Presence

                                                        Pictures by Ann Marie Parker  

You need to be generous to yourself in order to receive the love that surrounds you.

You can suffer from a desperate hunger to be loved.
You can search long years in lonely places, far outside yourself.
Yet the whole time, this love is but a few inches away from you.
It is at the edge of your soul, but you have been blind to its presence.

We must remain attentive in order to be able to receive.

John O’Donohue

 

When a great moment knocks on the door of your life,
it is often no louder than the beating of your heart,
and it is very easy to miss it.

Boris Pasternak

Let us be present to the now. It’s all we have and it’s where God will always speak to us. The now holds everything, rejects nothing and, therefore, can receive God too.

Help us, God, to be present to the place we most fear, because it always feels empty, it always feels boring, it always feels like it’s not enough. Help us find some space within that we don’t try to fill with ideas or opinions. Help us find space so you, loving God, can show yourself in that place where we are hungry and empty. Keep us out of the way, so there is always room enough for you.

 

Good God, we believe that you are here and your presence gives us hope. We thank you for each day of our lives. We thank you for so many further chances to understand, to forgive again, to trust again, and to love. We thank you that we live now, that our problems are soul-sized. We ask that you teach us and lead us, that you put the thoughts into our mind that you want us to think, the feelings in our hearts that you want us to feel. Reconstruct us. Put us together because we don’t know how to do it ourselves. We trust that you are hearing this prayer, and that you care for the answer more than we do. We pray therefore not alone, but with the whole body of Christ in Jesus’s name. Amen.

— from The Wisdom Pattern: Order, Disorder, Reorder by Richard Rohr

Annmarie writes that today’s photos taken from Ruskin View close to the parish church in Kirby Lonsdale. The river below is the Lune and the county in the distance is North Yorkshire. Probably my last visit as I had gone up annually to stay with a close friend who died a few weeks ago, an artist who was larger than life,  whom I was glad came into my life. This was a lovely place to visit and Ruskin’s favourite haunt.