Evening Prayer Wednesday, 21 October 2020
The Secret Embrace
By Fr Thomas Keating ©
Before being born into the world of time,
The silence of pre-existence was all absorbing.
The transition from eternity to time
Is full of sufferings, fears, and little deaths.
But, in the transition from death
To eternal life,
The silence of pre-existence
Bursts into boundless joy.
All that can be manifested emerges
From the endless creativity of
That Which Is.
But
The Secret Embrace
Of
The Source of all creation
With
Infinite Transcendence
Can
Never be revealed.
Good evening and welcome to Evening Prayers
That this evening may be holy, good and peaceful,
let us pray with one heart and mind.
Silence is kept.
As our evening prayer rises before you, O God,
so may your mercy come down upon us
to cleanse our hearts
and set us free to sing your praise
now and for ever.
Breathe in
Breathe out
Be still…
When our faith is weak
you strengthen us,
when we lose our way
you rescue us,
when we fall into sin
you forgive us.
Gracious Father,
please remind us
as we forget,
that your love is
unconditional,
always moulding us
into what we could be,
always blessing us
that we might glorify you.
For love,
grace
and forgiveness,
we thank you.
Amen
Presence
Dear Jesus, I come to you today
longing for your presence.
I desire to love you as You love me.
May nothing ever separate me from You.
Freedom
Lord, may I never take the gift of freedom for granted.
You gave me the great blessing of freedom of spirit.
Fill my spirit with Your peace and Your joy.
Consciousness
Knowing that God loves me unconditionally,
I can afford to be honest about how I am.
How has the last day been, and how do I feel now?
I share my feelings openly with the Lord.
THE WORD OF GOD
Luke 12:49-53
Jesus said to the crowds, “I came to bring fire to the earth,
and how I wish it were already kindled! I have a baptism
with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed!
Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth?
No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on five in one
household will be divided, three against two and two against three;
they will be divided: father against son and son against father,
mother against daughter and daughter against mother,
mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law
and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.”
WORDS OF WISDOM
It is remarkable to trace how Thomas’ understanding of God evolved over the last three decades of his life. In the 1980s, when his first books and videos were beginning to appear, God was still very much framed within the classic Western model with God as “he”—a father figure. Thomas’ initial focus during the early years of his teaching was to shift that image away from a fearsome father, the wrathful God who has caused so much misery and woundedness for Western seekers, to a “divine therapist”: supportive, trustworthy, and a hundred percent behind us in our journey of transformation.
But by the end of his life, Thomas is in a very different place. God co-inheres and interpenetrates everything, the ocean-in-drop and drop-in-ocean, constantly exchanging in a dance of endless fecundity. God is not the “author” of creation, removed and overarching; the whole thing is God. There is not a single place in all creation where God is not, because God is creation itself, endlessly outpouring, endlessly receiving itself back. From top to bottom, we live and move and have our being in a participative reality, every fractal joined to every other fractal in a symphony of divine becoming pouring forth from that infinite wellspring.
In fact, with one singular exception, Thomas does not actually use the word “God” in this entire collection of poems. It is always “the Divine,” “I AM,” or “the Source.” He clearly did not want what he was trying to say here co-opted back into conceptions of a distant, male-gendered Being sitting up there in the heavens. He wanted us to keep our eyes on the big picture.
But more important, he wanted us to swim in the ocean.
Some may say that Thomas took a turn late in life toward a more “Buddhist” approach to divinity, but I believe this is not really accurate. We are not talking about a theology here, but a level of consciousness, universal across all the religions and accessed primarily through the consistent practice of meditation. To see oneness, it is necessary to see from oneness, with the eye of the heart, not the binary skew of the mind. From his decades and decades of faithful Centering Prayer, along with some very courageous and painful inner work, the rewiring of brain and heart that supports this seeing was gradually accomplished within him. These poems are its joyful fruit. They are tiny cameos of what non-duality looks like when approached from a uniquely Western and Christian perspective.
Cynthia Bourgeault
https://cac.org/the-secret-embrace-2020-10-21/
Copyright © 2018 by CAC. Used by permission of CAC. All rights reserved worldwide
PRAYERS & INTERCESSIONS
We pray for the world…
Lord, in your mercy
hear our prayer.
We pray for the universal church of Christ…
Lord, in your mercy
hear our prayer.
We pray for one another and all those known to us…
Lord, in your mercy
hear our prayer.
THE LORD’S PRAYER
As our Saviour taught us, so we pray
Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread.
Forgive us our sins
as we forgive those who sin against us.
Lead us not into temptation
but deliver us from evil.
For the kingdom, the power,
and the glory are yours
now and for ever.
Amen.
Calm me, O Lord, as You stilled the storm.
Still me, O Lord, keep me from harm.
Let all the tumult within me cease.
Enfold me, Lord, in Your peace.
I will lie down this night with God,
and God will lie down with me;
I will lie down this night with Christ,
and Christ will lie down with me;
I will lie down this night with the Spirit,
and the Spirit will lie down with me;
God and Christ and the Spirit,
be lying down with me.
AMEN
The Blessing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ue8xepN3EI
Revd. Ernesto Lozada-Uzuriaga
