Good morning…
After re-working yesterday’s post, I touch on the Henri Nouwen online devotional, and God’s Spirit flows me further down the exact same wavelength. It is as if Nouwen is continuing the final sentence of our morning message, a sentence which reads: “If we prayerfully listen well to the inklings of God’s Spirit stirring in our soul, we ordinary people are empowered to become the love, the voice, the presence of God to those in pain, mysteriously reaching out at the exact right moment.” Nouwen’s love, voice, presence now flow with ours.
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Through Prayer We Enter Into God’s Compassionate Heart – Henri Nouwen morning meditation, May 9th, 2019
Prayer is far from sweet and easy. Being the expression of our greatest love, it does not keep pain away from us. Instead, it makes us suffer more since our love for God is a love for a suffering God and our entering into God’s intimacy is an entering into the intimacy where all of human suffering is embraced in divine compassion. To the degree that our prayer has become the prayer of our heart we will love more and suffer more, we will see more light and more darkness, more grace and more sin, more of God and more of humanity. To the degree that we have descended into our heart and reached out to God from there, solitude can speak to solitude, deep to deep, and heart to heart. It is there where love and pain are found together.
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From the beginning of time, God created human beings to be deeply interconnected caretakers of every living thing all across our globe. As we enter into God’s compassionate heart through prayer, we descend into our own heart and reach out to God from there. Deep to deep and heart to heart, the mysterious Spirit spurs us to reach out in love, creatively caring for others in pain.
While prayerfully pondering this Holy Spirit power, I am drawn to read Richard Rohr’s morning meditation from May 9th, and I flow further still down the exact same wavelength. “The Way of Jesus is an invitation to a Trinitarian way of living, loving, and relating,” writes Rohr. “We are intrinsically like the Trinity, living in absolute relatedness. To choose to stand outside of this Flow is the deepest and most obvious meaning of sin. We call the Flow love. We really were made for love, and outside of it we die very quickly.”
Deep calls to deep at the [thundering] sound of Your waterfalls;
All Your breakers and Your waves have rolled over me.
Yet the Lord will command His lovingkindness in the daytime,
And in the night His song will be with me,
A prayer to the God of my life (Psalm 42:7-8, AMP).
…Sue…
