Call to Silence & Opening Meditation – Manifesting Love
Last week we explored belonging. It seems that the natural progression is to manifest our belonging with love. For most of us, the first love we learn about … and learn from … is that of our mother. The readings for this Mother’s Day are about love in all its forms.
Opening Prayer – Invocation to the Cosmic Mother, by Judy Sion
Oh, Great Mother, divine feminine, birther of the cosmos, lover unto Spirit, Creatrix of all matter and queen of all worlds within worlds and those without, we call you to us in this hour.
We are your children; hear our call.
We are the daughters and the sons of your divine union, the flesh of your passion for life. You, who lay with Spirit, our Father, in the beginning of time, and brought us forth from the blessed union of Spirit and Matter, we are your children, the sons and daughters of your flesh and your heart, and we remember your touch and the fragrance of your essence, and we long for you.
Come to our hearts and gift us the remembering. Come to our minds and open our genius.
Enlighten us with your presence.
Draw back the veils that we might see, and harken the doors to open, that beauty and ecstasy may live in our homes and hearts more fully.
This is our hour of greatest need. We call you through fire and water, through earth and wind, through all that bears your name. We call all your lineages and all your names. Come unto us. Come into us. So be it.
The Magdalen Manuscript, by Tom Kenyon and Judi Sion.©2002, Sounds True, Inc., Boulder, Co.
Readings on Love
Love by Tagore
Love adorns itself;
it seeks to prove inward joy by outward beauty.
~
Love does not claim possession,
but gives freedom.
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Love is an endless mystery,
for it has nothing else to explain it.
- Rabindranath Tagore
The Love Religion, Ibn Arabi
The inner space inside
That we call the heart
Has become many different
Living scenes and stories.
A pasture for sleek gazelles,
A monastery for Christian monks,
A time with Shiva dancing,
A kaaba for pilgrimage.
The tablets of Moses are there,
The Qua’an, the Vedas,
The sutras, and the gospels.
Love is the religion in me.
Whichever way love’s camel goes,
That way becomes my faith,
The source of beauty, and a light
Of sacredness over everything.
Divine Love: Looking For Your Face, Rumi
From the beginning of my life I have been looking for your face but today I have seen it.Today I have seen the charm, the beauty,the unfathomable grace of the face that I was looking for.Today I have found you and those that laughed and scorned me yesterday are sorry that they were not looking as I did.I am bewildered by the magnificence of your beauty and wish to see you with a hundred eyes.My heart has burned with passion and has searched forever for this wondrous beauty that I now behold.
I am ashamed to call this love human and afraid of God to call it divine.
Your fragrant breath like the morning breeze has come to the stillness of the gardenYou have breathed new life into me I have become your sunshine and also your shadow.My soul is screaming in ecstasy. Every fiber of my being is in love with you. Your effulgence has lit a fire in my heart and you have made radiant for me the earth and sky.My arrow of love has arrived at the target I am in the house of mercy and my heart is a place of prayer.
From Rumi, Hidden Music (translated by Azima Melita Kolin & Maryam Mafi, 59.)
With love you cannot bargain
There, the choice is not yours.
Love is a mirror, it reflects
only your essence,
if you have the courage
to look in its face.
A Prayer of St. Francis
Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love.
Where there is injury, pardon
Where there is doubt, faith
Where there is despair, hope
Where there is darkness, light
Where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek To be consoled as to console,
To be understood as to understand,
To be loved as to love:
for it is in giving that we receive,
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned, It is in dying to self that we are born to eternal life.
1 Corinthians, 13
1) If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
2) And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.
3) If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.
4) Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful;
5) it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;
6) it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right.
7) Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
8) Love never ends; as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away.
9) For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect;
10) but when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away.
11) When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways.
12) For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood.
13) So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
Call to Conversation
Closing Meditation & Music:
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