Daily Readings

Monday, July 14

Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.  And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.

—Genesis 12:1-2

Tuesday, July 15

Work is my gift to the world.  It is my social fruitfulness.  It ties me to my neighborhood and binds me to the future …  I tidy the garden and plant the garden and distribute the goods of the garden and know that it is good.

—Joan Chittister

Wednesday, July 16

The circularity of self-generated hope is too weak to stand against the serious doubts that wash over us …  Only a community can say, “Bless you.  Bless us.  Yes.  Yes.”

—Gary Gunderson

Thursday, July 17

     For behind the spontaneous joy of life
There is always a mechanism to keep going.

—W. H. Auden

Friday, July 18

We begin to see that, positively, maybe everything glad and human and true and with any beauty in it depends on cherishing life, on breathing more life into this life that we are.

—Frederick Buechner

Saturday, July 19

If our usual response to an annoying situation is a curse we’re likely to meet emergencies with a curse.  In the little events of daily living we have the opportunity to condition our reflexes which are built up of ordinary things.  And we learn first of all by being blessed.

—Madeleine L’Engle

Sunday, July 20

Down the walk from the children who misbehave
The generosity of the trees.  These answer
The shouting with shade.

—Stephen Sandy

Monday, July 7

Jesus said, “The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.
“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls, who, on finding one pearl of great value, went and sold all that he had and bought it.”

—Matthew 13:44-46

Tuesday, July 8

The Kingdom is here and now present in a mode of hiddenness and humility that demands repentance before acceptance is even possible.

—John D0minic Crossan

Wednesday, July 9

The Emperor, his bullies and henchmen terrorize the world every day, which is why every day we need a little poem of kindness, a small song of peace, a brief moment of joy.

—David Budbill

Thursday, July 10

Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen…with our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our sheer relentlessness—and our ability to tell our own stories.

—Arundhati Roy

Friday, July 11

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
the treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, or hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seems as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

—R. S. Thomas

Saturday, July 12

We pray
that the continent of love may be shaped within
the continent of power, here by the river of fire.

—Wendell Berry

Sunday, July 13

He who is near me is near the fire.
But he who is far from me is far from the Kingdom.

—Origen

Monday, June 30

Jesus answered, “The first [commandment] is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself

—Mark 12:29-30

Tuesday, July 1

Humility was a way of finding one’s place in relation to God and neighbor, a way of loving both without allowing the need for attention, honor, gratitude, or even being right to interfere.

—Michael E. Williams

Wednesday, July 2

Love means an interior and spiritual identification with one’s brother so that he is not regarded as an “object” to “which” one “does good”. The fact is that good done to another as to an object is of little or no spiritual value. Love takes one’s neighbor as one’s other self …
We have to become in some sense the person we love. And this involves a kind of death of our own being, our own self.

—Thomas Merton

Thursday, July 3

The nature of true charity: not a sterile fear of doing wrong but a vigorous determination that all of us together shall break open the doors of life.

—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Friday, July 4

For a long time I prayed that my children would grow up to be disciples and they would know joy in that service. Later, I added another petition: “May they always know that they are deeply love by you.”

—Arthur Paul Boer

Saturday, July 5

                 God help us if
we make this world only out of bone, and not the greater
weight
of admiration, whimsy,
fierce and unspeakable love.

—Mary Oliver

Sunday, July 6

For some reason we human beings seem to learn best how to love when we’re a bit broken, when our plans fall apart, when our myths of our self-sufficiency and goodness and safety are shattered.

—Kathleen Norris

Monday, June 23

Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits.
who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases.

—Psalm 103:2-3

Tuesday, June 24

For remedies people look first to science and then look away in disappointment partly because they mistake the nature of the problems and partly because they have grown so used to thinking of science and technology as a secular substitute for the miraculous.

—Lewis Thomas

Wednesday, June 25

Self-care is never a selfish act—it is simply good stewardship of the only gift I have, the gift I was put on earth to offer to others.  Anytime we can listen to true self and give it the care it requires, we do so not only for ourselves but for the many others whose lives we touch.

—Parker Palmer

Thursday, June 26

There are two extremes to avoid:  being completely absorbed in your pain and being distracted by so many things that you stay far away from the wound you want to heal.

