The greatest privilege of a human life is to become a midwife to the awakening of the Soul in another person. Plato

Meditation: I remember how over 13 years ago, I was home alone for the first time with my twin girls after the delivery. Their Dad had to go back to work and my Mom had not yet arrived from Germany. I looked at the two of them sleeping and started crying, as I felt the awesomeness of this gift of becoming a mother. How awesome a responsibility, how awesome a privilege of raising these two girls.

Yesterday I watched my teenage girls with similar eyes. They experience many firsts these days. How awesome to accompany these young girls into womanhood. What a privilege to witness their maturing right in front of my eyes. Thirteen years ago their soul arrived. Today their body, soul and spirit merge to get ready for this awesome journey called adulthood. I am privileged as I continue being their mother and their companion.

Prayer: God of beauty, you become visible every day in the life of our girls. Their growth, their discoveries, their choices, their awareness and their beginning wisdom are awesome to witness. I pray that we as parents will not hinder our teenagers’ birth into adulthood, but foster and coach like midwives do. Help us to embrace even the stormy, overwhelming and painful moments and times, as they are all part of the birth experience. As I am becoming the mother of grown children, midwife me into trusting and midwifing their process. Help me to remain available without becoming overprotective or overbearing. Amen

“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” Jeremiah 29:11

 

The world, more suffering than sinning, turns toward Pope Francis as in a conversation people turn to the person who is making sense of things. Eugene Kennedy

Meditation: Pope Francis is a guiding light in this dark period of history. Millions are losing their homes, their countries and even the basics for a peaceful and human dignified existence. Others who are still having a home, a country and a somewhat secure existence are trying to prevent those who are suffering from entering their shores. They are afraid of suffering, afraid of sharing or of needing to change. They threaten as they feel threatened of losing their privileges.

In this chaos of our present times, Pope Francis embodies Jesus’s voice and heart in a pure way. We can sum up the Pope’s message with the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.”

Prayer: God, You have given Your church a shepherd who embodies discipleship to the fullest. He is a sign that You have not abandoned this our generation. Through him and his prophetic voice You are calling us to wake up and turn towards suffering and not away from it. His voice comforts and blesses those who suffer, and it calls us to repent and change our ways. God have mercy on those suffering and change the hearts and minds of those threatening. God have mercy. Amen

But even if you should suffer for what is right, you are blessed. “Do not fear their threats; do not be frightened.” 1. Peter 3:14

Nationalism is a form of collective narcissism, where the citizens possess an inflated self-love of “their own people,” to the exclusion of other human beings.  Bryant McGill

Meditation: Our nation is led by a pathological narcissist who evokes the worst traits that our country is capable of: nationalism as collective narcissism. Decisions are being made that sacrifice whole groups of people on the altar of self-adoration. The current leaders justify their oppressive new laws by splitting into declared “good versus bad”, “us versus them”, “Christians versus Moslems”, “citizens versus immigrants”, “healthy versus those with a precondition” . This primitive and narcissistic defense mechanism of splitting causes great suffering for many innocent people. I am afraid that during these next four years many will be left behind. Many will fall through the intentionally cut holes in our social safety net. Holes and road blocks are being established everywhere: The powerful leave others to be without power: to not have a way to get a visa, to not find a way to get affordable health insurance, to have no way to escape bigotry nor get away from increasingly hateful and threatening talk and behavior…

Prayer: God, we pray for our nation that is being torn apart by collective narcissism. We pray for those judged, discriminated against, jailed, and tossed aside. Your heart aches for those sacrificed on the altar of self-idolatry. God, we pray that Your will be done. Let the church become a place of refuge, a beacon of hope, a voice in the wilderness that prophetically claims Your values that are opposite of what is currently happening in this country. Stop the craziness. Let those who Your Spirit leads stand up against the exclusion of the vulnerable, the sick, the stranger and the declared “other”. Heal our nationalist exclusivism and our country’s collective narcissism. God, have mercy. Amen

 “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves.  Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.” Philippians 2:3-4

Consult not your fears but your hopes and your dreams. Think not about your frustrations, but about your unfulfilled potential. Concern yourself not with what you tried and failed in, but with what it is still possible for you to do. Pope John XXIII

Meditation: In these political times when it feels many gains are being wiped away and we go to bed frustrated with the news of the day, fear creeps in based on the rhetoric of war engagement and the heightened aggressive talk everywhere. If we consult our fears we will go and buy literal or symbolic “survival bunkers”, as some of the richest Americans do these days. If we allow our frustrations to occupy every hour of our day, we walk around angry and poisoned. And if we stare at the loss of eight years of progress, we might get overwhelmed by feelings of despair. God’s Spirit wants to lift our Spirit to instead consult our hopes and dreams, to look at our unfulfilled potential as a person and as a nation, and to focus on what we can do today, each day, and engage the possible we can do.

