Program: Centering Prayer Vestibule Practice: Breath and Body Awareness Centering Prayer; Lectio Divina; Time to Share; Short reading for enrichment.

Lectio Divina material

The Way

All the ways of the Lord are loving… Psalm 25:10 NIV

This is my commandment: love one another, as I have loved you. John 15:12 NJB

41. Jesus did not teach a specific method of meditation or bodily discipline for quieting the imagination, memory, and emotions. We should choose a spiritual practice adapted to our particular temperament and natural disposition. We must also be willing to dispense with it when called by the Spirit to surrender to his direct guidance. The Spirit is above every method or practice. To follow his inspiration is the sure path to perfect freedom.

Open Mind Open Heart by Fr. Thomas Keating.   Christian Life, Growth and Transformation, Chapter 13

                                              

READING: “The Present Moment and All That Is”Excerpted fromThat We May Be One Fr. Thomas Keating  (Word of the Week 

Our relationship with God is not static. It’s dynamic, and the Spirit is suggesting what to do in every present moment. So, that’s why we haven’t time to think of the past or the future, unless God brings it to our attention, because everything that we want is NOW. Our capacity is there. God is prepared to fill it, and we just have to go through the experience of development on each level of our humanity, culminating in living just to manifest God in whatever way we’re supposed to.

The present moment then, you might say, is the computer that God is always texting us. So, if we think we’re alone, we’re mistaken. As long as you have your cell phone on, you’re in touch with all the world—it’s a good symbol of relationship, because in relating to God, you’re relate to everything that he made and everything that he made is good. This is the kind of conviction or conceptual background that we need to insist upon over and over again. It’s being in the presence of God and being able to stay there and love being there, while submitting to the difficulties and duties or what happens at the same time. There is everything that’s happening at the present moment, and there is this Presence that doesn’t change, that is always there, and which you contact in some degree when contemplative prayer begins to be firmly established.

I think those scientific gadgets are marvelous metaphors of how many ways God is actually communicating to us at every moment. It’s not just a statue or a picture we’re thinking of. It’s all of reality contained in its Creator here and now in a single instant. You have to be open and adapting as whatever happens as an embrace from God.

So, there’s no need to think of self or the past or to worry about the future. It’s now. Now, now, now, now, now!  You’re always in the presence of God and then you can see God in different things, whatever the Spirit may suggest.