Newsletter
insight newsletter - issue 11.3
i n s i g h t on prayers
Ellen Turnbull and I were wondering about a way to draw insight attention to this remarkable book of evolutionary prayers by Bruce Sanguin that he has published under the title, If Darwin Prayed. We also wanted to draw attention to the celebration of five years of this online newsletter, insight.
I suggested to Ellen that we send a copy of Bruce’s prayer collection to at least ten people who had, at some point in the last five years, made a written contribution to insight. We would take a chance that somewhere between the book’s covers would be at least one prayer that sparked a response in that writer. We would anticipate a spark of recognition, a moment of connection, as the writer found one prayer giving voice to something of the depth of their own relationship with sacred mystery and with divine presence. And we would invite them to write about that.
And so we did just that.
Here’s what I said to the writers in my letter:
I don’t know how it is with you and prayer, but I can pretty much mark out my path of spiritual formation through prayer collections of one kind or another. It’s great how the right prayer writer emerges just as I feel the need for a fresh voice to accompany me in finding a few words for the almost inexpressible in that season of my living.
And so it is with this collection we have sent you. I had the opportunity to collaborate with Bruce Sanguin in creating a small group study guide to accompany his book, Darwin, Divinity, and the Dance of the Cosmos. That experience shifted enough ‘stuff’ within me that I needed help to find a language for the holy terrain in which I then found myself. What a relief when I If Darwin Prayed appeared! It really was like coming to a gushing spring of water and experiencing deep refreshment.
This is one of the prayers in Bruce’s book. Over the last few months I’ve read it aloud in some of the groups I’ve been facilitating as a kind of call to attentiveness in the session about to begin.
Travellers in Time
Let us gather now,
friends of Spirit – travellers in time –
to hear the story
of Love’s evolving narrative.
In this sacred space,
we release into the present,
laying aside all worries, plans, and complaints,
entering into the now
of Mystery’s eternal temple.
In this sacred space,
we honour our past,
retelling the great story of deep time
as Spirit’s unfolding tale,
giving thanks that a whole universe
is gathered up in the likes of us –
tradition’s promise.
In this sacred space,
we consent to the allurement
of an unrehearsed future,
from where the living Word
woos each one of us toward
our unique expression –
that is Spirit’s dream.
Amen.
The prayer is so knowingly written that I can feel the human tension of recognition rising in people and then being released with a great sigh at these thirteen words: In this sacred space, we consent to the allurement of an unrehearsed future. I could say something about every line, but I just want to hint at what a writer might do in 200 words or so: take us to a prayer and make a personal connection. I know that’s asking a lot: the vulnerability of it; the deepest truths of our living.
This edition of insight is a collection of the six reflections we received from the writers we contacted, along with the prayer they addressed.
From Jim Strathdee
Writer, musician, liturgist, and workshop leader in Sacramento, California
We turn aside to see
the beauty of each other,
the goodness of this life,
and the truth of sacred wisdom that knows:
Earth to be holy;
all creatures to be kin;
the universe to be One;
and Spirit to be a flaring presence,
for all who turn aside to see.
Amen.
Excerpt from “Turning Aside to See,” page 148
I live near a beautiful river that runs through a large 30-mile-long protected parkway that is home to nature’s wild abundance: native trees and plants, deer, wild turkeys, coyotes, and thousands of water birds. Most every day I take a “prayer walk,” a trek that is part spiritual practice and part aerobics. I find “prayer stations” along the way: a beautiful lookout where I give thanks for the beauty of Earth, some rocky rapids where I stand and let the sound and the spray wash my soul, a quiet pond for prayers of intercession. Then there is always a moment where I pick the berry-like flowers of the anise plant, rub them between my fingers, and smell the strong, thick aroma of licorice. I can’t tell you exactly why I do this – it just seems intuitively the right thing to do.
