awaken – Beguine Again

Aug152015 by TerriNo Comments

Sunrise on Sabbath

A reflection chosen especially for justice workers. Hold onto the mystery and stay awake. An exchange between a master and a disciple... Student: Is there anything I can do to make myself Enlightened? Master: As little as you can do to make the sun rise in the morning. Student: Then of what use are the spiritual exercises you prescribe? Master: To make sure you are not asleep when the sun begins to rise. Anthony DeMello in Kathleen Dowling Singh's The Grace in Dying, A Message of Hope, Comfort and Spiritual Transformation ... Jesus: I am going over there to pray. You sit here while I’m at prayer. 37 Then He took Peter and the two sons of Zebedee with Him, and He grew sorrowful and deeply distressed. Jesus: 38 My soul is overwhelmed with grief, to the point of death. Stay here and k...

Awaken to Release

spiritual practice, Spirituality

Today, what brought me to being awake to the Divine, was working on and implementing a ritual that I am sharing with you here. How do you use ritual to be awake to God? This evening, I did a ritual with my interns. It was the ending of our formal relationship as supervisor / intern and the beginning of a journey into being colleagues! Definitely a sacred time. As I pondered what to do, I knew two things. LaPadre had given me the framework for ritual creation. I wanted a ritual that honored releasing of my interns to the world and a way to release the many things that chaplains of incarcerated juveniles carry. I lay pondering these things and then I went, “Ah-ha!” I had a God-breathed inspiration. And it was all based on breath, wind, spirit, and release. And so, now that it is comple...

Awakening with the Light v. 2

Photography, spiritual practice, Spirituality

This month is interNational Photography month! Here, we will be playing with this theme on Wednesdays during May. I will be focusing on where the practice of photography intersects with our own experience and expression of the divine–where photography draws us into a new experience of the divine. Last week, I wrote about the symbolism in our religious traditions of light and used photography and light to show how we can point to something that transcends our understanding. Plato would say that the photo of sunset points towards the form of sunset—that perfected form of sunset-ness. Plato’s Theory of Forms “described the common nature of all things in the world, not just of a table, for instance but of all the tables that ever were and ever will be. This Platonic form of t...