Bon Voyage!

We have arrived in Michigan. We had a great flight. We are staying at Rose and Guy's for the next month, visiting family and friends, relaxing, and celebrating a beautiful wedding in a couple of weeks.

For many years, both separately and together, we have spent 20-30 minutes every morning doing Centering Prayer, an ancient spiritual method laid out by the anonymous author of the medieval text “The Cloud of Unknowing” and revived by a bunch of Trappist monks more than 30 years ago. Now that we are on the road, so to speak, we have added a second “sit,” as it is called. Two 20 minute periods of Centering Prayer are highly recommended by the teachers of the practice.  We sort of cheated before, because Father Keating said that if you are too busy to do 20 minutes twice a day, you can do 30 minutes in the morning. But now we don’t really have an excuse.  I have been reading Cynthia Bourgeault’s book The Heart of Centering Prayer, which emphasizes the importance of the two periods.  (Okay, and I’m a presenter myself, and am always telling people they should do two…)

Centering Prayer is also sometimes called the Prayer of Consent, the Prayer of Simplicity, or the Prayer of the Heart. It is both a relationship with God and a method to deepen that relationship. Instructions can be found here:

https://www.contemplativeoutreach.org/centering-prayer-1

I changed my job on Facebook to "GAP YEAR" and my occupation to "world traveler." 

Having entered into this liminal state, between jobs, between identities, our house rented out, our stuff in storage, I suppose in our minds, we are trying to make a connection between the liminal space between the thoughts in Centering Prayer, the consent to the presence and action of God that is symbolized by the sacred word, and the liminal space we entered when we left Seattle, as we consent to the presence and action of God in our lives every day. 

For us, this consent to the presence and action of God begins with an admission of personal powerlessness.  “Of myself I am nothing; the Father doeth the works.” When we try to wrest happiness and satisfaction from this life by “managing well” or worse, by thinking (!), well, you can imagine the disastrous consequences.  Step One begins with an admission of the inability to manage our own lives. Luckily, we then realize we are “powerless but not helpless” and that when we do reach out for help, we receive it.  But of course we forget this every so often and try to “run the show” – so just like we do in Centering Prayer, we return to a state of “spiritual deflation” and gratitude for the grace the fills our lives every single day.