Greetings to our new friends and our old friends!
Beloved seekers of God’s life in you and with you. This blog is is dedicated to the life-giving, bountiful, exhilarating and yes often mundane and grueling experience of Christian contemplative living, as experienced primarily by our family over the past fifty plus years. We would describe this journey as one of being called by the incredible love of The Divine into the depths of our being. Here we share in a dialogue with the Spirit of God, a dynamic interchange of energy which is beyond words. In this we are offered the possibility of a transformation of our interior knowing, which leads to a transformation of consciousness. In this dynamic dance, we are offered the Truth about ourselves and about all of creation. This Truth is both personal and universal and incarnates within us, changing the way we physically encounter the world.
Throughout this fifty-year journey, one experience is ultimate for each member of our family. That is the experience of a transformation of consciousness that hinges on the manner in which Christ Jesus has led us and is still leading us out of the heavy web of lies that infuses our lives and into an ever-growing interior clarity that might well be described as a spiritual experience of living water. This place of living water and the journey moving forward into this lived reality has involved and still does contain daily periods of sabbath space, a sabbath rest. In these times we are called to enter into a deep place of holy beauty where prayer, praise, mercy and compassion warms, softens and expands within us offering the assurance of the blessedness of life in God. This is a sabbath space, an encounter with the breath of God, offering us the possibility of transformation through contemplative practice.
It is during this holy, love and joy-filled season of Advent that we commence our sharing. A perfect time to begin reflection on contemplative living, particularly as it is experienced in the midst of family life. Mary the mother of Jesus, the great mystic, invites us to do as she did and ponder in our hearts the mystery of God with us and within us. In our evening prayer, we pray the words of the Magnificat, “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord and my spirit exults in God my Savior; because he has looked upon his lowly handmaid. Yes, from this day forward all generations will call me blessed, for the Almighty has done great things for me. Holy is his name, and his mercy reaches from age to age for those who fear him.”[1] Like Mary, we find God as the ultimate source of our life. We come to know ourselves also as the bearers of God’s life into the world and the meaning that truth holds for our life, day by day, moment by moment.
The gift of the contemplative life is offered to each one of us, as each one of us is the bearer of Christ’s life in and to the world. We are called to recognize within and around us the gracious light and life of Christ. We are all offered the wonderous opportunity of unwrapping within us this gift of God’s life. This Advent Season may we become more aware of God within each one of us, living out of us in the moments we experience: moments of joy, of tender love, of delight and of deep holiness. So often in this event-filled time of year, the true gift of God’s life in us gets obscured by the busyness of the season. The gift of contemplation opens us to know the reality of God with us and living through us. It is the gift within the gift, which brings with it the peace that passes all understanding.
The sabbath space, we share as a family and also individually, is that time dedicated to sacred stillness. This inner sacred stillness has a powerful, yet tender and compassionate voice of its own. It is that voice that leads us into life-giving rest in God. There are countless daily practices, which can lead us into this divine dance. One of the daily spiritual exercises, practiced over the years by our family as a part of our sabbath space, has been Lectio Divina. In this phase of our blog, each week we will open to you the sacred wonder of this gift of holy reading, holy seeing and holy living. We share with you how this form of sabbath space opens us to God’s presence, untangling us from those lies that have interiorly bound us and have kept us from fully living out our true inheritance as children of God.
[1] Luke 1:46-50, General editor: Alexander Jones. The Jerusalem Bible. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966.
Spiritual Homesteading 