Welcome

I welcome to my life When you rise and welcome the day, entering it with intention and prayer, you’re not calling the day to yourself. You have no power to do that. Instead, you’re bringing yourself to the day. You’re praying for power to enter the coming day alert and alive and active—not passive, dull, unconscious.

When you whisper the words, “I welcome to my life,” you’re bending your life open again. Yesterday you did things, said things, heard things, and saw things that frightened or angered, excited or enticed you. To some degree, you went to bed worried or wounded, upset or obsessed. And today you awakened lost in your own little world, absorbed in yourself—curved in upon yourself.

But when you welcome the day, you reverse the curvature of sin. You bend yourself out toward God again. There’s still plenty to worry about. The responsibilities you face are still waiting for you. Trouble or pain will pester you again. And it’s likely that you’ll forget God and get all curved in upon yourself. No worries. Just place yourself in this welcoming posture again. Open rather than closed. Your heart curved toward God, ready to receive.

There’s more goodness coming toward you than you have eyes to see.

For more meditations on the Daily Guide/Rule of Life, click on the blog category, "Daily Guide/Rule of Life"

Click here to read or pray the Daily Guide/Rule of Life

Arise

As I rise and embrace the gift of this new day The way you greet the day matters. Your first lucid moments set the course for what follows. Set that course with intention, through a simple prayer, and you’ll be okay. The prayer needn’t be long, but it ought to be clear. In fact, the simpler, briefer, and more focused it is, the better.

For much of your life you’ve let the day start you. Your alarm wakens you, and you stumble out of bed. You start the coffee or a shower. A steady stream of thoughts flows through your head. You fetch the newspaper, turn on music or the TV. Maybe you check your email or head off to the gym. The mental stream swells, and as it does, your body and spirit are pulled along with it. Tension and stress tug at your neck and shoulders, the thought-stream nags at you, demanding more from your body than your body wants to give. So you pump a little more caffeine into your veins or jot another note on your to-do list. These thoughts—largely unexamined—have yanked you into a river whose direction you control far less than you realize.

But if you rise and announce your intention to greet with gladness the day God’s given you—if you breathe from the deep center within you where Christ dwells, if you feel the firmness of the earth beneath you, if you open your arms in a gesture of welcome and arrest those thoughts for just a moment, if you say with purpose, “I rise and embrace the gift of this new day,” then you’ll have altered the course of your personal history, you’ll have announced your intention to go against the stream—or at least no longer to follow blindly when you choose for a time to follow where it leads.

So, rise and embrace the gift of this new day. Arouse your spirit. Embrace the day, and join up with God. The moment of your rising and what you do with it has the power to change everything.

For more meditations on the Daily Guide/Rule of Life, click on the blog category, "Daily Guide/Rule of Life"

Click here to read or pray the Daily Guide/Rule of Life

The mixed life

Ours is a “Mixed Life.” We mix the active life and the contemplative life, faithful to both prayer and running errands, silence and participating in meetings, solitude and chaotic work places, meditation and minding the housework. And as we walk through our days, we slowly saunter the land that’s right beneath our feet, knowing all around us is holy. But without some kind of regula—a Daily Guide or model or pattern for our lives—I don’t think such a life is possible for us uncloistered saints.

Click here to read my Daily Guide.

Rebels need practices and habits

Such Guides are common in monastic communities, and that makes sense. To live a life wholly devoted to God in the midst of this distracting world requires a determination that’s not only fierce, but that’s intentional and examined. Rebels need practices and habits that hold their lives in the center even when their determination falters. Why is it, though, that such Guides are common in monastic communities, but not among those of us who choose to walk with God beyond the sacred enclosure and out in the wildness of the today’s world and among it’s many opportunities and dangers?

It seems to me that such Guides are just what we need if you and I intend to live a life of prayer in the midst of this rushing stream and the surrounding wilderness that is our daily life. There is no sound of bell to call us to prayer, no form of daily prayer shared with others committed to the same path, and no regulated rhythm between work and prayer, eating and sleeping. No map. No GPS. Often no praying saint beside us to point the way. Some kind of Daily Guide—patterns and practices that help open our eyes to holiness—are necessary if we’re to see the whole world as sacred and encounter every blessed thing as gift from God.

Click here to read my Daily Guide.

Difficult and liberating

A regula serves not only as a sturdy walking stick while fording a rushing river, facing upstream and against the current; it can also give shape to the particular kind of life that knows holiness intimately, a life that harried people like you and me are otherwise powerless to create. A Guide or Rule is both difficult and liberating.

Difficult, because the life envisioned requires hard work if we’re to avoid simply being carried along with the masses. A Guide does inhibit—it limits choices, it teaches us to say “no” as well as “yes”.

But it’s also liberating. By choosing a way of life, knowing what options we will choose and which we will not, embracing certain values and not others, we’re free from captivity to a passive life. We’re no longer being driven along with the masses. We’ve determined the course our life will take. We live with fewer illusions. And we learn how to spot those illusions when they blind us to what is truly real and good and holy.

Click here to read my Daily Guide.