The Prayer of Attending
God’s agent of spiritual renovation is the Spirit, and the Spirit blows where she wills.
We can become lost in the hurly-burly of modern life. We can submerge ourselves in a pool of chatter and small talk. We can hide from ourselves and from God by allowing ourselves to become busier and busier. The prayer of attending is about finding moments in the midst of our hectic, noisy existence to connect with God and God’s redemptive love….
In the Bible we have a picture of compassion according to which a person is in such deep solidarity with the pain of another that she takes that pain into herself. She receives the other in her suffering and distress in her inmost space (the heart or the womb). It is, then, as if she hosts the suffering person….
As we live and move through the daily round we are connected with a myriad of faces, gestures, words, sights, sounds, values, and ideologies. In attending to this heavily populated world we are confronted with the primordial wrestling of light and shadow. Here we are blessed with goodness, love, and justice; there we are assaulted by evil, aggression, and egoism. Prayerfully, from the quiet inner centre, we ask: “Loving God, how do you want me to engage with this world that I see, hear, and touch?”
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