Acceptance by Cheryl Jones

'Acceptance' Helps Reduce Stress

The truth is that life is full of surprises both good and bad, right? Things happen that we can't control and can rarely anticipate. This sometimes causes great stress and pain.

Acceptance is about seeing things as they are in the present moment whether we like it or not.

The reality is that aside from catastrophe or crisis, we typically deplete our energies resisting or denying what is already fact. Our resistance to 'what is' causes us great stress and tension. In addition, it creates a barrier to change.

When I'm in the midst of a negative situation, the last thing I want to do is accept it. But the truth is that denying it or resisting it will only make things worse. "It is what it is" so to speak.

When we talk about acceptance, we're not talking about being passive. In other words, I'm not suggesting that you accept the unacceptable. I'm asking that you accept the negativity in the moment without judging it.

When I'm in the midst of a negative situation, I pay attention to my breathing. I notice the thoughts that are going through my mind. I'm aware of any strong emotions. I notice sensations in my body. I keep paying attention to my breathing to stay calm.I accept that whatever is happening in this moment is my reality. 

The best I can do is to see it clearly and then choose my response.

Cheryl will be presenting a Fall Labyrinth Day Retreat for Women on Saturday, October 20th.

Meditation in Motion

“Men go abroad to wonder at the height of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering.”

My first yoga teacher often started her classes with the above quote from St. Augustine.  As these words began to draw me into my yoga practice and my body, I learned that the body is a powerful means for strengthening my connection to God.  This is something that I was already experiencing through singing – raising my voice in song had always been my favorite way to pray.  Now, I had another amazing tool.

Every time that I practice yoga, my mind is pulled away from the distractions of daily life.  This prepares me for the fruit of the practice, which is the still time at the end.  This is a valuable time for me to connect with spirit.

I am so fortunate to be able to teach yoga.  It is my joy to help others learn about this transformative practice. 

Join Nancy Murray, Maureen Dagon, Dr. Brandon Nappi and Terri Laggis for an overnight Yoga Retreat November 9 to 10, 2012. Register now! 

A Season of Promise Invitation from Fr. David Cinquegrani

Dear Friends,

On my way to the funeral of a beloved retreatant my cell phone began to ring. When I arrived at the church I checked my voice mail. There was a joyful message from another retreatant about the birth of twin grandchildren that very morning. Later on, the same day, we welcomed 75 teenagers to Holy Family for a weekend retreat. The cycle of life, I was reminded, is ongoing and natural but, at the same time, difficult and relentless. Our lives change every day, sometimes without warning. In the Hebrew Scriptures we remember the sage words: “For everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under the heavens.”

The practical wisdom of the Book of Ecclesiastes and the natural rhythm of the four seasons provide insight into how we can grow in resilience, cultivate peace, and learn to trust the ancient promise—that no matter how life may challenge us and regardless of where our journey takes us, God will be present, stirring us to growth, love, and newness of life.

As we reflect on the very compelling theme from last season, “The Courage to Hope” we remember that courage is not the absence of fear, it is the presence of fear with the willingness to face it. This year we will pay attention to the ways in which we can remain grounded in the promise of God’s presence, throughout every season of our lives. “A Season of Promise” reminds us that each person has the potential to grow and flourish throughout the seasons of life but within each season there can be moments of joy, contentment, and peace amid the swirling questions and uncertainty that may arise.

I am thrilled to introduce this theme, “A Season of Promise” chosen by our Retreat Team. And no matter what season you choose for your retreat, our promise is for peace, healing and care on the sacred ground that is Holy Family Retreat Center.

"Listening" from Being Home by Gunilla Norris

Somehow, I must sit to listen.
Standing implies the readiness for action,
for the executing of the will.
To hear You I must sit down and calm down.

The magpie mind chatters.
It doesn’t know about stopping.
How helpless I feel in its automatic firing,
its busy babbling. It is impossible to hear You
as long as I am full of sound.
I turn this helpless prayer toward You.
Help me to be quiet, to sit here
…slowly unknowing everything,
becoming dark, becoming yielding…
just sitting.

Click here for information on our weekend retreat with Gunilla Norris at Holy Family,

How the Light Gets In

I was recently on retreat at Casa Del Sol, House of the Sun. I treasure each of my days there. This retreat house is located at Ghost Ranch, a Presbyterian Conference and Retreat Center in the high desert mountains of New Mexico, about 70 miles from Santa Fe. The Casa is an old adobe hacienda. It is located several miles from the main ranch area, up a breathtakingly beautiful road. This is where Georgia O’Keefe did much of her painting. Although the hacienda has been restored with love and care in recent years, it is still prone to cracks as the desert land around it shifts. I have been there twice this year. Both weeks have featured a brilliant full moon. My visits have been so well timed. Nights are very dark at the ranch which makes the soft moonlight even more prominent.

