Recently I had the opportunity to go to Erie, PA to spend time in retreat at Mt. St. Benedict, a monastery of Benedictine nuns. What a warm, gracious, welcoming community! My friends and I felt so blessed to have had an opportunity to share in their liturgies and to share meals and conversation with them. While there, I picked up a small book entitled God Speaks in Many Tongues by Joan Chittister. In the book Joan Chittister takes 40 sacred texts and shares a meditation. Here is one I found quite poignant:
Meditation 12
In my soul there is a temple, a shrine, a mosque, a church where I kneel.
Prayer should bring us to an altar where no walls or names exist.
In my soul there is a temple, a shrine, a mosque, a church that dissolve, that dissolve in God.
– Rabia, Sufi
Religion is the toxin that too often poisons the idea of the God in whose name we speak.
When we use religion to divide, to demean, to assert our own superiority, then we have made ourselves our religion.
Then God is shamed and, possibly, ignored.
Then no one with a right mind could possibly believe what we believe.
Good for them.
– Joan Chittister
We often wonder why so many people have lost their sense of faith and no longer seek the comfort and direction of the Almighty. This meditation challenges us to look in the mirror. What are we doing to welcome them back? Are we displaying attributes of ourselves that will make people say: “I want what they have”? If we aren’t, then we definitely should.
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