A prayer in time of difficulty

P1000282O God, early in the morning I cry to you.
Help me to pray and gather my thoughts to you. I cannot do it alone.
In me it is dark, but with you there is light.
I am lonely, but you do not desert me.
My courage fails me, but with you there is help.
I am restless, but with you there is peace.
In me there is bitterness, but with you there is patience.
I do not understand your ways, but you know the way for me.

Dietrich Bonhoffer,Lutheran pastor imprisoned and executed by the Nazis.

Being true to the possibilities

And from a more recent Irish writer:

All the possibilities of your human destiny are asleep in your soul. You are here to realize and honor these possibilities. When love comes in to your life, unrecognized dimensions of your destiny awaken and blossom and grow. Possibility is the secret heart of time.

John O’Donohue, Anam Chara

Photo: Flickr User Amerune

Sunday: A wish for the day

Because of the day that is in it….

Dia dar gcoimead agus Dia  dar dteagasc,  Dia dar seoladh ar bhothar ar leasa

(May God keep us and teach us

and lead us on the right way)

Beannachtaí na Féile Pádraig :   Happy Saint Patrick’s Day.

The challenge of the Journey

File:Path.JPGThen you shall take some of the blood, and put it on the door posts and the lintels of the houses . . .and when I see the blood, I shall pass over you, and no plague shall fall upon you to destroy you, when I smite the land of Egypt.    Exodus 12: 7 & 13

They thought they were safe
that spring night; when they daubed
the doorways with sacrificial blood.
To be sure, the angel of death
passed them over, but for what?
Forty years in the desert
without a home, without a bed,
following new laws to an unknown land.
Easier to have died in Egypt
or stayed there a slave, pretending
there was safety in the old familiar.

But the promise, from those first
naked days outside the garden,
is that there is no safety,
only the terrible blessing
of the journey. You were born
through a doorway marked in blood.
We are, all of us, passed over,
brushed in the night by terrible wings.

Ask that fierce presence,
whose imagination you hold.
God did not promise that we shall live,
but that we might, at last, glimpse the stars,
brilliant in the desert sky.

Lynn Ungar, Passover

Sunday Quote: Living fully

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What you can plan

is too small

for you to live.

David Whyte, What to Remember when Waking

Sunday Quote: How we hold our experience

Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way

has learned the ultimate.

Kierkegaard