I have a habit of rising early in the morning there to take pictures as the sun is rising. The light wash of dawn is a surprising and beautiful visual gift for us early risers. One morning before the sun was up over the horizon, the moon was setting to the west slightly above a portion of the hacienda. That adobe wall sports a noticeable crack just beneath the roofline. One of my favorite photos from the week features that cracked abode illuminated by the full moon as it set. The cracked abode and moonlight reminded me of a quote I tucked in my journal and brought with me on retreat. These words are credited to Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen: There is a crack in everything; That’s how the light gets in.

In a culture that prizes perfection and self-sufficiency or the appearance of them, not much value is placed upon what is cracked. But in truth, everyone and everything has its share of cracks. If Cohen is to be believed, there is the potential of wondrous illumination in the cracked places. No doubt there are plenty of cracks in the lives, experiences, and efforts of those of us who value and tend, write for, sell, and pray over Groundcover. Cohen’s words ask us to reconsider how we view our cracks. Do we attempt to hide them or mask them with our shame? Or do we remember the light we may see when we look at them with gentle eyes? What is broken can often be broken open into something greater.

In this time of year when many faith and wisdom traditions in northern climates have celebrations around light, I suggest we lift up the healing light that shines along the pathways of our cracks. May that light be guidance and blessing for each of us and for others through us. Thank you for the cracks you reveal that the light might shine upon us all.

Rev. Dr. Martha Brunell

Pastor, Bethlehem United Church of Christ

Join us for a weekend retreat with Martha. Click here for more information.

Please Wait for Me by Leo F. Flangan, Jr. Ph. D.

It’s more than 10 years since 9/11. Looking back I can see the journey that I and many others have taken. For each of us it is a unique journey – yet we share many paths. One thing we have in common is the difficulty of crossing the chasm created by our experience between ourselves and our loved ones. Another is letting go – not of what we have been through – but of the many habits and routines that just don’t feel right any more. We also face the challenge of letting our loved one’s know where we are on the journey.I can’t recommend how you should communicate to those you care for. I can tell you finding a way is essential.

I wrote the following entry, when the depression of PTSD was so heavy I couldn’t leave my easy chair. It asks my wife to wait for me and have confidence in my return.

Please Wait for Me

I know you love me. I know you worry for me. You feel the pain that springs from me.

I saw horrors and soaked them up like a sponge. I now know that fear is not something that you feel in the pit of your stomach – it is something that occupies your whole being.

You want to come back with me to the place where it happened. You want to understand for yourself. You want to see and feel what I feel. Please don’t. Please don’t try.

I seem distant and to myself. I don’t talk and laughter is a sound I can’t often find.

But you touch me in a way that heals. You are my connection to what we had and what we will have. You are my anchor in what was normal. Let me come to you. Give me time and I will.

I will do things and go places that seem to increase my pain. Sometimes you think I am risking my sanity and my soul. I am finding my way to healing. It will take time. Let me come to you. Be there for me.

Please don’t ever try to really share the horror and pain of this experience. If you join me, I fear we will both lose our strength. We will both be adrift. I need you to be where you are for me. Wait for me. Be patient with me. I will come back to you.

You have the hardest job. The most desperate. To stay where you are for me and let me complete my journey. Trust me that I am not lost – I am coming home.

And when I return, I will be different. I will be stronger than I was. I will have faith in myself. I will love you more…and we will go forward together.

Leo is one of presenter's for our Firefighter's Retreat February 24-26. Click here for more information or to register.

The End of the World ... as We Know it

Fr. Meninger has been a Centering Prayer teacher for 30 years. Click here for more information about Holy Family’s Advent Centering Prayer retreat.

It's that time of year again when we are given the ominous prophetic words concerning the end of the world. One line especially from the second reading from First Thessalonians has been given an over literal prominence; "We who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with those Christians already dead, in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air." This verse has been recognized for centuries by theologians as fanciful, apocalyptic language certainly not to be taken literally.

About 200 years ago a sincere but misguided preacher insisted it be taken literally and has acquired some considerable following. Many of them are sincere, many are paranoid, and some use it to exploit gullible Christians for their own financial profit.

