“Whatever threshold you stand on right now, nurture your awareness of how the sacred is more available in these moments, more clearly heard or seen. Keep alert for signs of how the divine is moving through your days.”
—Christine Valters Paintner, PhD, Give Me a Word: The Promise of an Ancient Practice to Guide Your Year
What thresholds spaces are you in right now? Where do you notice the divine moving through your day?
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“For John of the Cross, the spiritual life is not about getting closer to God. Instead, it is a journey of consciousness. We realize union with God, we don’t acquire it or receive it. It is something we already possess, but we need to let go of everything that keeps us from seeing this reality.”
—Christine Valters Paintner, PhD, A Midwinter God: Encountering the Divine in Seasons of Darkness
When have you felt the truth of already being in union with God? What stands in your way of embracing this reality?
To register for the self-study companion retreat to the book with additional resources and guidance, click here.
Verse of the day
For God did not give us a spirit of cowardice but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.
– 2 Timothy 1:7
Voice of the day
We must not be frightened nor cajoled / into accepting evil as deliverance from evil. / We must go on struggling to be human, / though monsters of abstraction / police and threaten us.
– Robert Hayden, “Worlds in the Mourning Time” (1970)
Prayer of the day
Empower us, God of justice, so we can rise above our fears during tumultuous times.
“What happens on social media doesn’t stay on social media. Online violence is real world violence. Social media is a deadly game for power and money, what Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism, extracting our private lives for outsized corporate gain. Our personal experiences are sucked into a database, organized by AI, then sold to the highest bidder. . . These American companies controlling our global information ecosystem are biased against facts, biased against journalists. They are—by design—dividing us and radicalizing us.”—Maria Ressa, Nobel Peace Prize lecture 2021
“Before you speak of peace, you must first have it in your heart.”—St. Francis of Assisi
…injustice is the social consequence of pride; and the inevitable fruit of injustice is self-destruction… It is the business of politics so to organize the vitalities of human existence that a “commonwealth” will be created out of the conflicting forces and interests of human life, a task which has never been achieved in history without setting force, as the instrument of order, against force as the instrument of anarchy. The basic problem of politics is how to prevent the force which is an instrument of order on one level of social organization from becoming the instrument of either anarchy or tyranny on the next level of social integration. ~ Reinhold Niebuhr on Politics, p. 119
“It cannot be denied that too often the weight of the Christian movement has been on the side of the strong and the powerful and against the weak and oppressed-this, despite the gospel.” ~ Howard Thurman (Jesus and the Disinherited, p. 21)
“The heart is meant to be vulnerable, malleable, broken open by love. The ancient Hebrew prophets regularly preached about turning our hearts of stone into hearts of flesh.”
—Christine Valters Paintner, PhD, A Midwinter God: Encountering the Divine in Seasons of Darkness
When has your heart hardened out of self-protection? What helps soften your heart, allowing for both sorrow and love?
To register for the self-study companion retreat to the book with additional resources and guidance, click here. Use code MIDWINTERGOD20 to take 20% off through October 31st.
Verse of the day
Do not repay evil for evil or abuse for abuse, but, on the contrary, repay with a blessing. It is for this that you were called—that you might inherit a blessing.
– 1 Peter 3:9
Voice of the day
We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another. / We seek harm to none and harmony for all.
– Amanda Gorman, “The Hill We Climb”
Prayer of the day
God, release us from the impulse to react with gestures that induce harm. Let us cling to your grace instead.
You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make. (Source)
Pastor Michael Moore's Blog 