Pray with us
Our promise ...
Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The LORD is the everlasting God,
The Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable.
He gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless.
Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted;
But those who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength,
They shall mount up with wings like eagles,
They shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.
Isaiah 40.28-31
Our prayer ...
O LORD, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too
high;
I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvellous for me.
But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a child quieted at its
mother's breast;
Like a child that is quieted is my soul.
Psalm 131
Lord my God
when your love spilled over into
creation
you thought of me.
I am from love
of love
for love.
Let my heart, O God,
always recognise,
cherish and enjoy your goodness
in all of creation.
Direct all that is in me toward
your praise.
Energise me in your service.
Lord God,
may nothing ever distract me
from your love.
Neither health, nor sickness,
wealth or poverty,
honour or dishonour,
long life or short.
May I never seek nor choose
to be
other than you intend or wish.
From JS Bergan and SM Schwan: Love, a guide for prayer.
Our world ...
Through every grass-blade in the thousand, thousand grasses;
through the million leaves, veined and edge-cut, on bush and tree;
through the song-notes and the marked feathers of the birds; through
the insects' hum and the colour of the butterflies; through the soft,
warm air, the flecks of clouds dissolving - I used them all for prayer.
Richard Jefferies, The Story of my heart, 1883
When all the things around me, while preserving their own individual
contours, their own special savours, nevertheless appear to me as
animated by a single secret spirit and therefore as diffused and
intermingled within a single element, infinitely remote; and when,
locked within the jealous intimacy of a divine sanctuary, I yet feel
myself to be wandering at large in the empyrean of all created beings:
then I shall know that I am approaching that central point where the
heart of the world is caught in the descending radiance of the heart of
God.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
You never Enjoy the World aright, till the Sea it self floweth in your
Veins, till you are Clothed with the Heavens, and Crowned with the
Stars: and perceiv you self to be the Sole Heir of the whole World: and
more than so, becaus Men are in it who are evy one Sole Heirs, as well
as you. Till you can Sing and Rejoyce and Delight in God, as Misers do
in Gold, and Kings in Scepters, you never Enjoy the World.
Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditations, C17th
Our part ...
What God chooses, he cleanses
What God cleanses, he moulds
What God moulds, he fills.
What God fills, he uses.
JS Baxter
Our vision ...
I will not cease from mental fight
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.
William Blake
Our destination ...
So lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees,
and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be
put out of joint, but rather be healed. For you have not come to
something that can be touched, a blazing fire, and darkness, and gloom,
and a tempest, and the sound of a trumpet, and a voice whose words made
the hearers beg that not another word be spoken to them. You have come
to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly
Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the
assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God the
judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to
Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that
speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.
Hebrews 12
Our response ...
