Humility as a virtue has to do with knowing ourselves as human, as earthy, as the clay into which the divine breath has been breathed . . . It is to live the paradox of our blessed and broken natures, to know that matter matters, that flesh carries spirit, that life is discovered at the precise meeting place of the human and the divine. To practice humility is to live deeply into this truth, to lift oneself to the mountain top of prayer and aspiration and to embrace the lowly valley of our own abjection.
~ from "Little Things" by Wendy M. Wright in Weavings, Jan-Feb 2003
True thanking is to enjoy God. Gratitude is a true understanding of who we really are. With reverence and awe we turn ourselves around toward the work God leads us to do, enjoying and thanking with our real selves.
No one listens, they tell me, and so I listen...
and I tell them what they have just told me,
and I sit in silence listening to them,
letting them grieve.
Be a gardener. Dig a ditch, toil and sweat and turn the earth upside down and seek the deepness and water the plants in time. Continue this labor and make sweet floods to run and noble and abundant fruits to spring. Take this food and drink and carry it to God as your true worship.
Be a gardner. Dig a ditch, toil and sweat and turn the earth upside down and seek deepness and water the plants in time. Continue this labor and make sweet floods to run and noble and abundant fruits to spring. Take this food and drink and carry it to God as your worship.
Prayer unites the soul to God, for though the soul may be always like God in nature and in substance restored by grace, it is often unlike God in condition, through separation on our part. Then prayer is a witness that the soul wills as God wills, and it eases the conscience and fits us for grace.
