“Looking with eyes of love is an invitation to a kind of holy gazing. We spend much of our lives looking at the world for information to process. Gazing is a different kind of seeing, one where we look with ‘eyes of the heart,’…”
— Christine Valters Paintner, PhD,Breath Prayer: An Ancient Practice for the Everyday Sacred
What do you see when you look with eyes of love?
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The big hope that never quite deserts me, that I and my kind
Will study war no more, that love and tenderness and all the
inner graces of Almighty affection will cover the life of the
children of God as the waters cover the sea.
Howard Thurman — Meditations of the Heart, p. 110
Verse of the day
I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strays, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, but the fat and the strong I will destroy. I will feed them with justice.
– Ezekiel 34:16
Voice of the day
Violence does, in truth, recoil upon the violent, and the schemer falls into the pit which he digs for another.
– Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892)
Prayer of the day
We pray that our hands are not ones that commit violence, but ones that bind wounds, welcome the lost, and protect the weak.
Verse of the day
On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.
– Isaiah 25:6
Voice of the day
See, stay alive / in the meantime, laugh / a little harder. Go on / and gnaw that bone clean.
– Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, “The Gospel of Barbecue” (2000)
Prayer of the day
God of the Table, may we honor the abundance of your feast and work to make sure everyone has food to enjoy each day.
“In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political,
I must listen to the birds
and in order to hear the birds
the warplanes must be silent”
—Marwan Makhoul
“There were times when it would have been easy to fall apart or to go in the opposite direction, but somehow I felt that if I took one more step, someone would come along to join me.”—Rosa Parks
Verse of the day
Depart from evil, and do good;
seek peace, and pursue it.
– Psalm 34:14
Voice of the day
But peace, like a poem, / is not there ahead of itself, / can’t be imagined before it is made, / can’t be known except / in the words of its making, / grammar of justice, / syntax of mutual aid.
– Denise Levertov, “Making Peace” (1987)
Prayer of the day
Great Peacemaker, give us the courage to pursue the peace we can’t yet see, to make the world we can’t yet imagine.
Verse of the day
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are humans that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?
– Psalm 8:3-4
Voice of the day
There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature—the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.
– Rachel Carson, “Silent Spring” (1962)
Prayer of the day
Creator, your glory is revealed in the earth around us. Help us to listen to the rhythms of nature and honor them as we seek to honor you.
“Love doesn’t make our struggles vanish. It doesn’t mean carrying perpetual optimism into our days or even having to believe that everything will be okay. It does mean that I believe Love is the foundation of everything and holds us in our sorrow as well as our delight. “
— Christine Valters Paintner, PhD,Love Holds You: Poems and Devotions for Times of Uncertainty
How does Love sustain you in times of struggle?
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