Where will you pause to touch the Earth? Where will you marvel at the hints that lie scattered around you in the grass? Where will you discard what you previously thought was true, and try on a new belief for size? Where will you stop for directions, for advice, for a conversation with another, for a relationship, for a moment of grace brought to you by the mind of a child?
What does it mean to you to persist through difficult times on your journey?
We each bring to our various relationships a tendency to see what we know, or maybe what we want. And that doesn’t serve anyone particularly well.
And so, Karen Armstrong counsels us to come to terms with how little we know if we have any shot at living a compassionate life.
There’s a lot I don’t know. And in order to truly develop compassion, I need to make peace with that, and to start finding out what others know that I don’t.
Make a list of a few of the things you don’t know. Be OK with it.
“Listening is not an act of the ear, listening is an act of the heart.” – Rev. Leslie Takahashi
To what is your heart listening today? To what does your heart need to listen today?
Artists of all kinds—painters and poets, singers and sculptors alike—know the importance of imagination. On the basis of art alone, we understand that imagination adds beauty of all sorts to our world. At the very least, we can appreciate that other people’s imagination makes our world a more interesting and lovely place.
But our own imagination is a vital spiritual resource. First, imagination helps us interact with the world around us in new and wonderful ways.
Transcendentalist philosopher and Unitarian minister Ralph Waldo Emerson reminds us of this power of imagination. “A symbol,” he writes in his essay “Poetry and Imagination,” “always stimulates the intellect, therefore is poetry ever the best reading.”
We each were born with the powers of creativity. While we’re not all going to be famous artists or poets or musicians, we each have the faculties to use our imagination to create.
To use these gifts allows us to change our relationship with the world around us.
Today, spend some time imagining.
Today, a prayer to recite from Rev. George Kimmich Beach:
Giver of being and freedom, thou who touches our lives in unforeseen ways, who unsettles our ease and upsets our self-satisfactions:
We wait in these moments of stillness to let the hidden processes of healing and growth do their silent work within us, and to let the quiet work of reconciliation be renewed among us.
Because we know that the ultimate issues of life—healing and growth, reconciliation and renewal—cannot be forced, neither by excess of activity nor by tumult of words, we seek out this stillness. We seek the quiet—the resting place—of our restless hearts.
Because we live with mystery, we trust that which is deeper than we know—which touches our hearts—which steadies us and rekindles our spirits—which, finally, in faith, may be named the love that has laid hold upon us, and will not let us go.
Amen.
