God of the open garden
we have found you
and long to hold you fast.
But you refuse our clinging need,
eluding the love
that would bind and possess you,
sending us out
beyond the bounds of our feeble knowing.

Rapt in our joy and desire,
we cannot interpret you:
you have gone from us again,
moving into morning,
moving into light.

In your great love,
wait for us,
where you have sent us,
go ahead of us,
be there to meet us,
risen, released in your world

Nicola Slee
The Book of a Thousand Prayers

If you were not risen,
Lord Christ, to whom would we go
to discover a radiance
of the face of God?

If you were not risen,
we would not be together
seeking your communion.
We would not find in your presence
forgiveness,
wellspring of a new beginning.

If you were not risen,
where would we draw the energy
for following you
right to the end of our existence,
for choosing you again and anew?

Brother Roger of Taize
The Book of a Thousand Prayers

Alleluia, Christ is risen.

A few hours more,
A few minutes more,
A few instants more.
For thirty-three years it has been going on.
For thirty-three years you have lived fully minute after minute.
You can no longer escape, now; you are there, at the end of your life, at the end of your road.
You are at the last extremity, at the edge of a precipice.
You must take the last step.
The last step of love,
The last step of life that ends in death.

You hesitate.
Three hours are long, three hours of agony;
Longer than three years of life,
Longer than thirty years of life.

You must decide, Lord, all is ready around you.
You are there, motionless, on your Cross.
You have renounced all activity other than embracing these crossed planks for which you were made,
And yet, there is still life in your nailed body.
Let mortal flesh die, and make way for eternity.
Now, life slips from each limb, one by one, finding refuge in his still beating heart.
Immeasurable heart,
Overflowing heart
Heart heavy as the world, the world of sins and miseries that it bears.

Lord, one more effort.
Mankind is there, waiting unknowingly for the cry of its Saviour.
Your brothers are there; they need you.
Your Father bends over you, already holding out his arms.
Lord, save us,
Save us.

See.
He has taken his heavy heart,
And,
Slowly,
Laborioiously,
Alone between heaven and earth,
In the awesome night,
With passionate love,
He has gathered his life,
He has gathered the sin of the world,
And in a cry,
He has given all.
‘Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit.’

Christ has just died for us.

Lord, help me to die for you.
Help me to die for them.

Michel Quoist
Prayers of Life

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow.

For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow.

Life is very Long.

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

For thine is
Life is
For Thine is the …

from The Hollow Men
T.S. Eliot
(self-evidently)

My dear child. So confident and so full of insight. And so unrealistic.

He had seen the destruction of his own land, the terrible brutality of the Babylonians. As a child he had lost so much. I held him to me, let him feed on my own pain and glimpse my own inexhaustible currents of joy.

My pain. My joy. How hard, how hard for human kind to see either. What terror it is for them to be let in. How courageously they breast me, surging up the thermals, soaring, tumbling, landing rough. Eagles they are.

And he – he surged ecstatically up, never loosing the current that took him until he could see the wonders I planned for my true Israel. He saw the restoration, and all the ecstasy of re-building in the old land made new. And the message which he hoped would fill others with elation as it did him – that message caused them to round on him. How could he be other than distraught.

He understood much, but not how hope can be the most acute pain, more agonising even than a peaceful despair. They attacked him. Another might have turned to bitterness, but he turned to me, and I drew him further and further into my pain, into the place where the waves of suffering crashed and broke on the rock of my love, and where still waters are re born out of tumult and agony.

I rejoiced. I drew him to me. I could let him hear things that even Jeremiah could never hear. He would come to see how pain was inevitable for my servants, and how it turned to healing. He would come to see how the suffering of wrong doing broke its power against the rock of my servants.

But even he, beloved, full of my spirit, blessed with insight, could only go so far. He was balancing impossible things. He over reached. It is not possible for human kind to face suffering and death and break the power of the waves of pain and wrong without terrible cost. They cannot keep that inner calm in which my little Isaiah still believed.

Let me be plain (will you hear me?)- neither is it possible for God.

Pain is real. It soaks though as water soaks earth, and blood soaks bandages. I cradled him. I knew. It would only be when I came and suffered with them that they would even begin to understand.

It would only be when I was the servant and they saw my blood soaking through that they would even start to understand.

I wrote this in September, after reading a small part of Jürgen Moltmann’s “The Trinity and the Kingdom”. Never has a piece of theology hit me with such force. I re-offer it for this week’s meditating.

It is dark, dark night.

Take this cup – suddenly in the dark

it is too awful. But the warm tide

is receding into the dark

and the cold sweat of emptiness

takes its place. The desperate words

fall unheeded on the stony ground.

Withdrawn in a point of light

God has no ears, only pain

and tight-focussed squeezing of the great

love now raw and bright

above Golgotha. The night is past

but dark remains, and emptiness.

A searing cry bruises the great mind

drenched in the pain of loss and

separation – and this is done

for me, this hellish loss, this bruising …

so that I can see, can understand,

am not forsaken. It is too much.

Too much for me. Too much.

©C.M.M.

Sometimes chaos in our lives brings out pleasant and peaceful outcomes.

This piece of driftwood on the shore for Lake Huron sits peacefully reflecting in a pool on a sunny evening in October 2008. It may have been brought there by a storm, but the tranquility comes out.

More about this image and the others in this series.