Jedidiah

Found this via Relevant Magazine yesterday....it's exciting to see businesses buiding stronger foundations in social justice.


Jedidiah Clothing: Who We Are from Jedidiah Clothing on Vimeo.

Contemplative prayer is like....

Contemplative prayer beckons me to loosen my strangle-hold on life. It whispers of a freedom, intimacy and joy in life that I have only barely tasted – a life of seeing and knowing God and others for who they are, instead of what I demand them to be. This life is….(gulp) just over the cliff. All I have to do is let go. Let go of managing my schedule, my health, my friendships, my relationship with God. Letting go of the many words and feral thought-life that plague me. Simple, right?

The problem is that this “managed” life is sooooo real to me. Like the cliff. Rock solid and “safe.” I don’t know what’s over the cliff! I only know that it appears to be a very long way down. And what will happen to my tidy packaging of life if I take the leap? Over the cliff can be a frightening place.

But that is where the light shines. And in those moments of solitude and silent prayer…those times when the Jesus Prayer settles so sweetly in my heart and trickles into the air around me…those seconds when typing emails at work becomes a holy sacrament…that is when I know that in letting go, in putting my full weight into the fall, I’ll find a Hand. Simple, silent, and still. It catches me gently and there I am held above the raging waters, finally free to be my true self, to love others as they are, and to live intimately with my Abba.

So my grip loosens…my shoulders relax…and with Luther’s prayer (“I am Yours, save me!”) as my only remaining “defense,” my hands open and I’m falling.

Lord, free me from care for myself.

...treasure from an Irish poet.

On its way through the innocent night,

The moth is ambushed by the light,

Becomes glued to a window

Where a candle burns; its whole self,

Its dreams of flight and all desire

Trapped in one glazed gaze;

Now nothing else can satisfy

But the deadly beauty of flame.

When you lose the feel

For all other belonging

And what is truly near

Becomes distant and ghostly,

And you are visited

And claimed by a simplicity

Sinister in its singularity,

No longer yourself, your mind

And will owned and steered

From elsewhere now,

You would sacrifice anything

To dance once more to the haunted

Music with your fatal beloved

Who owns the eyes of your heart.

These words of blessing cannot

Reach, even as echoes,

To the shore of where you are,

Yet may they work without you

To soften some slight line through

To the white cave where

Your soul is captive.

May some glimmer

Of outside light reach your eyes

To help you recognize how

You have fallen for a vampire.

May you crash hard and soon

Onto real ground again

Where this fundamentalist

Shell might start to crack

For you to hear

Again your own echo.

That your lost lonesome heart

Might learn to cry out

For the true intimacy

Of love that waits

To take you home

To where you are known

And seen and where

Your life is treasured

Beyond every frontier

Of despair you have crossed.

(The blessing: John O'Donohue's "For an Addict" ~ The image: my creation, symbolic of so many thoughts swirling in my mind this week)