The Little Book of Lent: Daily Reflections from the World’s Greatest Spiritual Writers. Arthur Howells

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СКАЧАТЬ 3:12–17

      ‘Do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus.’

      Prayer

      Lord God,

      Thank you for your presence with me;

      for your guidance and encouragement in the past.

      Thank you for taking me into the future,

      unknown and uncertain.

      But, above all,

      thank you for being with me now,

      today, at this present moment,

      when we can meet together –

      for this is heaven on earth.

THURSDAY, WEEK ONE

      For Reflection

      Dr Sheila Cassidy is a palliative care physician who lectures widely on terminal care. She is the author of Audacity to Believe (an account of her arrest and torture in Chile in 1975), Good Friday People and Light in the Dark Valley. The following extract is from Sharing the Darkness which has the subtitle The Spirituality of Caring.

      Precious Spikenard

      Mary’s extravagant gesture (anointing the feet of Jesus with the expensive ointment, spikenard) must have been her way of saying to him, ‘I love you. I know what is going on inside you. I can’t stop it happening, but I want you to know that I care and to take the memory of my love with you, to comfort you in the dark days ahead.’ Perhaps this episode gave Jesus the strength he needed, at that moment, to carry on with his mission.

      In the same way the love that we pour out on the dying or the handicapped says many things. It is an expression of our need to serve, to love, however flawed our motives. To the person cared for it is the gesture that makes the pain bearable, life somehow worth living:

      No revolution will come in time

      to alter this man’s life

      except the one surprise

      of being loved.

      SIDNEY CARTER

      But the most important message is the unspoken one to the world at large: that this ‘dead loss to society’, this dying woman or handicapped man, is infinitely precious. If I as a doctor spend an hour of my clinic time talking to a woman who has only a few weeks to live, I am making a clear statement of her worth. I am giving her time that could have been spent with people who will get better, who will be able to contribute once again to the common good. I am affirming the worth of the individual person in a world in which the individual is at risk of being submerged or valued only for his strength, intellect or beauty. It is a prophetic statement about the unique value of the human person, irrespective of age, social class or productivity. It is an affirmation that people matter just because they are people, because God made them and loves them, just as they are, not because they are good or witty or physically beautiful.

      We isolate the handicapped on the pretext that they will disturb the peace – when the reality is that their presence disturbs our desire for the beautiful. We isolate our dying on the pretext that they want peace – when the reality is that their presence disturbs our sense of omnipotence and immortality.

      Meanwhile there will always be those who find themselves called like Mary of Bethany to disturb the peace by pouring out over some dead loss to society that which could have been sold for three hundred denarii.

      SHARING THE DARKNESS SHEILA CASSIDY

      Scripture Reading

      ST JOHN 12:1–8

      ‘“You do not always have me.”’

      Prayer

      Generous God –

      as you pour your anointing Spirit on us

      so may we pour out your love

      on those we will meet today;

      may we demonstrate by what we say and what we are,

      that all are valued and precious in your sight

      because they are your people.

FRIDAY, WEEK ONE

      For Reflection

      Heather Ward is a teacher of English and the author of Gift of Self and Giving Yourself Away. She also lectures on prayer and spirituality.

      The Wilderness Experience

      As Christians I think we perhaps need to accept that we are always on a route to God which may pass through the desert: we dare not live on starvation rations. By this I mean that we need to be feeding continually on truth, on doctrine, so that we are not living solely according to our feelings, our choices, our way of understanding the gospel.

      For some of us this may involve concentrating our attention on the basic truths about God as Creator, Father, Redeemer, Lover, especially emphasizing, perhaps, those which we find most difficult emotionally. The need is to allow God to be greater than our powerful feelings. For me, at stages in my life when psychological and emotional difficulties have been uppermost, this has been a matter of directing reading, thinking and praying, towards this one aspect of God in an openness of mind and heart which consents, as it were, to its truth. When we have such difficulties we can often find that beneath it is a powerful resistance to the idea: we don’t like God as Creator, because we don’t like the implications of being a creature; we can’t accept God as ‘Father’ because we take a dim view of fathers.

      During one period of darkness, for example, I discovered that God’s ‘absence’ resulted from an unwillingness to let God love me, to let God be Love. I couldn’t cope with a gift I hadn’t earned because it was humiliating, belittling. For me the message behind being loved was about my worthlessness, my incapacity to give anything of value. To be loved unconditionally was for me, to be deprived of any human dignity. Once I realized this I realized that there was also a gap between my mind and my feelings. Intellectually I saw that this idea was wrong-headed and distorted, while emotionally I still ‘knew’ it was true. No amount of argument or persuasion had any power in this situation: it was my feelings which needed re-educating. So I immersed myself as far as possible in brooding upon God as Love – in Scripture, in accounts of Christian experience, in my own life – in a willingness to surrender my own view of love. And in prayer I could only ask him to teach me his meaning of love and offer him a willingness to learn afresh. Certainly I have found again and again that our only way through this kind of impasse is to foster within СКАЧАТЬ