In the Sanctuary of Women: A Companion for Prayer and Reflection

Prayer for the Morning With this new day, we open our eyes and we pray: God, inhabit our seeing. Live in our looking. Be our vision and our sight. Illumine us, that we may perceive you, know you, welcome you in all the ways you go hiding in this world. Amen. Jan Richardson In The Sanctuary of Women: A Companion for Reflection And Prayer

Some Questions for Reflection Today How do we seek God? Where do we perceive the presence of the holy? How far are we willing to go to find it? What feeds our minds and imaginations in our searching? How does our hunger for God impact our other relationships—with institutions and systems and other people? How do we claim and create our own visionary spaces…? Jan Richardson In the Sanctuary of Women: A Companion for Reflection And Prayer

We try so hard, don’t we? When spiritual development becomes a passion we sometimes work at it to the point of exhaustion, excluding all spontaneity of spirit. That’s why I’m letting myself off the hook today, and invite you to join me if so moved.

In her book, In the Sanctuary of Women: A Companion for Prayer and Reflection, Jan Richardson suggests with Thomas Moore that we let ourselves “get sleepy” once in a while, because it is in the latent spaces in-between when we let go, that spirit can then plant seeds that can germinate. Moore suggests that “…awareness, wisdom, and soulfulness do not arrive solely through perpetually vigilant consciousness.”

So today, let yourself off the hook and let spirit do her work.

Blessing

May you grow sleepy
enough
to find the gap where God lives.
May your soul find its waking
there.

Jan Richardson In the Sanctuary of Women: A Companion for Prayer and Reflection

Photo Credit Fish Hook: http://clipart-library.com/clipart/yikdE9EiE.htm

Photo Credit Person Floating: Esther Lui for NPR