When we go out into the world as we have made it
Everywhere there speaks to us forgetfulness of the Spirit.
If human work were to be without love
The earth would become a bleak and barren desert.
Through forgetfulness of the Spirit
Love ebbs away.
Bring to mind in us, O Christ,
Inspirer of true human love,
How we have come to the earth
From fields of light,
From the heights of the Spirit.
May we bring to earth
What we have seen in the Spirit.
May remembrance of God
Grow strong in our souls
Overcoming the mists
Which hide the meaning
In the work of each day.
https://www.thechristiancommunity.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/logoBLK-1.png00CCNAhttps://www.thechristiancommunity.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/logoBLK-1.pngCCNA2020-04-06 08:53:322020-04-06 08:53:32Prayers for Strength
A corona is a circle of light around an object. The most magnificent corona in our universe is the corona around the sun. It is a fiery circular crown with occasional intense flare-ups. Its rays extend millions of miles into space. What a majestic body our sun is, the source of light and of life.
Looking at the heart, there is also a corona. The heart muscle has its own blood supply. It comes from a crown or corona of blood vessels that circle the heart. This corona can be defective, and then one speaks of coronary heart disease.
And now we have a corona-virus that has unleashed panic around the globe. Borders have been closed. Air travel has been partially suspended. Millions of people are under lockdown. The corona-viruses are named for the crown-like spikes on the surface of the virus. They usually cause mild to moderate upper-respiratory infections, like the common cold. But they can also cause more severe illnesses such as bronchitis and pneumonia, which can, of course, lead to death.
For some time now, people all over the world seem to have fallen under the spell of fear. Fear has entered our lives like a fast-spreading virus. It has become a corona of darkness around the globe. Like the crown-like spikes of the corona-virus, the dark spikes of fear drive people apart. Fear drives people into isolation. Fear contracts and constricts the heart.
And is the heart of humanity not suffering from coronary heart disease, from constriction, and therefore from a lack of love supply? Infectious love and life and laughter are giving way to deadly infections of the soul and the spirit. The world needs healing. We need healing.
As I child I used to sing: ‘The Sun is in my heart …’ We need to re-discover the sun-being in our hearts, in our midst, so that His corona can embrace our frightened humanity and drive away the cold and dark corona of fear, and so that we may find the courage to touch each other’s soul with the contagious healing power of love.
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The following prayer was offered by Rev. Nora Minassian at the 24th Annual MLK Community Prayer Breakfast on April 7th, 2018 at the Phoenixville Middle School in Phoenixville, PA.
Let us pray:
Dear Lord, we come to you with gratitude for all your creation filled with wisdom and beauty. You send your light to us. You give us air to breath, bread to eat, water to drink and ground on which we walk. They unite us all.
We come to you with humility. For we know not what we do with your works, with your creation, with the gifts of life that you give us. We claim them to be ours and deny them to our fellow men. We draw borders and deport our fellow men. We pollute the air, take down forests and build mountains of trash. We impose sanctions so we can consume. We kill so we can drive. We look at the speck in our brother’s eye and become blind to the log in our own eye. Forgive us and open our eyes.
Help us stop turning against your creation. For our fight is not against flesh and blood like the Apostle Paul says (Eph. 6) but against the attacks of the adversarial forces tempting us with fear, lies and greed. Help us seek justice not by revenge but by forgiveness, by imbuing ourselves with truth, with you, Lord. Help us protect each other with the knowledge that you are in each one of us; you are in our diversity – whatever height, gender, sex, race, faith, religion, age, language, color. You are in all of us. If one of us suffers, we all suffer; if one of us is honored, we all rejoice. (1. Cor. 12)
We thank you for our diversity. Our differences are not there for us to just tolerate but to embrace and celebrate. Open our hearts to find you in each other. You call us your friends and give your life for us. Help us be each other’s friends and lay down our lives for each other. Help us love those who hurt us, as Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. says, “Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.” Your love unites us all.
Teach us that beautiful timeless prayer that you taught your disciples, that makes us your and each others’ brothers and sisters. We pray with you Lord:
Our Father, who art in the heavens, hallowed be Thy Name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done as above in the heavens, so also on the earth. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil. For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever.
Amen
This prayer was published in the Spring 2018 North American Newsletter, which can be found in its entirety here.
The Creator God, the Logos, the Cosmic Son, emptied himself of his mighty power and descended into a human being. God became fully human in Jesus, through suffering what we suffer, being hungry, tempted, misunderstood and wounded even unto death. We call this being Jesus Christ. And in this Easter time, we celebrate His resurrection and His transformation of what makes us human. For if we look closely at the Risen One, what is most human, His wounds, remain – His wounds remain but are different- changed. Healing power now radiates to us from His wounds.