However, a few days ago I had an epiphany. I had been reading a prayer by Bruce Sanguin and was moved by the power of his image of kinship with all of creation. In my mind I know that Earth was born of fire 13.7 billion years ago, and after the land cooled and the waters came, encoded in the first bacterium and the first creature that crawled out onto the shore was all the material necessary to form us humans. All things on Earth are made from the same stuff. We are not visitors here. We are all kin. But on my walk that day, at the moment of my little communion with the anise berries, it hit me. We are all kin. I went bounding around the area, proclaiming to rocks, bushes, and water, “We are kin! We are kin!”
Bruce Sanguin entreats us to become “re-enchanted” with Earth. We do need to fall in love with Earth again to fuel our passion to care for her. But for me, there is a great sadness in all of this. All summer long I’ve carried Bill McKibben’s book Earth in my backpack. McKibben is an environmental scientist and the founder of 350.org, an international effort to keep the carbon in Earth’s atmosphere to 350 parts per million. Now we are well beyond this tipping point and global warming is underway. The old earth that has sustained human life for the last 200,000 years is gone. The floods, droughts, wildfires, and melting glaciers, snowpack, and tundra are the new normal. This new earth will become an increasingly harsh place. Without enumerating the social, political, and economic ramifications, it is safe to say that our human journey will become an increasingly uphill struggle.
In the midst of all this change, it is vital to me that we hang on to the evolutionary spirituality and mysticism that Bruce Sanguin is expressing. He invites us to read the earth as a “sacred text.” We can learn from the creative processes of evolution that always keep what is essential in order to survive and flourish in the future. I am counting on the Holy Presence of the universe to engage our courage and creative imaginations as we hunker down, simplify, and find durable economies within smaller communities of care, always looking after the well-being of all our neighbors and other-than-human kin. And along the way, may we always be open to those sacred moments of celebration and delight when we see in each other and in all creation, God’s blessed kinship.
May Earth always be experienced as a blessing.
From Donna Sinclair
Author, spiritual companion, journalist, gardener, and social activist in North Bay, Ontario
We have managed to roll together
the tangled strands of our lives
and get ourselves here.
We take this soft and colourful ball of life –
the school knapsacks filled with anticipation,
the news from home,
the co-worker we can’t stand,
the friend that means the world to us,
the dreams that could come true if we just had time,
the failures that haunt our sleep,
the medical report we await,
the love received,
the healing laughter –
we take it all and entrust it as an offering to
the Cosmic Knitter,
who fashions – like an ancient granny –
from these ends of our lives,
a coat of many colours.
We place these woolly bits of our living
in the knitting bag
of this sacred liturgy,
listen for the eternal click and clack of needles,
and eagerly await the finishing touches of Spirit.
Amen.
"Knit One, Purl Two," page 109
I love colour and texture, and above all making things with my hands. But I can’t knit. God knows I’ve tried. Sadly, “the tangled strands” Bruce describes are all I ever produce.
My mother could knit though. She raised it to an art form, providing her children and grandchildren with perfect Celtic-patterned sweaters.
In the blindness of her later years she stopped knitting for a while, but began again under the kindly prodding of a seniors’ residence staffer. Then she knit scarves that were full of holes and love. The edges zigzagged alarmingly, and she had trouble figuring out how long a scarf needed to be. “Well, he doesn’t walk outside in the cold much,” she famously said about one of the recipients of her knitting, the proud owner of a scarf that barely encircled his throat.
After awhile she got the hang of it again, and we all received the long, long mufflers decreed by her granddaughter, wildly multi-coloured and sufficient in size to wrap around the neck several times and still almost trail on the ground.
And then her 96-year-old hands gave out. She couldn’t keep us warm any more. Soon after that, my mother died.
But I know about the “eternal click and clack of needles.” I know about the “woolly bits” that made her scarves a riot of leftover colour, calibrated into harmony by her insistent questions (“Is this blue? Does it go with this? Is it green?”).
And now – a couple of years after the knitting stopped, after I tipped my mother’s ashes into the ground beside my father, after I had a dream that announced her continuous and radiant presence – I know, too, about “the finishing touches of Spirit.”
