POTLUCK DINNER- JULY 31 – after M3M service
M3M: July 31, 2008
Priest – Rick Wilson
Selection of Readings – Barbara B.
Moving with awareness = Meditation
OPENING #14 Blessed Be the Holy One
PRAYER #20 Come, Holy Spirit
TABLE #25 From the Fruit of Your Creation
SANCTUS #35 Holy, Holy, Holy One 5 (vs, 1 only)
CLOSING #59 Rise Up, Rejoicing (Spirit of the Living One)
A Reading from the Christian Gospel: Luke 18: 15-17
The Message, paraphrase
“People brought babies to Jesus, hoping he might touch them. When the disciples saw it, they shooed them away.Jesus called them back, ” Let these children alone. Don’t go between them and me. These children are the kingdom’s pride and joy. Mark this: unless you accept God’s kingdom in the simplicity of a child, you’ll never get in.”
Hear what the Spirit is saying to the Church.
Thanks be to God.
A Reading from the Tradition of Buddhism:
Awakening Loving-Kindness Pema Chodron Pp, 24-27
In Meditation and in our daily lives there are three qualities that we can nurture, cultivate, and bring out. We already possess these, but they can be ripened: precision, gentleness and the ability to let go. When the Buddha taught, he didn’t say we were bad people or that there was some sin we had committed-original or otherwise-that made us more ignorant or clear, more harsh then gentle, more closed then open. He taught there is a general misunderstanding that we all share, something can be turned around, corrected, and seen through, as if we were in a dark room and someone turned on the light switch.
It isn’t a sin that we are in a dark room. It’s an innocent situation, but how fortunate that someone shows us where the light switch is. It brightens up our life considerably. We can start to read books, to see one another’s faces, to discover the colors of the walls, to discover the little animals that creep in and out of the rooms.
In the same way, we see our so called limitations with clarity, precision, gentleness, good heartedness, and kindness, and, then having seen them fully, let go, open further, we begin to found our world is more vast and refreshing and fascinating then we had realized before. In other words, the key to feeling more whole and less shut off and shut down is to be able to see more clearly who we are and what we are doing.
The innocent mistake that keeps us caught in our own particular style of ignorance, unkindness, and shutdowness is that we are never encouraged to see more clearly what is, with gentleness. Instead there’s a kind of basic misunderstanding that we should try to be better then we already are, that we should try to get away from painful things, and that if we could get away from painful things, then we would be happy. That is the innocent misunderstanding that we all share, which keeps us unhappy.
Meditation is about seeing clearly the body we have, the mind that we have, the domestic situation that we have, the job that we have and the people who are in our lives. It about seeing how we react to all these things. It is seeing our emotions and our thoughts just as they are right now, in this very moment and in this very room, on this very seat. IT’s not about trying to make them go away, but just seeing clearly with precision and gentleness.”
Hear what the Spirit is saying to the Church.
Thanks be to God.
A Reading from the Continuing Revelation of God to People of Faith: Hook-up;
Trager Mentastics Movement as a way to agelessness Milton Trager M.D., pp. 56,57
We are surrounded with a force
a life-giving, life- regulating force.
It might be electro-chemical, electro-magnetic.
Whatever it is we know that force exists.
We don’t have to go a fraction of an inch
away from our body to get it.
You are enveloped by this force.
Allow the force to enter.
There is no trying. There is no effort
To try it to fail.
Hook-up is the same as meditation.
And like meditation, there are many levels.
One can go deeper and deeper into
a state that is beyond relaxation.
A step beyond relaxation is Peace.”
Hear what the Spirit is saying to the Church.
Thanks be to God.