Because of this, within each one of us there is now also this healing power. And this healing power is calling each one of us to accept and take hold of our wounds, calling us to transform in His image so that our wounds, too, can radiate healing power to others.
But so often we would silence this power in us. Instead of entering and working through the pain like Christ, we would deny, escape, blame.
And yet, individuals everywhere take up this call, take up this power. The doctor – inspired to heal by the pain of having a sick brother, the woman who is barren and then adopts orphaned children, the psychotherapist – inspired to help others because of his broken childhood, the activist working to overcome oppression out of the pain of his people. All are examples of healing power radiating from the wound.
This is how God works in the world, in our lives. Because to be united with Christ means to find deep meaning in our marks of pain – to be united with Christ means to have access to liberating joy even in the midst of suffering.
Dear friends, The Community of Christians is made up of wounded healers, those who radiate healing power from wounds. May this power continue to permeate our hearts, our earth, our humanity.
***
Join Jonah Evans for a webinar, The Heart of Easter: Becoming New, Encountering Christ, hosted by the Anthroposophical Society in America on Tuesday, April 3. Listen live or register to download the webinar later. Click here for more details.
To read about how we celebrate Easter at the altar, visit our festivals page. You can also find an Easter-tide children’s story here.
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If you had to speak to a large group of people about the existence and meaning of Christ, how would you prepare for it? Where would you go? What would your sources be? You could read all you want from the Gospels, or Thomas Aquinas or any number of theologians but you could still be swimming in the darkness.
You would have to go deep into your own soul to find some nugget of truth that you could really stand behind and to which you could bear witness. You would have to find truths you have sought for and won. That would be a beginning.
Here is where I began:
The whole world, visible and invisible, organic and inorganic, is made up of wisdom. Wisdom, which is hidden; wisdom formed through sacrifice. There is nothing, nothing at all, of nature or of human making that is not imbued with wisdom.
When we have interest in something, or someone, for longer than a minute, a transformation begins to happen: As we direct our interest toward the hidden wisdom within the person or thing, then that wisdom begins to reveal itself. We gain for ourselves the wisdom, which lay hidden in the thing outside of us. That becomes a part of us; it is within us.
Through the release of wisdom, we come to love. We love that which we comprehend. Even if what we comprehend is some evil working in the world, it is still of great value. We find relief in comprehending as a light shining in the darkness.
It is the dawn of a new year. May we have the courage to dig deep and to discover the wisdom that has conjured the world into being, so that we may come to love one another and the world. This is the manifestation and the gift of Christ in us.
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There is a sacred secret in human evolution. It is hidden. Yet, at the same time it is open to all human beings. This open secret is that within each human soul there is an inner bride. This bride of our hearts is being called to holy wedlock with a very special groom. The bride in every human heart is called to a holy union with Christ.
And yet, our Michaelmas gospel (Mt.22) tells us that if this hidden wedding for our heart is to take place, we must become worthy. ‘For all are called, but only individuals make themselves worthy.’
To be worthy of a wedding, the bride of our heart must first really believe: believe that the wedding is real! We must practice trusting that He is actually here; longing to unite with the bride in us; ready to touch us and make us whole…
To be found worthy for a wedding we are also called to receive. We are called to receive and put on the gift of the wedding garment. This means that we cannot remain the way we are. The bride must put on something new. To be worthy, we must have the courage to be changed, to be made new.
And finally, to become worthy for the wedding, the bride in every human soul must learn to speak. For above all, we cannot be found to be speechless in the presence of God. We must learn to speak with truth, directly to the beloved, our words resounding from our heart’s core saying: “Take me, as You have given Yourself to me.”
During this time before Easter, we celebrate death. In other words, we celebrate the process of letting go, of emptying ourselves. We celebrate moving alone through the narrow gate of transformation. And it’s not that we are morbid or obsessed with the negative. On the contrary, we celebrate death precisely because in Christ, death becomes life.
If we have had the blessing of being with someone passing through the gate of death, it is often only when loved ones leave the room that the dying are able to make the transition from this world into the spirit. Death requires that we let go of something earthly; to die requires that we make the transition alone.
And yet, we are not so much celebrating dying at the end of life. Passiontide is the practice of dying during life.
We are called to die while we live by letting go of our blame and hate toward ourselves and others, so that the life of love can fill our hearts. We are called to die while we live by letting go of our inability to be alone, so that solitude and His constant presence awaken in us. We are called to die while we live by letting go of fear, so that we can stand at peace with the world.
Dear friends, in Christ every circumstance and situation in our lives is an opportunity to die into His life. For the open secret is, Christ is the reality in which we live.
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