Moment of Oneness, May 8, 2024 - prepared by Jean Albert

Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81507551772
Meeting ID: 815 0755 1772
To connect by phone dial: +1 646 558 8656

Home…

                                           

Opening prayer: 

Have you ever found yourself feeling a little exhausted and lost? A little        lonely? Wondering what this life is all about anyway? As people of loving faith, we tend to try harder to reach out to help others, maybe we look for the Holy outside ourselves. Often, the ache inside remains - just buried further down.

   

What if in owning the ache we heed the call to really find our way home to God?

Back to our roots in the Divine where we discover we aren’t alone and lost after 

all.

Mystic, author, humanitarian, “wounded healer”, priest, Henri Nouwen will be our guide this evening. 

Opening Song Root of the Root by Sara Thomsen, video by Denise

https://youtu.be/_LX3-wx-x5U

READING: 

It is the most basic human loneliness that threatens us and is hard to face. Too often we will do everything possible to avoid the confrontation with the experience of being alone, and sometimes we are able to create the most ingenious devices to prevent ourselves from being reminded of this condition. Our culture have become most sophisticated in the avoidance of pain, not only our physical pain but our emotional and mental pain as well. We not only bury our physical pain bout our emotional and mental pain as well.  We not only bury our dead as if they were still alive, but we also bury our pains as if they were not really there. We have become so used to this state of anesthesia that we panic when there is nothing or nobody left to distract us. When we have no project to finish, no friend to visit, no book to read, no television to watch, or no record to play, and when we are left all alone by ourselves, we are brought so close to the revelation of our basic human aloneness and are so afraid of experiencing an all-pervasive sense of loneliness that we will do anything to get busy again and continue the game that makes us believe that everything is fine after all.  

Pause for Moments of Reflection on the Reading

1.Today worrying means to be occupied and preoccupied with many things, while at the same time being bored, resentful, depressed, and very lonely…

Worrying causes us to be “all over the place,” but seldom at home. One way to express the spiritual crisis of our time is to say that most of us have an address but cannot be found there.

Pause

2. It strikes me increasingly just how hard-pressed people are nowadays. It’s as though they’re tearing about from one emergency to another. Never solitary, never still, never really free but always busy about something that just can’t wait. You get the impression that, amid this frantic hurly-burly, we lose touch with life itself. We have the experience of being busy while nothing real seems to happen. The more agitated we are, and the more compacted our lives become, the more difficult it is to keep a space where God can let something truly new, really take place.



Pause

3. For most of my life I have struggled to find God, to know God, to love God. I have tried hard to follow the guidelines of the spiritual life—pray always, work for others, read the Scriptures—and to avoid the many temptations to dissipate myself. I have failed many times but always tried again, even when I was close to despair.

4. Now I wonder whether I have sufficiently realized that during all this time God has been trying to find me, to know me, and to love me. The question is not “How am I to find God?” but “How am I to let myself be found by him?” The question is not “How am I to know God?” but “How am I to let myself be known by God?” And, finally, the question is not “How am I to love God?” but “How am I to let myself be loved by God?” God is looking into the distance for me, trying to find me, and longing to bring me home

 

Pause

5. My true spiritual work is to let myself be loved, fully and completely, and to trust that in that love I will come to the fulfillment of my vocation. I keep trying to bring my wandering, restless, anxious self home, so that I can rest there in the embrace of love.

Pause

Petitions:

- Seeking God, for the times we have wandered away from home, from You, we pray.

- Loving One, for the times we have wandered away from each other we pray.

- God of our rest, for the times we have relied on busyness to assuage our restlessness, we pray. 

- Holy One for the times we rely solely our our own solutions we pray. 

- Who or what would you like to pray for at this time?

Closing Prayer: As evening shadows lengthen and night invites us to slumber, may you find rest in your true Home. 

Closing Song: You Say by Lauren Daigle

https://youtu.be/HqpNGYbcy3U?si=ai1dxFJyZz2fW_P7