Blessed Source
O Blessed Source, eternal Lord of creation,
sustainer of all worlds,
you embrace the whole cosmos within yourself,
for everything exists in you.
Let your winds come and breathe your everlasting Spirit in us.
Let us inhale your divine Spirit and be inspired.
Enlighten us in your truth.
Pour your grace into our hearts.
Wipe away our sin and all negativity.
Transform us into your Love, and let us radiate that Love to all others.
Inflame us with your unending life.
Dissolve our limited way of being.
Elevate us into your divine Life.
Give us your capacity to share that Life with everyone.
Shape us in your wisdom.
Grant us your joy and laughter.
Let us become that divine wisdom, sensitivity,
laughter and joy for all beings.
Let us realize fully that we are members of that Sacred Community
with all humankind, with other species, with nature and the entire cosmos.
Grant us a heart that can embrace them all in you.
Let us be in communion with you forever
in the bliss of that Love:
the Love that sustains all
and transforms all
into your Divine Radiance.
Amen
by Brother Wayne Teasdale
C. Robin Janning, ECVA Dep. Dir. Comm.
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Morning Glory
From Thomas Merton: "If I had no choice about the age in which I was to live, I nevertheless have a choice about the attitude I take and about the way and the extent of my participation in its living ongoing events. To choose the world is not then merely a pious admission that the world is acceptable because it comes from the hand of God. It is first of all an acceptance of a task and a vocation in the world, in history and in time. In my time, which is the present." (Thomas Merton. Contemplation in A World of Action, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1973)
From Rabbi Rami Shapiro: "Cultivating grace is a bit of a paradox. You cannot get what you always and already have. There is noting you can or need do to merit grace. All you need do is accept grace. The reason this is so difficult for us is that our hands are full. We are burdened by carrying the past and future around with us wherever we go, and have no room for the grace of the present moment. Cultivating grace means putting down the burden of time, and opening our hands to the timeless now." (Rabbi Rami Shapiro, The Sacred Art of Lovingkindness:Preparing to Practice; forward by Marcia Ford, SkyLight Paths Publishing, 2006)
When I write and think about art, I often use the words acceptance, vocation, grace, and now. Thomas Merton and Rabbi Shapiro are my teachers. What they teach me about art is transmitted from heart to heart; soul to soul. Be here, be now. Listen. Accept grace. Give it all back. Start again each morning... each moment.
Infinity
(image and text © by Claudia Smith, All Rights Reserved)
Out where cascading hues and pigments
Streak across a distant
Palette
Out where evolving shapes and forms
Merge and sing in harmonic
Rhapsody
Out where Earth and sky
Breathe as one with each
Master stroke
Out on that phantom edge
God paints a demonstration of
Infinity
- Rejoice in God's infinite love! -
C. Robin Janning, ECVA Dep. Dir. Comm.
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Art Of The Soul
like the breath
moving in and out
like sleeping and waking
stopping and then running
emotion splashes and swims
flies and crashes
from an edge
of the brush
Rose Chapel
The emotion and spirit of the moment caused me to raise my camera with some hope that I might bring a few images away with me. That would have been enough. To look at an image and remember the moment. But now I find that the image holds more than the memory of a moment.
It’s been two years since that trip to Rose Chapel. But in the way I choose one paint over another, one medium or tool over others, I chose this photograph tonight. With it, I chose another. Nothing complicated. Rather mundane really, the photograph of a rose; thus ensuing a fairly elementary play on words—Rose Chapel/rugosa rose.
As a photographer and as an artist, I worked with these two images to bring one more into life. Color and line and form were my guides—most visible guides. I had no theological agenda. Determined by some amount of time "looking," it was finished.
Then, I listened. I listened to the conversation between the work of my hands and the work of my heart. There I found a theological pause. A moment, when I saw my fragile understanding of the Ground of Being grow not because of searching, but because of working.
Working in the ordinary way of art.
C. Robin Janning, ECVA Dep. Dir. Comm.
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