Morning Prayer Friday, 17 July 2020
Sometimes you just want to run away – not from the danger of contagion, nor from the dangers of the dark.
Will nothing ever change?
Will the Archers never have a full cast of characters again?
Sometimes the monotony of one day merging into another
makes you yearn to be somewhere – anywhere – that is not here.
I miss the communality of life – Sunday worship, Thursday coffee, Tuesday stitching group.
I miss my regular society in which I was never bored or distracted.
Thomas Traherne (1637–1674) put it this way:
Thou Lord hast made thy servant a sociable creature, for which I praise thy name: a lover of company, a delighter in equals. Replenish the inclination, which you have implanted. O Lord, I delight in Thee for making my soul so wholly active, so prone to employment, so apt to love, that it can never rest nor cease from thinking. I praise thee with joy for making my soul so wide that it can treasure ages, see thine eternity and walk with thee in all thy ways.
For some time, I have been creating textiles based on the island of Lanzarote –
a wasted landscape of shaded black and brown.
I never found it monotonous or dreary since there was always something new to discover
in the landscape left behind by the volcano.
Now I long to return to that wasteland.
A thought from Thomas Merton (1915–1968):
The Desert Fathers believed that the wilderness had been created as supremely valuable in the eyes of God precisely because it had no value to men.
The wasteland was the land that could never be wasted by people because it offered them nothing. There was nothing to attract them. There was nothing to exploit.
The desert was the region in which the Chosen People had wandered for forty years, cared for by God alone. They could have reached the Promised Land in a few months if they had travelled directly to it.
God’s plan was that they should learn to love Him in the wilderness and that they should always look back upon the time in the desert as the idyllic time of their life with Him alone.
The desert was created simply to be itself, not to be transformed by men into something else.
In the morning of this new day help me, Lord, to discover again
the many thousands of tiny things that bring interest to my life.
Refresh my memories of friendships still in place despite distance.
Keep me curious today as I go about the world of my duties.
Lord refresh my sociable soul.
Amen
Paul writes that the whole of creation understands the monotony of waiting:
I reckon that the sufferings we now endure bear no comparison with the glory, as yet unrevealed, which is in store for us. The created universe is waiting with eager expectation for God’s sons to be revealed. It was made subject to frustration, not of its own choice but by the will of him who subjected it, yet with the hope that the universe itself is to be freed from the shackles of mortality and is to enter upon the glorious liberty of the children of God.
Romans 8: 18–21
In the morning of this fresh new day
I pray for people weighed down with illness, anxiety and fear.
Let them feel our prayers within their souls.
Lord, may they know relief from their monotony,
may they find refreshment in their personal desert,
may they find faith renewed in our future hope.
Amen
Living near the city centre I see Milton Keynes slowly returning to community.
In the morning of this new day I pray for the people
who keep Cornerstone functioning as God’s House.
I pray for the people planning and working towards our opening in September
when we can once again be sociable together.
Lord on the morning of this new day keep us all safe and hopeful.
Amen
Cheryl Montgomery