Please note that the first reading from the Book of Wisdom contains a beautiful promise. Wisdom is available to those who seek it. Wisdom is knowing the will of God and how it is carried out in our personal lives and in the world. Many early Christians who read First Thessalonians lacked true wisdom. If Jesus was coming soon then there wasn't much point in going to work, growing food or getting an education. So they spend their time waiting to be caught up into the skies. The apostles did this on Ascension Thursday when Jesus ascended into heaven. An angel appeared and said in effect, “Why do you stand here idle, gazing up into the heavens, Jesus will come again in the clouds and glory…meanwhile, get back to work.” This necessitated the writing of Second Thessalonians in which they were told, once again, to go back to work.

Wisdom is also prominent in the parable of the wise virgins. Their wisdom was simply common sense, something we all need. Julian of Norwich is a veritable font of wisdom, that is, of common sense. She understood that God is a God of love. There is no such thing as the wrath of God. This is a human construct. God is not a judge, or avenger. He does not condemn , punish or criticize. Again, these are all human constructions. God is a God of compassion and forgiveness and he offers us not blame but pity.

In Heaven, Julian tells us, even our sins will be to our honor because God will reward us for our repentance. The greater our sins, the greater is God's compassion. This is why Jesus tells us that there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over 99 who have no need of repentance.

Wisdom, common sense, will tell us that if the Triune God is all-powerful, all wise and all loving, then this world which he created in his wisdom out of his love will come to the end for which he created it, namely himself.

The English Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, expressed this well in a poem called God's Grandeur.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil crushed.

Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell:

the soil is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness, deep down things.

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink, Eastward springs –

Because the Holy Ghost, over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with, ah! bright wings.

So, even though we have spoiled it, the world is always on the brink of a new dawn. The theological virtue of hope is one of the three ways by which God communicates himself to us. This is not something he is going to do, he is always doing it. He is the promise and the fulfillment of the promise. He is the not -- yet and the already -- here. The victory has been won for us we have only to reach out and claim it. May God grant us the wisdom to do so. May you be happy, May you be free, May you be loving, May you be loved.

Father William Meninger

St. Benedicts’ Monastery

Snowmass, Colorado

For more information about Centering prayer and Fr. Meninger visit: http://www.contemplativeprayer.net/

A Plethora of Vocations by Fr. John Baptist Pesce

Most of us weekly pray for “an increase of vocations to the priesthood and religious life,” or something along those lines at the Sunday parish Eucharist. We are also encouraged to pray “for an increase of vocations”. The expression usually has it that “there is a shortage of vocations,” meaning a shortage of priests and religious, both male and female. And, if we pray for these the Lord will send laborers into the vineyard. Who can be “against” that?

All are equally called to holiness (relationship to God). There are no second class citizens here. There are different venues to answer that destiny. The share of God’s work to which we are called has something to do (however amorphous) with the reign of God working itself out in history. Granted this requires a more nuanced understanding of holiness than commonly accepted. But, by now, we should appreciate that this call to holiness doesn’t mean that some are called to be really holy and other, well, just about make it. There is no place for mediocrity in this call to holiness. Would you believe it, we are called to be saints! What we need among all the baptized is a willingness to answer this call to holiness whatever form this response takes in the concrete, nitty-gritty of life.

My suggestion is that what may possibly help in the present situation relative to the matter of vocations, narrowly understood, is to promote on all sides and for everyone a sense of vocation, comprehensively appreciated, namely, the realization that each of us has a call from God to do a share of God’s work in the service of God’s people. A heart specialist who is skilled in heart transplants as well as a park employee who picks up butts and other trash in a public park to remove some of the ugliness from the face of the earth. That goes for butcher, baker, nuclear scientist, nurse’s aide, sanitation worker. Think of the problem we’d have if we didn’t have garbage collectors! Whatever serves to humanize human life, whatever makes it easier to be good, whatever makes more for the type of society that all, deep down, are hungering and thirsting for.

To promote this mentality and the living of it because it is the truth, it seems to me would be an immense contribution towards the awareness that God may be calling some to a way of life that is that of the priest or of a sister or brother. With this collective awareness that we all have this call from God to do a share of God’s work in the service of God’s people, there is the possibility that the Spirit may awaken in some the realization, hey, it may be that God is calling me to do the life and work of a priest or sister or brother! In my judgment, it’s worth the try and there’s nothing to lose and plenty to gain even if, only by the individuals, who have this perspective on their answer to the call for holiness! Ordinary work, decent, upright, up building doesn’t have to be sanctified. It is sanctifying.