—Henri Nouwen

Friday, June 27

It is not a question of well-being, it is solely a thirst for greater-being.

—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Saturday, June 28

Be careful about reading health books.  You may die of a misprint.

—Mark Twain

Sunday, June 29

Reshape me in your wholeness
to be a healing person, Lord.

—Ted Loder

Monday, June 2

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.  For the law of the Spirit of life has set me free from the law of sin and death.

—Romans 8:1-2

Tuesday, June 3

To speak and not to punish.  To speak and not condemn.  To speak in order to educate and enrich, not to repudiate and humiliate.  To speak and to cure, not to hurt and wound.  Rebbe Wolfe of Zbarazh believed in using language exclusively on behalf of man, never as a weapon against him.

—Elie Wiesel

Wednesday, June 4

Oh, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person; having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but to pour them all out just as they are, chaff and grain together, knowing that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping and then, with the breath of kindness, blow the rest away.

—George Eliot

Thursday, June 5

The superstition of the anger … is that somewhere along the trajectory of any quarrel a tribunal will be reached that will hear all complaints and find for the plaintiff; the verdict will be that the defendant is entirely wrong, the plaintiff entirely right and entirely righteous.  This of course is not going to happen.

—Wendell Berry

Friday, June 6

The person who has great peace of heart pays no attention to either praise or blame.

—Thomas a Kempis

Saturday, June 7

And what is the good of a better idea about meaningless things if we lose our life relationships in the process of proving ourselves to be right?

—Joan Chittister

Sunday, June 8

O God, empty me of angry judgments,
and aching disappointments,
and anxious trying.

—Ted Loder

Monday, May 26

The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.

—Galatians 3:22-23

Tuesday, May 27

If you have been given the power to break down barriers to let love flow, then you’ve met God.

—Barbara Wheeler

Wednesday, May 28

Joy is a net of love by which you can catch souls.

—Mother Theresa

Thursday, May 29

The Christian gospel is a summons to peace, calling for justice beyond anger, mercy beyond justice, forgiveness beyond mercy, love beyond forgiveness.

—Wendell Berry

Friday, May 30

Being means: not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which doesn’t force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterward summer may not come. It does come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are there as if eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly silent and vast. I learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful for: patience is everything!

—Rainer Maria Rilke

Saturday, May 31

loving-kindness like air
cannot be used up

though I breathe heavily locked in a room
beyond the wall a wind blows freely

—David Rosenberg

Sunday, June 1

Jesus brings a wholly different righteousness.  He brings God’s goodness because he brings God himself, who encompasses everything and tolerates nothing isolated; the living God, who wants nothing but life; the God of riches, whose being consists in giving.

—Eberhard Arnold

Monday, May 19

While Peter was still saying this, the Holy Spirit fell on all who heard the word. And the believers from among the circumcised who came with Peter were amazed, because the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles.

—Acts 10:44-45

Tuesday, May 20

It is not that the church has a mission and the Spirit helps us in fulfilling it. It is rather that the Spirit is the active missionary and the church (where it is faithful) is the place where the Spirit is enabled to complete the Spirit’s work.

—Lesslie Newbigin

Wednesday, May 21

… in whatever fortress, on whatever foundation,
then, now, in eternum, the spirit bears witness
through its broken flesh:
to grace more enduring even than mortal corruption,
ineradicable, and rightly so.

—Geoffrey Hill

Thursday, May 22

A true community cannot exist for a single day without the gift of the Holy Spirit.

—Heinrich Arnold

Friday, May 23

The so-called materialism or our own time is, by contrast, at once indifferent to spiritual concerns and insatiably destructive of the material world. And I would call our economy, not materialistic, but abstract, intent upon the subversion of both spirit and matter by abstractions of value and of power.

—Wendell Berry

Saturday, May 24

… the wind’s head,
bent on blowing me clean
out of my senses.

—Nancy Willard

Sunday, May 25

The life of this world is wind.
Wind-blown we come and wind-blown we go away.
All that we look on is windfall.
All we remember is wind.

