Announcing Your Place

Finding Smaller and Larger Realities

Photo by Vincent van Zalinge on Unsplash

Opening Prayer

Take a moment to ponder the ways you connect most deeply to belonging. Breathe into that awareness for a moment. Open to grace.

Reading

Job 12: 7- 10

But ask the animals, and they will teach you;
   the birds of the air, and they will tell you;
ask the plants of the earth, and they will teach you;
   and the fish of the sea will declare to you.
Who among all these does not know
   that the hand of the Lord has done this?
In his hand is the life of every living thing
   and the breath of every human being.

Job 12: 7- 10

Reflection

The theme of earth and creation continues in this week’s prayer reflection. It is not, by any means, all there is to say about the spiritual life but it’s what the season inspires in me and in the tradition I belong to.

This Friday, 4th October, the church celebrates St Francis of Assisi. The saint is widely acknowledged for his love of God’s creation. He was also fierce and challenging in his embrace of material poverty, inspired by Jesus and demanding it of would-be followers. We love Francis for the first of these qualities and tend to forget the second! That’s understandable. Yet how inextricably, in many ways, these two things are - the love of creation and the need for radical simplicity.

Surely it is this sort of poverty we are being nudged towards if we are to address the ecological crisis that is, slowly but surely, forcing itself into our consciousness. I don’t think I’m alone in my reluctance to address it. On some level, we know that the crisis will require us to relinquish so much, either by choice or by inevitable consequence. And, still we resist this choice. We simply don’t know how to find the courage to change the way we live.

In his book, At Work in the Ruins, Dougald Hine argues that our denial arises not so much from a reluctance to face terrible facts but from an absence of a bigger story and a deeper experience in which we might place them. Hine writes: Before it is over, I suspect, we will need to learn again what it means to take seriously things that are larger or smaller than were allowed to be real or significant, according to the scales and systems of modernity¹.

To face the possibility of the end of the world, at least as we know it, we shall need to be more faithful to the smaller unseen encounters with ourselves, with those around us and with our local culture: a simplicity of living that is more natural, more generous, more just. Letting the ‘soft animal’ of our bodies love what it loves’, in the words of the poet Mary Oliver, instead of the punitive repentance that we normally revert to when we are trying to change something - telling ourselves and one another off for being wrong.

We shall need to turn again to what the poet Mary Karr has called, the small the fond and the local. And, at the same time, we will need to raise our heads and remember our larger belonging to mountains and rivers, wild geese and distant stars: to the earth, to the cosmos, to God. We shall need to rediscover the greater stories of creation and kinship, redemption and resurrection.

These are the belongings - both smaller and larger than the systems of modernity - that will sustain us in the times ahead and maybe, miraculously, change the course of events.

Besides the stories, there are practices and prayers that can hold us in and to our conversion. I urge you to find them. Silence is one of those practices. It can loosen our grasp on the compulsions and anxieties that rob us of what we really need. Inside the letting go of silence, we come closer to the mystery of our deepest identity and belonging.

So let us now imagine ourselves joining hands with brother sun and sister moon, brother air and sister water, brother fire and sister earth: not omitting the wisest of all - sister death. But more about her next time².

A Time of Silence

Suggestion: 20 mins. But take even a few minutes if you can!

Silence is not always easy. The mind is hard to quiet. If you don’t yet have a way, you might find a single prayer word or phrase - perhaps from something you’ve just read - and return to it each time you find your mind wandering. Don’t worry. It will wander. Just gently return.

Widening the Circle

Take a moment to give thanks for the grace of silence, and extend that grace to all those on your heart and mind right now…

The Lord’s Prayer

The New Zealand Lord’s Prayer captures beautifully the profound elements of a prayer that for some of us has become too familiar. See below.

Poem

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Blessing

And so, may we let the soft animal of our body love what it loves. May we find in pebbles and prairies and prayers our true belonging. May we cherish ever more deeply every small encounter and open ever more widely to the grace and vision beyond our present knowing.

… And the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us all evermore.  Amen. 

Music

Question for the Week

What connects you most naturally and most deeply to a sense of belonging? Is there a Greater Story that inspires you? What prayer arises in your heart as you ponder all this? (Take some time to write this up in order to deepen it.)

The New Zealand Anglican Lord's Prayer

Eternal Spirit, Earth-maker, Pain-bearer, Life-giver,
Source of all that is and that shall be,
Father and Mother of us all,
Loving God, in whom is heaven:

The hallowing of your name echo through the universe!
The way of your justice be followed by the peoples of the world!
Your heavenly will be done by all created beings!
Your commonwealth of peace and freedom sustain our hope and come on earth.

With the bread we need for today, feed us.
In the hurts we absorb from one another, forgive us.
In times of temptation and test, strengthen us.
From trials too great to endure, spare us.
From the grip of all that is evil, free us.

For you reign in the glory of the power that is love, now and for ever.
Amen.

- The New Zealand Book of Prayer | He Karakia Mihinare o Aotearoa

1. At Work In The Ruins, Dougald Hine. p8

2. Reference to Canticle of Brother Sun and Sister Moon. Francis of Assisi, 13th C.