Sunday
The hero’s journey is not to just keep going to new places, making the trip a vacation or travelogue. We have to return to where we started and know it in a new way and do life in a new way.
—Richard Rohr
Monday
By denying their pain and avoiding the necessary falling, many have kept themselves from their own spiritual journeys and depths—and therefore have been kept from their own spiritual heights.
—Richard Rohr
Tuesday
The sacred task at hand is to let yourself be reclaimed by something deeper than the immediacy of struggle and pain. This something need not be identified or fixated upon, but surrendered to.
—Pixie Lighthorse
Wednesday
The journey is absolutely sacred because we are not just flesh and blood. We are also spirit beings. And what other kind of journey could a spirit being take except for a spiritual journey?
—Barbara A. Holmes
Thursday
Jesus wanted his followers to know that the journey they would make involved knowing and enlivening the teachings he advocated. In other words, Jesus was cautioning them, “If you decide to give yourselves to what truly counts in this life, it will cost you.”
—Joyce Rupp
Friday
“The hero “falls through” what is merely their life situation to discover their Real Life, which is always a much deeper river, hidden beneath the appearances. This deeper discovery is largely what religious people mean by “finding their soul.”
—Richard Rohr
Week Eight Practice
For Living without Control
Public theologian Kate Bowler shares a prayer for times when we aren’t sure of our next move. She writes:
I had a very tender podcast conversation with theologian and ethicist Stanley Hauerwas. We have worked together for almost two decades now, and I rely on him to be incredibly certain about what makes a life good and virtuous…. After describing how many twists and turns that life had taken, he had come to a conclusion: “The ability to live well is the ability to live without so many certainties.”
We will have to develop a high tolerance for having so little control and so few bedrock assumptions. So let’s ask our God to “unplan” our days a little and help us live that way.
God, I come to you as I am.
It is all I have, really.
And the next one I’m conscious of
will be the same.
I can feel the way I move,
moment to moment,
without the comfort of “solutions.”
It seems wild to me now how I imagined
any once-and-for-all cure for this,
or a master plan to ensure things
will work out.
But, truth be told, that’s always been
my secret hope.
So, Lord, let’s try again.
I’m begging for a new plan.
I want a plan that is an “unplan.”
I must keep moving and planning,
trying and changing,
knitting my days together even as
they unravel.
So can we do this together?
Remind me to pray: come Lord
and quiet the worry.
I step, and you steady me.
I give, and you keep my hands open.
I act, and you fortify me with courage
to try and try and try again.
This life is uncertain, Lord,
but your love is not.
You tell the story of my life
regardless of how little I know
about how it ends, except to say,
you were there since the beginning
and you appear on every page.
Reflection Prompt
Now that we know that we don’t know, let’s enjoy that thought for a moment. Isn’t it delicious that the God who flung stars into space also knows every beginning and end? So let’s settle in for a moment and let ourselves not know in the presence of the God who already knows.
Reference:
Kate Bowler, Have a Beautiful, Terrible Day! Daily Meditations for the Ups, Downs, and In-Betweens (New York: Convergent, 2024), 90–91. Used with permission.
Image credit: Jeremy Bishop, Untitled (detail), Australia, 2016, photograph, public domain. Click here to enlarge image.
The desert and the new sprout of spring green are part of the journey.
