Liturgies

If one goes into one’s own heart, one will find oneself in the heart of everyone else, and everyone else, as well as oneself, in the heart of Ultimate Mystery..

— From The Contemplative Outreach Newsletter, vol 25–June 2010 in The Thomas Keating Reader

Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion – its message becomes meaningless.

— Abraham Joshua Heschel,
God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism, p. 3

Maybe you will not be called
With the coal held to your lips,
The rush of wings of
Ambitious angels
Covering you. …
But maybe you will be called by
Fallen mustard seeds and
Open-eyed dreams.
Maybe you will be called by
The ordinary and the striking,
The places where your heart catches
More than once. …
Maybe you will know that
Your call is no less real
Because it comes with
Seeds in your hand
And the taste of fruit in your mouth,
With a sound so soft
It could have just been the breeze,
But wasn’t.

– Laura Martin
Associate Pastor
Rock Spring Congregational UCC, Arlington, VA

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and softly stole away into
some anonymous Mary’s womb again
where in the darkest night
of everybody’s anonymous soul
He awaits again
an unimaginable
and impossibly
Immaculate Reconception
the very craziest
of Second Comings

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, from A Coney Island of the Mind