RESOURCES FOR an online “quiet day”
Wednesdays October 21 & 28 from 7 - 9 pm, 2020
Here you will find materials to prepare for or reflect on during an online quiet day, including:
• a schedule;
• reflection questions;
• quotes that can be used for reflection or lectio divina;
• instructions for mindful eating:
• how to prepare for an online quiet day;
• instructions for centering prayer;
• instructions for visio divina;
• instructions for a more extended, self guided retreat .
Schedule
October 21, 7 - 9 pm
Introduction to the “day”
Brief Centering Prayer Refresher
Twenty minutes of Centering Prayer Practice
Questions and Comments
October 28, 7 - 9 pm
Talk on Centering Prayer and Creativity
Practice of Centering Prayer and Visio Divina
Reflections on the “quiet day”
Reflection Questions
• What are the essentials of my spiritual life that will help me to live prayerfully if I do them every day, every week, or every year?
• Where and when am I most likely to feel the presence of the sacred in my life and how do I make more space for that?
• What is the change I most want to see in the world? What is God’s call for me in regard to working for justice and peace? How can I use my creativity to provide hope, inspiration, and spiritual nourishment to those around me?
• What do I most want to bring away with me into my daily life from this time of prayer and reflection? A word of reminder to myself? A feeling? A way of being?
• How do I bring forth what is within me in a fruitful way?
• How can I use creative work to enter into relationship with the deepest part of myself?
• What will help me to better honor and nourish my creativity? What will help me to come bursting forth in full aliveness?
Quotes that can be used for reflection or lectio divina
Gospel of Thomas, Saying number 70
If you bring forth what is within you,
what you bring forth will save you.
If you do not bring forth what is within you,
what you do not bring forth will destroy you.
Brother David Steindl-Rast, in the foreword to Thich Nhat Hanh, Living Buddha, Living Christ
In midwinter, St. Francis is calling out to an almond tree, “Speak to me of God!” and the almond tree breaks into bloom. It comes alive. There is no other way of witnessing to God but by aliveness.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
This is in the end the only kind of courage that is required of us: the courage to face the strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable experiences that can meet us. The fact that people have in this sense been cowardly has done infinite harm to life; the experiences that are called “apparitions,” the whole so-called “spirit world,” death, all these Things that are so closely related to us, have through our daily defensiveness been so entirely pushed out of life that the senses with which we might have been able to grasp them have atrophied. To say nothing of God. But the fear of the inexplicable has not only impoverished the reality of the individual; it has also narrowed the relationship between one human being and another, which has as it were been lifted out of the riverbed of infinite possibilities and set down in a fallow place on the bank, where nothing happens.
A story from the Desert Fathers and Mothers, from Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert
Abbot Lot came to Abbot Joseph and said: Father, according as I am able, I keep my little rule, and my little fast, my prayer, meditation and contemplative silence; and according as I am able I strive to cleanse my heart of thoughts: now what more should I do? The elder rose up in reply and stretched out his hands to heaven, and his fingers became like ten lamps of fire. He said: Why not be totally changed into fire?
Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde
We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings. . . The fear of our desires keeps them suspect and indiscriminately powerful, for to suppress any truth is to give it strength beyond endurance. The fear that we cannot grow beyond whatever distortions we may find within ourselves keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, externally defined, and leads us to accept many facets of our oppression as women.
When we live outside ourselves, and by that I mean on external directives only rather than from our internal knowledge and needs, when we live away from those erotic guides from within ourselves, then our lives are limited by external and alien forms, and we conform to the needs of a structure that is not based on human need, let alone an individual’s. But when we begin to live from within outward, in touch with the power of the erotic within ourselves, and allowing that power to inform and illuminate our actions upon the world around us, then we begin to be responsible to ourselves in the deepest sense.
Marie-Louise von Franz, Creation Myths
One of Jung’s students asked him, “I am now seventy and you are eighty years old. Won’t you tell me what your thoughts are on life after death?” Jung’s answer was, “It won’t help you when you are lying on your deathbed to recall, ‘Jung said this or that.’ You must have your own ideas about it. You have to have your own myth. To have your own myth means to have suffered and struggled with a question until an answer has come to you from the depths of your soul. That does not imply that this is the definitive truth, but rather that this truth which has come is relevant for oneself as one now is, and believing in this truth helps one to feel well.”
Frederick Buechner, Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations with Frederick Buechner, (New York: HarperCollins, Publishers), 1992, p. 185.
The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.
Instructions for Mindful Eating
Bring yourself fully into your body, noticing your breath going in and out, gently letting go of thoughts that do not have to do with eating and being present to your food. If you are planning to give yourself fully to mindful eating, it is best to eat without reading, talking, or engaging in any other task as you eat.
Notice the colors, shapes, and textures of the food before you.
Slowly begin to eat, pausing to notice the sensations of the food and the feelings in your body as you eat and interact with your food.
Notice any thoughts that are coming up and gently let go of them if they do not have to do with the experience of eating.
Listen to your body. How do you feel as you eat? Does your body tell you when it has had enough?
Finally, offer a prayer for all those humans and creatures who helped bring your food to the table.