Prayer: God, you see the Spirit of hate that tries to ignite fear in people. You hear the language of war and aggression that suddenly creeps into our conscious and unconscious as a nation. You know how threatened many people feel. And You know how many of us are being impacted by the new laws and by a changed political climate. Your promise to never leave us emboldens us. Your Spirit of hope is what sustains us. And we are grateful. Amen

For He Himself has said, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.” So we may boldly say: “The LORD is my helper; I will not fear. What can man do to me?” Hebrews 13:5-6

I think a spiritual journey is not so much a journey of discovery. It’s a journey of recovery. It’s a journey of uncovering your own inner nature. It’s already there. Billy Corgan

Meditation: My teenage daughters are discovering who they are by engaging with friends, expectations of school and with hobbies they choose. At the same time they are finding out their likes, their dislikes and their ways of “being in the world”. If this journey of becoming gets interrupted by traumatic events, or by other circumstances, and teenagers are no longer able to focus on themselves but have to focus on survival or having to take care of others, they need to come back to this spiritual journey of “becoming” later in life. The good news is that it is never too late. Even as adults we can recover from those interruptions and wounds and still begin a journey of uncovering who we were meant to be in the first place, even late in life. There is no greater joy than seeing adults go back to those earlier developmental tasks of uncovering their own nature and spiritually engage the question: “How did God create me and how can I live most congruently with myself?”

Prayer: Creator God, you know how we needed to survive and adapt. You know how we got lost in demands and expectations. Help us recover. Uncover the richness of Your Spirit within us and the freedom and creativity we can still develop, no matter how old we are. Help us to be true to ourselves and discover Your hand in our lives. Amen

For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. Ephesians 2:10

 

Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death. Arthur Schopenhauer

Meditation: Last night, on a Sunday evening, my daughter looked at me and said: “It seems like this morning was a long time ago. So much has happened! What did I do after I got up?” I smiled. At thirteen, life suddenly is being experienced much more consciously. My daughter then proceeded to recount and trace back how her day had gone and all the things she had experienced that day. Later she incorporated her findings into her night prayer. Since my twin daughters were two years old their night prayer always starts with “Thank you, God, for this day”. At times I smile when a teacher is being thanked for whom my daughters had been angry with earlier in the day. How wonderful that the Spirit of gratitude transforms our challenges and growing experiences and helps us accept them. Each day is a little life. And each evening prayer is an exercise in remembering, thanking and letting go. Falling asleep after having made peace with how the day went is a spiritual exercise. Every night in practicing finding gratitude and peace, we are preparing for our final letting go.

Prayer: Merciful and compassionate God, every day is a little life. Every day is a gift from You. Help us enjoy it to the fullest. Wake us up to the beauty of possibilities. Help us be mindful as we journey through the day and let us remember all the moments of joy, challenge and sadness. And at the end of the day, help us forgive others where they failed us, and help us to be grateful even for the challenging moments. You renew us every day, and You are with us every step on the way. Great is your faithfulness. Amen

It is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness. Lamentations 3:22-23

 

Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful. Albert Schweitzer

Meditation: Next year my daughters will attend High school. Many parents and children get very uptight and serious about this four year journey. Getting into certain classes and already taking college level classes can become an obsession. Being a teenager is hard. Getting the performance pressure on top of that (and often culturally presented “as if life itself depends on it”) can be emotionally and psychologically taxing and even damaging. But how do we as parents relax? How do we not fall into the cultural hype of positioning our children with everything they do for “success” as our culture defines it? Our relationship with God can be a helpful anchor. We allowed our daughter to drop the social studies elective for 9^th grade and instead choose a class in acting. We as parents trust that if she finds one area she is excited about every day, all the other studying she has to do will be easier. We learned about her that if she is able to make friends by being part of a group and by creating things together, she will be happy. And we trust that this happiness will radiate in all areas of her life and that her studying and her grades will fall in place. We trust that our daughters will be successful as they find their internal positive motivation and learning becomes part of their way of being in the world rather than only an external pressure to perform.