—Charles Wright

Monday, May 12

Little children, let us not love in word or speech but in deed an in truth.

—1 John 3:18

Tuesday, May 13

… you can love completely without completely understanding.

—Wendell Berry

Wednesday, May 14

… the only way to love a person is … by listening to them and seeing and believing in the god, in the poet, in them.

—Brenda Ueland

Thursday, May 15

Justice is the way love speaks in public.

—Michael Eric Dyson

Friday, May 16

If you have been given the power to break down barriers to let love flow, then you’ve met God.

—Barbara Wheeler

Saturday, May 17

It has taken me a long time to understand a simple truth:  though everyone needs to be loved, I am unable to be the source of that gift to everyone who asks it of me.  There are some relations in which I am capable of love, and others in which I am not.  To pretend otherwise, to put out promissory notes that I am incapable of honoring, is to do damage—all in the name of love.

—Parker Palmer

Sunday, May 18

Let the fragments of love be reassembled in you.  Only then will you have true courage.

—Hayden Carruth

Monday, May 5

Jesus prayed, “I glorified You on earth, having accomplished the work which you gave me to do; and now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory which I had with you before the world was made.”

—John 17:4-5

Tuesday, May 6

Man cannot see God, but there is a most distinctive kind of glory in the giving-up of the self, and this is the reflection of glory, which is accessible to all.

—Samuel Terrien

Wednesday, May 7

I do not know how to tear down the artificial decorations
of “religion”; behind them we would find freedom itself
joy, the glory of Your presence!

—Michel Boutier

Thursday, May 8

The “glory” of Yahweh is actually God’s own self, revealed in majesty and power, in the glow of holiness and the dynamism of being.

—Walter Burghardt

Friday, May 9

And like Billy Bray I go my way, and my left foot says “Glory,” and my right foot says “Amen”:  in and out of Shadow Creek, upstream and down, exultant, in a daze, dancing, to the twin silver trumpets of praise.

—Annie Dillard

Saturday, May 10

Now, the glory of God arises not out of the confession, but because every true confessing is accompanied with a detestation of the sin … and a sense of my reunion and redintegration with God …  In every true confessing God hath glory, because he hath a strayed soul reunited to his kingdom.

—John Donne

Sunday, May 11

Suppose it were offered you today as your calling to go forth and be to men, to yourself, and to God all that Christ was in his human walk, to be sent into the world as he was, to minister as he ministered, to carry his light, his peace, his joy, his glory to men, to reveal his purity, to suffer with his patience!  And what but this is the calling and mission of the gospel?

—Horace Bushnell

Monday, April 28

Judas (not Iscariot) said to Jesus, “Lord, how is it that you will manifest yourself to us, and not to the world?” Jesus answered him, “If a person loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.”

—John 14:22-23

Tuesday, April 29

We can put faith first and imitation second, inasmuch as it is necessary for me to have faith in that which I am to imitate. But we must also put imitation first and faith second. I must, by some action, be marked in some measure by conformity to Christ, and thus collide with the world. Without some kind of situational tension, there is no real opportunity of becoming a believer.

—Søren Kierkegaard

Wednesday, April 30

The true work of the sciences and the arts is to keep all of us moving, in our own lives in our own places, between the cultural and actual landscapes, making the always necessary and the forever unfinished corrections.

—Wendell Berry

Thursday, May 1

Education is not the means of showing people how to get what they want. Education is an experience by means of which enough men, it is hoped, will learn to want what is worth having.

—Ronald Reagan

Friday, May 2

For the world is not to be narrowed till it will go into the understanding (which has been done hitherto), but the understanding is to be expanded and opened till it can take in the image of the world.

—Loren Eiseley

Saturday, May 3

But writing itself is one of the great free human activities. There is scope for individuality and elation and discovery in writing.
For the person who follows with trust and forgiveness, what occurs to him the world remains always ready and deep and inexhaustable environment with combinded vividness of an actuality and flexibility of a dream. Working back and forth between experience and thought, writers have more than space and time can offer. They have the whole unexplored realm of human vision.

—William Stafford

Sunday, May 4

There is a confusion that leads to death.
But there is also a confusion that leads to life.

—Saint Jerome