From Paul Hawker
Pilgrim, mystic, author, and film maker in New Zealand
|
Presider: |
When the sun shines, |
|
All: |
we rejoice. |
|
Presider: |
When the money gods smile upon us, |
|
All: |
we rejoice. |
|
Presider: |
When family is the wind beneath our wings, |
|
All: |
we rejoice. |
|
Presider: |
When we are strong in body and mind, |
|
All: |
we rejoice. |
|
Presider: |
When the beauty of creation drops us to our knees in awe, |
|
All: |
we rejoice. |
|
Presider: |
For we are in you, |
|
All: |
We rejoice and give thanks. Amen. |
"Again I Say Rejoice," page 119
Bruce’s prayer speaks to me of the yin and yang of life: the fullness, the nothingness; the experience of the whole that is mystery.
What is this gift of life?
It is the coming out and the coming in, the highs and the lows, the passion and the despair, the loneliness and the laughter, the love and the loss, the comfort and the distress of knowing that in one thousand years there'll not be one single trace left of my being here on earth.
What is this gift of life?
Life is to know that prayer is simply asking God to take possession of me (and therein lies its bliss and its torment). It is to do all things and no thing. It is to strive and to submit, to gather and to give. It is to be fully human (for therein lies divinity).
What is this gift of life?
It is to be still and know God. It is to frequent, through grace, that place Julian of Norwich spoke of when she said, "All is well, all thing is well, all manner of thing is well."
From Charlotte Jackson
Clinical and trauma counselor, couples counselor, author, and spiritual companion in Vancouver, BC
O Holy One,
you have set us within a world of wonders,
an endless font of fascination.
We are fired into this world
with bottomless desire.
Forgive our fascinations,
which lead us away from the sacred
and toward the profane.
We are mesmerized by violence,
transfixed by displays of dominance,
and allured by the fetish of personal fortune.
Still you do not give up on us.
You are the persuasive pull of love,
and the insistent push
over the edge of yesterday’s truth.
You are the message of meaning –
and the promise of love
written into the stars and the life of this planet –
manifest in Jesus,
beckoning truth
and beacon of becoming.
We rest in holy longing.
Amen.
"Holy Longing," page 105
Holy longing. This prayer speaks to my heart. It reminds me that at the core of our fascinations, beyond our pull to the petty and transient, a substantial “meal” exists beyond the “lollipops” of violence, domination, and petty fortunes. Thomas Merton warned that we may unwittingly invest in fascinations and yet miss the deep peace asked of us by the holy longing:
To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone and everything is to succumb to violence.
This prayer reminds me and calls me forth to trust that there is a “persuasive pull of love,” a “beckoning truth” of a vastness more great, more unfathomable, more immanent that I can begin to guess at.
If we allow ourselves the space to dwell in the in-between states and develop what the poet John Keats called “negative capability,” an openness to being in “uncertainties, Mystery, doubts,” we make space for our heart and its wisdom to nurture and rest in holy longing, which I feel is the central purpose to which we are called to attend.
From Robert V. Thompson
Author, prophetic speaker, congregational leader, heretic, provocateur, and mystic in Atlanta, Georgia
O Holy One,
ineffable and yet as near as now.
You are the nameless one,
though named by many traditions.
You are holy,
you are wholeness,
you are that mystery,
that magnificence
that no single tradition can contain.
Your beauty astounds,
your wisdom clarifies,
your abundance flows out
by many rivers
and returns to your ocean heart.
We honour each river –
veins of tradition,
arteries of life,
returning to your fathomless heart,
and back out again into the body of creation.
We are carried away,
trusting the flow
more than our names.
Amen.
"The Nameless Flow," page 139
I think I get this inter-spiritual truth. Every spiritual and religious tradition has its truths but at the core of every one there is a single heart beating. That heart of the matter is forgiveness, love, unity, and wholeness.
This “nameless flow” conjures up a deep and inexplicable truth. As Meister Eckhart put it, “God is a great river that no one can dam up, that no one can stop.” Thomas Merton calls it, “the hidden wholeness.”
