May 2014 (Vol. XXVII, No. 5)

In this little corner of the world we welcome spring, made all the sweeter by the relentlessness of the passing winter. So many treasures in nature are tiny, unassuming graces— diminutive wildflowers, wriggling tadpoles, crimson ladybugs, and the melodic double songs of the brown thrasher. To blink or hurry by is to miss them. We live in a smog of attention deficit disorder; I don't mean the children, but all of us on this treadmill of overstimulation. In this culture of too much, too busy, too distracted, too bombarded, can we learn to sift through the chaos and lift out the truly important? I have become almost obsessed with butterfly watching— luminous wings call to me as if to say, follow my flight path, sit patiently while I feel the sun's warmth on my wings, see how I unfurl my perfect little straw to sip this nectar. I want to learn how to focus on small, sacred moments that nurture the soul.

Part of being human is to experience moments of true perception about those things that touch you so intimately that suddenly you see. What you see (or read or hear) at such moments has a ring of truth about it, not just of a general kind but as something that takes on a dimension and depth for you so that it becomes your truth. It seems to be making a claim on you. Such moments don't come often. Hold on to them. Cherish them until they become so much a part of you as to be second nature. For there is only one persistent demand made upon us by the Spirit. It is that we are receptive. That we keep our eyes open, our minds unclosed. It is, in short, that we retain all our lives our sense of wonder.

~ from THE SUNRISE OF WONDER by Michael Mayne
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The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.

~ Henry Miller
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The practice of paying attention is the rarest of gifts because it depends upon the harshest of disciplines. So uncommon is it for us to grasp the beauty and mystery of ordinary things that, when we finally do so, it often brings us to the verge of tears. Appalled by our own poverty, we awake in wonder to a splendor of which we had never dreamed.

~ from THE SOLACE OF FIERCE LANDSCAPES by Belden C. Lane, as reprinted in AN ALMANAC FOR THE SOUL by Marv and Nancy Hiles
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In my life-long impatience, how much I have missed. Last night, washing the dishes, I really looked at my iron frying pan in the dishwater. The light made visible for a moment a tiny rainbow—a light through water revealing all the colors of life. It is so easy to miss the tiny symbols. Finding them is quite different from the business of trying to hatch up big symbolic experiences. It is RECOGNITION, not PURSUIT, of meaning—recognition of the sacramental, of the intersection of the two worlds, breaking through unsought because one is ATTENDING.

~ from SUCH STUFF AS DREAMS ARE MADE ON by Helen Luke
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Maybe the burning bush was burning all the time and Moses didn't notice. Maybe the miracle is when you stop and pay attention.

~ from HOUSEHOLD SAINTS by Francine Prose
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Whenever she turned her steep focus to me, I felt the warmth that flowers must feel when they bloom through the snow, under the first concentrated rays of the sun.

~ Janet Fitch
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If I were to begin life again, I should want it as it was. I would only open my eyes a little more...

~ Jules Renard
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When I fully enter time's swift current, enter into the current moment with the weight of all my attention, I slow the torrent with the weight of me all here.

~ Ann Voskamp
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Because of my blindness, I had developed a new faculty. Strictly speaking, we all have it, but almost all forget to use it. That faculty is attention. In order to live without eyes it is necessary to be very attentive, to remain hour after hour in a state of wakefulness, of receptiveness and activity. Indeed, attention is not simply a virtue of intelligence or the result of education, and something one can easily do without. It is a state of being . . . a state without which we shall never know wholeness. In its truest sense it is the listening post of the universe.

~ from AGAINST THE POLLUTION OF THE I by Jacques Lusseyrann
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The present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh
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All of my life has been a relearning to pray—a letting go of incantational magic, petition, and vain repetition ""Me Lord, me," instead of watching attentively for the light that burns at the center of every star, every cell, every living creature, every human heart.

