THIS WEEKEND! "The Art of Meditation: Sustaining the Compassionate Life" with Fr. Laurence Freeman OSB in Fresno :: Sign up today!

How can I pray when I feel so scattered? Is there a way to experience more of God in the midst of my busy life?

Can I find more meaning in the daily tasks I do?

How do I respond redemptively to the rise of violence and fear in our world?

Click here to go to the website for more information or to pre-register!

Prayer isn't an escape from the world, nor is it merely asking God for things, for security, for safety. Prayer is relationship with the Beloved, it is the experience of union with the One who made and loves you.

Prayer is, of course, words. But it's got to be more than words just as a relationship must be more than words if it's going to do what good relationships do. And prayer also must turn us outward in meaningful engagement with the daily tasks that are ours to do, and in compassion that helps transform the world into the world God is making it to be.

Prayer is the most basic expression of our faith; in fact, aside from breathing, is is the most basic act of being human.

Each year, UPC hosts the Central California Prayer of the Heart Conference. This year's conference combines our Prayer of the Heart Conference and the Interfaith Scholar Weekend. Fr. Laurence Freeman is one of the world's greatest living teachers of Christian prayer and meditation. If you want your life to count, to act in whatever small or great way you feel compelled to act in this world, then meditative prayer is a necessity. It grounds you in Jesus Christ, the center of life.

This conference will help bring meaning, perspective, power, and dignity to your life, and it will join you with others, who, like you are offering their lives for the sake of healing the world. It will help you walk courageously, yet gently as a redemptive force to bring hope and healing to the world around you.

Schedule:

Friday, February 8, Location: Islamic Cultural Center of Fresno (no charge)

7:00pm Lecture "Meditation into the Common Ground"

Saturday, February 9, Location: Temple Beth Israel, Fresno ($45 advance, $50 at the door, $10 students)

8:30 am Continental Breakfast and Registration

9:00 Shabbat Observance (Torah Commentary)

9:15 Lecture: "The Crisis of Religion is the Time for Contemplation"

10:45 Lecture: "The Cave of the Heart: The Stages of Meditation"

Lunch

1:15 Session: "Questions and Answers with Fr. Laurence Freeman"

2:15pm Closing

Sunday, February 10, Location: University Presbyterian Church (no charge)

9:30am Worship with a sermon and guided meditation by Fr. Freeman

For more information about Fr. Laurence Freeman click here.

To register for Saturday's conference click here.

Tickled

Often I get the impression that people think the spiritual life is a struggle, something serious. Clergy bear a lot of the blame for this. I think we clergy make it serious so we can stay in control. That's not just silly, it's harmful. Here's a little poem to help you enjoy God today. It's from St Teresa of Avila, the sixteenth century Spanish nun, who knew more than her share of serious clerics.

How did those priests ever get so serious and preach all that gloom? I don't think God tickled them yet.

Beloved--hurry!*

Intention: Today I'll open myself to playfulness and sense in it the tickle of the Beloved.

*from Daniel Ladinsky's "Love Poems from God"

Prayer is a descent into our true humanity

Prayer is no flight into the extraordinary; it's a descent into true humanity. It's a union of heaven and earth, the sanctifying of the ordinary--the ordinary recovered by God, paradise regained. Prayer, the prayer that follows the impulse of love, that works to forget all else but God, is the reunion of my self, the reintegration of my being. Prayer is not about getting things from God, calling on God to toss me a life vest. Rather, it's the hard journey past all the alluring things that claim me, call me from the path. Prayer is true freedom, which is why prayer is a way of life and not a mere task or duty.

Prayer brings together what we too often separate

Prayer brings together what we in our ignorance too often separate. Prayer that follows the path of the embodiment of God joins together Divinity and humanity, spirit and matter, sacred and secular, mystical encounter with God and walking with a friend. Anyone whose praying perpetuates some sanitary separation between all these things isn’t walking the same path God-in-Christ has walked.

With every step the Beloved takes, there’s a deeper penetration of the Eternal into the temporal, and there’s a fuller incorporation of the temporal into the Eternal. That’s why we pray, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

Heaven and earth are one in Christ; Divinity permeating and pervading not only our humanity, but all creation as well.

The end of head-trip religion

The downward and inward move of God in the Incarnation of Christ brings an end to any religion that would make prayer into a mere head-trip. The Incarnation is an invitation to touch God, taste God, love God. It is first-hand and personal experience of the God who is ultimate reality, and it is the experience of this Reality in our bodies, on this earth.

This radical embodiment of God in Jesus makes all bodies, indeed, all matter—the earth included—sacred.