer, and novelist Wendell Berry was born on August 5, 1934, in Newcastle, Kentucky. He attended the University of Kentucky at Lexington where he received a B.A. in English in 1956 and an M.A. in 1957. Berry is the author of more than thirty books of poetry, essays, and novels. He has taught at New York University and at the University of Kentucky. Among his honors and awards are fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, a Lannan Foundation Award, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He married Tanya Amyx in 1957; they have two children. Wendell Berry lives on a farm in Port Royal, Kentucky. From http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?45442B7C000C000C0B