Reverence and Communion

All week I've been coming across readings which make of communion a way of life... here is the latest, thanks to Spirituality and Practice's facebook post. I'm investigating which Dossey book it's in.


There is only one valid way to partake of the universe -- whether the partaking is of food and water, the love of another, or, indeed, a pill. That way is characterized by reverence -- a reverence born of a felt sense of participation in the universe, a kinship with all and with all matter." (Larry Dossey)

Epiphany and Heart-Seeing God

Matthew 5:43-47, paraphrased

‘You have heard that it was said,
“You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.”
But I say to you,

Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,
so that you may know what it is like to come from the Source of us all;
for our Source calls the sun to rise on the evil and on the good,
and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.

For if you love only those who love you, what heart-space do you have?
Do not even the tax-collectors negotiate their fair share?

And if you greet only your brothers and sisters with honor,
how does that prepare you to be agents of blessing?

Do not all the tribes of this world do the same?
Be completely at ease with all, therefore,
as our heavenly Source demonstrates.

-- paraphrase by Rev. Jacki Belile for Women in Ministry Meditation, September 2009.

To See As God Sees

To See As God Sees

A brother went to see Abba Moses in his hermitage at Scetis and begged him for a word. And the old man said: “Go and sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.”

What is right in front of us we see least. We take the plants in the room for granted. We pay no attention to the coming of night. We miss the look of invitation on a neighbor’s face.

We see only ourselves in action and miss the cocoon around us. As a result, we run the risk of coming out of every situation with no more than when we went into it.

Learning to notice the obvious, the colors that touch our psyches, the shapes that vie for our attention, the looks on the faces of those who stand before us blurred by familiarity, blank with anonymity— the context in which we find our distracted selves—is the beginning of contemplation. Awareness of the power of the present—monastic mindfulness—is the essence of the contemplative life and common to all contemplative traditions. “Oh, wonder of wonders,” the Sufi master says, “I chop wood. I draw water from the well.” I live in the present, in other words. I know that what is, is the presence of God for me. “The first step of humility is to ‘keep the reverence of God always before our eyes’ and never forget it,” the Rule of Benedict says.

Awareness puts us into contact with the universe. It mines every relationship, unmasks every event, every moment, for the meaning that is under the meaning of it. The question is not so much what is going on in the room, but what is happening to me because of it? What do I see here of God that I could not see otherwise? What is God demanding of my heart as a result of each event, each situation, each person in my life? Etty Hillesum, Jewish prisoner in one of Hitler’s concentration camps, saw the goodness in her German guards. That is contemplation, that is the willingness to see as God sees. It does not change the difficulty, the boredom, the evil of a pernicious, an insidious situation, perhaps, but it can change the texture of our own hearts, the quality of our own responses, the depth of our own understandings. Without awareness, enemies stay forever only enemies and life is forever bland.

–from Illuminated Life by Joan Chittister (Orbis).