Whenever life doesn’t conform to my expectations – whenever I’m broken open – I have the opportunity to dive more deeply into that river. During my divorce nearly two decades ago, the hard shell of my life cracked. As never before, I had a choice: Do I deny, defend, or deflect? Do I shut down or open up? Or could I simply let go and let be? That divorce was my first holy teacher.
The nameless flow requires surrender to it as it moves around and through us. My experience has taught me that we can’t know it, touch it, or let it carry us unless and until we know that we know nothing at all. Once the clatter and clutter on the surface dissolves, there is nothing to know or do.
But as the mind quiets, a “thin filament” inevitably appears, and expands into the everlasting arms upon which I and we are always leaning. The supreme gift of the sacred darkness is to teach us how we are always being held. The grace of spiritual evolution is to awaken and reawaken to the nameless flow – the One who holds all.
From Ralph Milton
Author, publisher, networker, and sage in Kelowna, BC
Thanks for including me among those invited to respond to Bruce Sanguin’s book. I feel honoured. What I have is not a prayer or meditation, but a response.
Many years ago, when serving the churches of the Philippines, I learned that it was critical to learn the language – the specific dialect of a people – before I could talk to others about things that really matter. Especially about matters of the Spirit. Language or dialect are both vehicle and obstacle, and profoundly connected to the heart and soul of those who use them.
I deeply appreciate Bruce Sanguin’s efforts to forge a new dialect through which Spirit may enter human souls. I read his prayers with joy and appreciation. I am grateful that my middle-aged children and my teenage grandchildren have words and images through which they may encounter the Spirit.
As for me, I understand Bruce’s words. I meditate on his metaphors. But we speak a different dialect. Or perhaps sub-dialect might be more correct.
Three-quarters of a century ago, I grew up in a world that was at least nominally Christian. I absorbed the biblical stories with my morning oatmeal. My school days began with prayer, a scripture reading, and the singing of “God Save the King.” In high school, I was required to memorize a poem a week, of which about half were psalms or other poetic passages from the Bible. My psyche was marinated in a Christian culture.
I can no longer remember people’s names, or what I should be doing this afternoon, but all those stories and songs and poems are there and available to me. And it is through that dialect, those stories, those images that I continue to encounter the Spirit, and through which I grow my soul as I prepare for my second birthing.
I celebrate Bruce’s work and I am delighted that Wood Lake Publishing, a ministry of which I was one of several mid-wives, has the courage and vision to explore these worlds of Spirit. Like so many others of my vintage, I stand to one side and applaud. But like T.S. Eliot, I find that at the end of my exploring, I arrive where I started, “and know the place for the first time.”
And in closing (by Tim Scorer):
Deep appreciation to the writers who chose to respond to the invitation.
And words from the prayer with which we began:
May the living Word
woo each one of us toward
our unique expression –
that is Spirit’s dream.
Amen.
Afterword from the editor Ellen Turnbull
I’ve been going through the insight archive and re-reading some of the articles from the past five years. What an inspiring collection! Among other topics, there is a music issue, one focusing on embodied spirituality, an Advent couples journey, and of course the regular contributions from Tim Scorer, whose perspectives continue to encourage and nourish spiritual growth.
This issue, which celebrates insight’s fifth anniversary, is quite different from the first one (that came out under the name of CopperHouse Current). Like life and Earth, insight continues to transform, evolve, and move on, always with the intention of taking the best from the past – Christianity’s ancient wisdom – and being attentive to the movement of spirit in our day. Bruce Sanguin’s cosmological prayers are a natural fit with insight’s perspective of unity of spirit and creation.
I would like to offer deep gratitude to Tim Scorer for his contributions to each issue of insight. Tim is an astute and creative editor and writer. His experience and openness to what is emerging have enabled insight to maintain a finger on the pulse of a Christianity that is current and vital, and grounded in ancient truth. Thank you Tim for all you have done to nurture insight so well. Your careful and open-hearted leadership are much appreciated.
