Have Joy in This Day

Anna Blake-Godbout Have Joy in This Day Have Joy in this Day for we are son and daughter, sister and brother, mother, and grandmother, father and grandfather. Most of all, we are a Gift … of Courage, of Life, of Love entwined with Determination and Faith. Together we have walked the rugged paths of our own cragged mountain; and soared with eagle's wings in God's open skies. As the dearest of friends and family we have come to weather the storms and the sunshine of each season that passes its winds through us. For God gave us such blessings in celebration of Life's wonder and its mystery to be there for one another, to give us a place of peacefulness, surrounded by His cherished moments of giving each other Love and gentle Strength in our Prayer, in our Song and in our Living. As we come upon the rugged paths of our mountains let us hold one another high with outstretched hands in the sunshine of His golden wings, as we listen to the music of our hearts treasuring our memories, our hopes, our dreams. For we will be here, always, for each other bonded forever in our humanity … for now time is upon us as God has given us our moment to Have Joy in this Day and Beyond. © 2006 Anna Blake Godbout, My Words, My Time

A happy moment

Here we are on the pitcher's mound after Jackson's team won the Dizzy Dean Baseball State Championship on July 3, 2006, in Hernando, Mississippi.

Prayer of Abandonment

Nan C. Merrill, author of Psalms for Praying: An Invitation to Wholeness, reveals a bit about her childhood in an interview. Here is an excerpt:

My greatest fear growing up was of abandonment. My father was a traveling salesman. He was gone maybe 3 weeks out of the month. My mother was a very, very fearful person. Both of them had grown up with either various parents or no parents. And so I got this abandonment thing. A big part of my therapy was dealing with the fear of abandonment. And when I went to Detroit, I was introduced to the Prayer of Abandonment from Charles De Foucauld:

Beloved. I abandon myself into your hands.
Do with me what you will.
Whatever You may do, I thank you.
I am ready for all. I accept all.
Let only your will be done in me, and all your creatures.
I wish no more from this, my friend.
Into your hands I abandon my soul.
I offer it to you with all the love of my heart.
For I love you and so need to give myself,
to surrender myself into your hands
without reserve, not without boundless confidence.
For you are the heart of my heart.

It’s been the prayer of my heart for over 20 years. It delights me that I have changed from fearing abandonment to choosing to abandon myself. So that liability has been turned into one of the greatest gifts of my life.

Be like water

THE HIGHEST MOTIVE in life is to be like water. It fights nothing or no one. It flows from and back to its source and in the flowing smooths and wears away all resistance.

Taoist Proverb

The 4th Dimension

I'm going on a centering prayer retreat this week at Sacred Heart Monastery in Cullman, Alabama. It is called an 8-day intensive in centering prayer. I have practiced this ancient form of Christian prayer for the past two years and have found it to be transformative.

Here is a quote from a source book for centering prayer, Thomas Keating's book, Open Mind, Open Heart:

The union established during prayer has to be integrated with the rest of reality. The presence of God should become a kind of fourth dimension to all of life. Our threedimensional world is not the real world because the most important dimension is missing; namely, that from which everything that exists is emerging and returning in each micro-cosmic moment of time. It is like adding a sound tract to a silent movie. The picture is the same, but the sound track makes it more alive. The contemplative state is established when contemplative prayer moves from being an experience or series of experiences to an abiding state of consciousness. The contemplative state enables one to rest and act at the same time because one is rooted in the source of both rest and action.