Prayer: God of creativity, your Spirit wants to lead our daughters to know and trust themselves and even come to delight in themselves. Help them discover the particular gifts you gave them. Let them enjoy their passions and strengths. I know you delight in them as they blossom to become who you meant for them to be. Help us parents to not get in the way with our anxiety. Help us trust that if our teenagers find community and engage in things they love, they will find the motivation to excel in all areas of their life. And we are grateful. Amen

Take delight in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart. Psalm 37:4

What if Barack Obama established a Presidential Advisory Committee that would meet once every couple of months, bringing together the former presidents for a conference in order to seek their collective wisdom? There is a wealth of experience in former presidents that generally goes untapped. Tony Campolo

Meditation: I am fascinated that even in the Old Testament, creation begins with a “we”. God talks to God self as a “we”, as a community: “Let us make mankind in our image”… Creation needed more than one (maybe additional angels? Maybe “the Word” and “the Spirit”?) to bring forth the bounty and beauty it holds. Today after 100 days in office, the US stares at a novice president, stunned how he can be so unprepared for his “one man show” leadership. Why doesn’t he ask for support instead of just following the spur of the moment? How come this culture expects an unprepared and ignorant businessman to run this country by himself? Even congress has forgotten how to function like a community that creates together. Where has this country gone wrong? The younger generations are learning that they function and create best as a team, but the young folks are not yet in power. African nations in their communal life approach know that “it takes a village to raise a child”. But our Western world expects individuals to do what communities are meant to do. Why do we allow the limitations of a 70 year old narcissistic business man who did not even want to be president to ru(i)n our country? How has communal and collective wisdom gotten so lost at a time when we most urgently need it?

Prayer: God, Your wisdom is communal. We talk about You as “Trinity” and mean that You are “three in one”. You are within Yourself a community. You are always consulting within Yourself. You are listening to Yourself. And You are love. And this love has creative communal power. God we have lost our communal ways. We are no longer functioning as Your image. We are currently going astray as a nation. We are self-destructive by allowing one man to “ru(i)n our country”. Fill us again with Your communal wisdom. Help this inexperienced president to seek wisdom from experienced and wise guides, including those who had this role before him.  God have mercy on us and on this world, so that his mistakes won’t destroy and cost lives. God have mercy! Amen

Then God said, Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground. Genesis 1:26

Faithfulness to the past can be a kind of death above ground. Writing of the past is a resurrection; the past then lives in your words and you are free. Jessamyn West

Meditation: Sometimes our loyalty to past generations can become our prison. Yes, we do need to revisit the stories of our ancestors. However, we are not meant to be buried alive with them. Whatever hardships and pain our grandparents and parents suffered, we can grieve it and share their pain for a while. However, as we start praying and writing about those untold stories, we are being set free. The stories of our ancestors are their stories, they are not ours. We honor them, we write about them and then we let them go. Loyalty does not mean to hold onto painful stories forever. Our ancestors have been healed. They have been resurrected. And so, we are being allowed to let go of those stories. Let us be loyal to healing and resurrection rather than shoulder the pain of past generations.

Prayer: Gracious God, when we love our ancestors, we pray for them. When we feel the pain of their stories, we bless them and surrender them into your care. When we get stuck in stories too painful to be told, we pray for Your Spirit to come, help us pray about them, write about them and thus set us free. Our ancestors are free in You as well. The past is no more. Resurrection is real. And we are grateful. Amen

The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free. Luke 4:18

The gift of piety is closely tied to gentleness. The gift of piety which the Holy Spirit gives us makes us gentle, makes us calm, patient, at peace with God, at the service of others with gentleness. Pope Francis

Meditation: “Mom, please, don’t yell”. “Please, don’t be so critical.” When I am stressed and frustrated, I sometimes come across harsher than I intend to. When I am getting really tired, I can become critical. Nothing my girls do or not do is right. Everything bothers me, and it shows in my ways of talking harshly. I am trying to catch myself before I start getting loud and before I can only see the negative. But that is a challenge. I need God’s Spirit to help me. I notice that if I remember in those tense moments to talk to God when I am stressed, frustrated or tired, I can usually take a deep breath. And with that breath comes the Spirit. And once I have breathed deeply, I am taking in feelings of compassion for myself and for my state of exhaustion, and I suddenly also feel compassion for my girls who are just as tired and stressed as I am. “Well, let’s just leave those clothes on the floor for now. Let’s decide to be gentle with ourselves and with each other. We can tidy up when we feel rested again”…

Prayer: God of gentleness, we bring to You our harshness, impatience and even moments of rage. We pray for Your Spirit to fill us with Your presence so that we will be empowered to access compassion, gentleness and patience – with ourselves and with others. Amen

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Galatians 5:22