Centering Prayer Meditation Zoom Link 19 October 2021
Dear Meditators
This week we will reflect on one more of the images from Margaret Silf’s book, Sacred Spaces, Stations on a Celtic Way to guide our meditation. The aim of our session is to understand meditation as a way of creating a sacred space for God’s Presence; to maintain our intention through silence; and through this to experience a response at an individual heart felt level that may include peace, healing, forgiveness, or strengthening. This is the heart of Centering Prayer.
In Celtic spirituality there are seven stations of sacredness…’thin places’…where the visible world was totally interpenetrated by an invisible world, which is somehow in relationship with us. We have paused at 3 of these during this series. In the past weeks, the Infinite Knot, Hilltops, Crossing Places, and to end our series today – ‘Groves and Springs – Circles of Hospitality,’ as we make our own connections about what they might mean for us.
Margaret uses the image of the spring as a symbol of something that rises up, giving pure water without our effort, watering the growth of the surrounding trees, which form sheltering groves around the source of the spring. She asks us to pause here and draw deeply on the hospitality these blessed circles offer us.
- The sacred groves fed by sacred springs, encourage us to search for life. Let’s reflect on our own life journey. Have there been desert times and places? What has sustained you? Perhaps it was the encouragement of particular people, or enlivened by a particular community or circle to which you belong. Notice and celebrate that circle thankfully, and contemplate how it might become even more open and welcoming, as an oasis for others…as we express a fragment of Christ’s nature to others passing through, and they express their own fragments of Him to us.
- Let’s look at a Scriptural story of quite amazing hospitality and encouragement in Luke’s Gospel (chapter 24). Two weary and disappointed travellers on the road to Emmaus …Jesus was dead and buried, and their hopes and dreams were buried along with him. A stranger joins them and listens to their story, and tells them in a fresh and vivid way a story, which would take them beyond their own compulsions and power struggles to something beyond themselves. They shared a communion meal with the stranger, a communion which changed their way of seeing things. God passed though their immediate experience, and transformed it.
Relax now in body and mind, slow your breathing, and enter your meditation, centering your prayer, your will and intention on becoming aware of your times of genuine communion and companionship, coming together as one, as we do now… as sacred groves of friendship…one in the mystery embodied in the eternal spring… where creation and its Creator are our true hosts
Love and every blessing
Kathryn
Margaret Silf, Sacred Spaces – Stations on a Celtic Way, p 109-10, 120-129.
Remember to watch an introduction to Centering Prayer Meditation with Kathryn. You can see it here
Let us know how you are finding this time – we always like to hear from you😊
Peace and health at this time.
Irene & Damien