“Love calls us into connection with the world. In times when feeling disconnection and isolation is easier than ever, love calls us to step into the flesh-and-blood relationships, to engage, to risk, to be vulnerable.”
—Christine Valters Paintner, PhD, Give Me a Word: The Promise of an Ancient Practice to Guide Your Year
How can you support yourself to take the risk of showing up with your vulnerability in order to spark and sustain connection?
To register for a free, online gathering this Monday, September 22nd to celebrate the release of Christine’s book Give Me a Word, click here.
Verse of the day
Have I now become your enemy by telling you the truth?
– Galatians 4:16
Voice of the day
Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without all three, we have no shared reality, and democracy as we know it—and all meaningful human endeavors—are dead.
– Maria Ressa, “How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future” (2022)
Prayer of the day
Help us find the strength to embody your voice, God, in honor of those who have been rendered voiceless.
“Each of the elements offers us a unique energy or way of understanding the sacred: water flows and cleanses, the earth roots and nourishes us, fire represents the burning of love and passion, and wind expresses freedom, breath, and unpredictability.”
—Christine Valters Paintner, PhD, Give Me a Word: The Promise of an Ancient Practice to Guide Your Year
Which element resonates with you? With which one do you feel a sense of dissonance or tension?
To register for a free, online gathering on Monday, September 22nd to celebrate the release of Christine’s book Give Me a Word, click here.
“Every moment is an organizing opportunity, every person a potential activist, and every minute a chance to change the world.”
—Dolores Huerta, labor organizer and cofounder of the United Farm Workers Union
Verse of the day
Come to me, all you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.
– Matthew 11:28
Voice of the day
Be subversive. Embrace radical love that is outside the confines of tradition. Be suspicious of everything they taught you. Carry a research notebook. Be curious. Resist. Rest.
– Tricia Hersey, “Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto” (2022)
Prayer of the day
God, amid the weights we carry as we brave this world, may we find rest in you unlike any other refuge.
“We need more men with the guts, with the courage, with the strength, with the moral integrity to break our complicit silence and challenge each other and stand with women and not against them.”—Jackson Katz
I have participated in Christine’s yearly online offering “Give Me a Word” through the Abbey of the Arts for a number of years now. Some years it is “easy” and other years it takes a while for a Word to reveal itself to me. In her latest book Give Me a Word: The Promise of an Ancient Practice to Guide Your Year, Christine invites people to participate in the process of seeking your Word using all of their senses. She invites the reader to slow down, be still, and savor the moment as she guides them through the ancient practice of seeking a Word that will guide them throughout the year.
This particular passage spoke to my heart during my own pilgrimage as I spent time with my ancestors in Nova Scotia, Canada. It also encapsulates her invitation to you. The invitation to pray with our lives is not about reaffirming what we already know about ourselves but entering into prayer in an openhearted way to receive the grace and new vision offered to us. We pray with our lives as sacred texts to reveal new places of freedom, invitations to new ways of understanding ourselves, and the way God is moving through our stories. (p. 24)
It doesn’t matter when you begin your journey, her invitation truly is timeless and such a blessing, especially in challenging times.
“To love a place is not enough. We must find ways to heal it.”—Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
Verse of the day
Have we not all one father? Has not one God created us? Why then are we faithless to one another, profaning the covenant of our ancestors?
– Malachi 2:10
Voice of the day
In a time of destruction, create something. A poem. A parade. A community. A school. A vow. A moral principle. One peaceful moment.
– Maxine Hong Kingston, “The Fifth Book of Peace” (2003)
Prayer of the day
Our parent, maker of all things, attune us to the ways we can help create life-giving spaces in remembrance of you, for the sake of others and for ourselves.
“Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war.”—Thomas Merton, Peace in the Post-Christian Era
Pastor Michael Moore's Blog 