Lectio Divina - One hundred and twelve

From The Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks. New York: HarperCollins, 1995, p. 260.

Birdwings

Your grief for what you’ve lost lifts a mirror
up to where you’re bravely working.

Expecting the worst, you look, and instead,
here’s the joyful face you’ve been wanting to see.

Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
If it were always a fist or always stretched open,
you would be paralyzed.

Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding,
the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated
as birdwings.

Lectio Divina - One hundred and eleven

Hadewijch of Antwerp, quoted in For Lovers of God Everywhere: Poems of the Christian Mystics, ed. Roger Housden, Carlsbad, CA: Hay House, 2009, 60.

The madness of love
Is a blessed fate;
And if we understood this
We would seek no other:
It brings into unity
What was divided,
And this is the truth:
Bitterness it makes sweet,
It makes the stranger a neighbor,
And what was lowly it raises on high.

Lectio Divina - One hundred and ten

Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert, (New York: New Directions, 1960) p. 43.

A brother came to Abbot Pastor and said: Many distracting thoughts come into my mind, and I am in danger because of them. Then the elder thrust him out into the open air and said: Open up the garments about your chest and catch the wind in them. But he replied: This I cannot do. So the elder said to him: If you cannot catch the wind, neither can you prevent distracting thoughts from coming into your head. Your job is to say No to them.

Lectio Divina - One hundred and nine

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet. Stephen Mitchell, trans. New York: Vintage, 1986, p.41-2.

Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away, you write, and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast. And if what is near you is far away, then your vastness is already among the stars and is very great; be happy about your growth, in which of course you can’t take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don’t torment them with your doubts and don’t frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn’t be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn’t necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again; when you see them, love life in a form that is not your own and be indulgent toward those who are growing old, who are afraid of the aloneness that you trust.

Lectio Divina - One hundred and eight

Stephen Mitchell, A Book of Psalms, Selected and Adapted from the Hebrew. New York: HarperPerennial, 1993, 4.

Even in the midst of great pain, Lord,

I praise you for that which is.

I will not refuse this grief

or close myself to this anguish.

Let shallow men pray for ease:

“Comfort us; shield us from sorrow.”

I pray for whatever you send me,

and I ask to receive it as your gift.

You have put a joy in my heart

greater than all the world’s riches.

I lie down trusting the darkness,

for I know that even now you are here.

Lectio Divina - One hundred and seven

Matthew 10:8

Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons.

Lectio Divina - One hundred and six

Wendell Berry, from "Sabbaths 2001", in Poetry, Vol 181, No. 1, pp. 6-8.

Sit and be still
until in the time
of no rain you hear
beneath the dry wind's
commotion in the trees
the sound of flowing
water among the rocks,
a stream unheard before,
and you are where
breathing is prayer.