One way to practice the Twelve Days of Christmas
The Twelve Days of Christmas are largely forgotten today. If they are remembered, they’re remembered as a song about “Lord’s a leaping,” and “partridges in a pear tree.” The Twelve Days, December 25-January 5, are the true Christmas, the Christmas not of preparation for a single holiday, but of opening our hearts increasingly to the Absolute, the Ultimate, the Eternal Light of God.
This holiday season, why not soak in this mystery a little longer that most other people do? Why not practice the relevance of the Twelve Days for your interior life?
For help along that path, I’ve prepared a simple and short free ebook with readings for each of the Twelve Days and Christmas Eve. Most of them are short enough to be read in a minute, yet potent enough to provide you with meditative guidance throughout the day. To download, click on the title: The Journey of the Magi: The Twelve Days of Christmas as Twelve Ways to Deepen Your Experience of Prayer.
The simple prayer of the most important people
A re-post: The most important people today are probably not those we think of first.
Kallistos Ware tells of St. Barsansuphios of Gaza (sixth century) who says that in his time there were three persons whose prayers likely held everything together. Because of their spiritual intention, the sun rises each day, evil is held in check, and life goes on. He even mentions their names. John, he says, is one of them. And Elias too. The third, he says, lives in the province of Jerusalem. It could be anyone—a priest, a farmer in the fields, a mother tending her hearth and her children. But it may well be Barsansuphios himself, who was trying to keep himself clear about his spiritual vocation, but humility kept him from saying so.
For those with eyes to see and ears to hear, Ware says, “the world is upheld by the prayer of hidden saints—Christian and, I believe, also non-Christian.”
Awakening to the spiritual life and the vocation of prayer in the midst of daily life is not, as I’ve said before, a cul de sac or private party. Just as a butterfly fanning its wings in Tokyo affects weather patterns in New York, our spiritual intention, our life of prayer, has enormous social and political consequences no matter how hidden our life may be.
Thomas Merton once said:
“I wonder if there are twenty people alive in the world now who see things as they really are. That would mean that there were twenty people who were free, who were not dominated or even influenced by any attachment to any created thing or to their own selves or to any gift of God, even to the highest, the most supernaturally pure of His graces. I don’t believe that there are twenty such people alive in the world. But there must be one or two. They are the ones who are holding everything together and keeping the universe from falling apart.” (New Seeds of Contemplation, page 203)
Who can say what good is happening in this world because of your hidden life of simple, and sometimes bumbling, prayer?
How to read prayerfully--lectio divina
This is an excerpt from Cyprian Consiglio's excellent little book on prayer: Prayer in the Cave of the Heart: The Universal Call to Contemplation. The book's a primer on the historical center of Christian spirituality---drawing from resources from the Christian East and West, as well as illustrating parallels to other religious traditions enriching our prayer experience.
In this selection, Cyprian introduces holy reading, or lectio divina, as a particular practice of prayerful feeding of the thinking mind with holy things.
"When choosing the object of our meditation, pride of place is given to scripture. In addition, though, there is a long tradition of other types of reading (of devotional or spiritual books or of poetry) and other types of experiences (listening to music, looking at art) that can serve the same purpose. At times we read academically, to learn facts and figures, dates and names, or we listen to music or look at art critically, analytically. Lectio divina, however, is totally different. It is gentle, like reading a love letter, or hearing a loved one's voice, or gazing on a loved one's face." (p. 96)
It is my habit to read a very small section of holy scripture each morning, in addition to the non-reflective reading of a psalm, and invite the Trinity to be the Host of this encounter. I read and listen, waiting upon the voice of the Beloved.
'Till the mind is ravished
Notes from my reading of the Pursuit of Wisdom (by the author of the Cloud of Unknowing, 14th century), taken during my study at Oxford, summer 2007: "You must gather together your thoughts and your desires and make of them a church, and there learn to love only this good word Jesus, so that all your desires and thoughts are directed to love Jesus alone. And do not fail in this mindfulness, insofar as it is possible by grace and your frailty will permit, humbling yourself more and more in prayer and taking counsel, patiently waiting on the will of the Lord, until the mind is ravished above itself to be fed with the sweet food of angels in the beholding of God and godly things."