Photo: 1540

 

Spirituality: Don Campbell in The Soul of Creativity

Listening is our bridge from the outer world to the inner world. Music creates multiple levels of listening. Learning to listen to music in creative ways provides the means for health improvement in the body, enhanced communication, and expression. For music has all the universal components of language, emotions, and expression. There is music in silence; thus meditation and hours of silence heighten awareness of our body rhythms and sounds.

Photo: The Brightness of a new Month

 

Spirituality: Joan Chittister

There is no amount of darkness that can extinguish the inner light. The important thing is not to spend our lives trying to control the environment around us. The task is to control the environment within us.

Photo: The Snow Mounds

 

Spirituality: from Love and Work by Michael Robertson

I used to think that the goal of life is to do equally well in the spheres of work and love. Now I know there is only one sphere. What matters is the way I treat everyone I encounter in the course of my days: my wife, my child, a friend, a colleague, a secretary, a textbook salesperson, a complaining student. What's important is to treat each one with courtesy, with respect...with love...We're all connected in a web of love.

Prayer: "Held," by Rob Soley, from Moving Day

 We carried our grief

to the ocean's edge,
sat quiet in the sand;
the sorrow softened
as the waves washed
over them and the
brilliance of the
morning sun upon
the shimmering waters
filled our hearts
with wonder.

Spirituality: “The Lord’s Prayer,” in A New Zealand Prayer Book / He Karakia Mihinare O Aotearoa

Eternal Spirit,

Earth-maker, Pain bearer, Life-giver,
Source of all that is and that shall be,
Father and Mother of us all,
Loving God, in whom is heaven:

The hallowing of your name echo through the universe;
The way of your justice be followed by the peoples of the world;
Your heavenly will be done by all created beings;
Your commonwealth of peace and freedom
sustain our hope and come on earth.

With the bread we need for today, feed us.
In the hurts we absorb from one another, forgive us.
In times of temptation and test, strengthen us.
From trial too great to endure, spare us.
From the grip of all that is evil, free us.
For you reign in the glory of the power that is love,
now and forever. Amen.

Photo: Here comes the sun

 

Spirituality: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J., on Evolution, in The Phenomenon of Man

“Some thousands of millions of years ago, not, it would appear, by a regular process of astral evolution, but as the result of some unbelievable accident (a brush with another star? an internal upheaval?) a fragment of matter composed of particularly stable atoms was detached from the surface of the sun. Without breaking the bonds attaching it to the rest, and just at the right distance from the mother-star to receive moderate radiation, this fragment began to condense, to roll itself up, to take shape. Containing within its globe and orbit the future of man, another heavenly body—a planet this time—had been born.”

‘‘The Earth was probably born by accident; but, in accordance with one of the most general laws of evolution, scarcely had this accident happened than it was immediately made use of and recast into something naturally directed.”