~ Chet Raymo in NATURAL PRAYERS as quoted in EARTH'S ECHO by Robert Hamma
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Each age has its own tasks. For most of us now, our monasteries have no walls except the silence our meditation gathers to the center of our lives, and this is enough—it is more than enough. Our hermitage is the act of living with attention in the midst of things; amid the rhythms of work and love, the bath with the child, the endlessly growing paperwork, the ever-present likelihood of war, the necessity for taking action to help the world. For us, a good spiritual life is permeable and robust. It faces things squarely knowing the smallest moments are all we have, and that even the smallest moment is full of happiness.

~ from THE LIGHT INSIDE THE DARK by John Tarrant, as reprinted in AN ALMANAC FOR THE SOUL by Marv and Nancy Hiles
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The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

~ Marcel Proust
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When all striving ceases
I awaken to behold
Ever-present Awareness
Keeping silent watch.

~ Thomas Keating
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I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?

~ excerpt from Mary Oliver's The Summer Day
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March 2014 (Vol. XXVII, No. 3)

Beneath yet another blanket of gently falling snow, I find myself pondering the warming glow of hope. Endless gray days, dying yearling deer, and seemingly lifeless forest encroach upon my heart. I know that spring will come, with its joyful melodies and vibrant hues and teeming life. Likewise that winter holds its own still beauty, paring down the landscape so we can see its silhouettes more clearly. Yet at times our world seems too far cast in winter's thrall to be able to remember and envision its renewal. How does one hold on to hope amid the chill of our inhumanities and senseless overpowering of the earth? From whence does hope come? How can we cradle our hands around it to protect it from the snuffing winds and cynical voices? To choose hope is to tap into the memory of faithfulness and to wait with gratitude for seeds of possibility hidden beneath the snow.

To one who waits
all things reveal themselves,
so long as you have the courage
not to deny in the darkness
what you have seen in the Light.

~ Coventry Patmore
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Hope is the foundation or beginning step of faith and an essential expression of love. It provides the formless general aspiration for that which is higher and better, and then faith fills out the picture with the specific shape that a better self or a better world would take. As the expression of love, it sends that image out to the loved one and to the universe. By hoping you are taking an active part in the process by which the present creates the future.

~ - from THE POWER OF HOPE by Robert Ellwood
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One Breath

Here, in the silence
And stillness between
I find myself offering
A small breath of hope
For the world.

~ Casey Sayre Boukus
Casey Sayre Boukus hope

Hope is faith holding out its hand in the dark.

~ >~ George Iles
George Iles hope

Hope is a human act of commitment to and investment in the future. Hope is an act of human courage that refuses to cherish the present too much or be reduced to despair by present circumstance. Hope is the capacity to relinquish the present for the sake of what is imagined to be a reachable future...

Sureness about God's large resolve...is a summons...Now is the time for yielding justice, for foolish forgiveness, for outrageous generosity, for elaborate hospitality. None of these acts can come from fear, anxiety, or despair. But they are all acts that evoke new futures that the fearful think are impossible. Hope in the end is a contradiction of the dominant version of reality...it is at the root of human well-being, for ourselves as for all our would-be neighbors.

~ Walter Brueggemann in Sojourners Magazine, Dec 2013
Walter Brueggemann Sojourners Magazine hope

I see in [these] folks the human capacity for change, for redemption, for forgiveness. I believe that every one of us, made in God's image as we are, has that capacity. Our challenge is to learn to call it forth in each person. Our hope is that we will succeed.

~ Shelley Douglass in Sojourners Magazine, Dec 2013
Shelley Douglass Sojourners Magazine hope

How shall the mighty river
reach the tiny seed?
See it rise silently
to the sun's yearning,
sail from a winter's cloud
flake after silent flake
piling up layer upon layer
until the thaw of spring
to meet the seedling's need.

Make tender, Lord, my heart:
release through gentleness
Thine own tremendous power
hid in the snowflake's art.

~ Antoinette Adam
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Above all, hope is based on relationships, on a collaborative connection with people as well as a higher power.

~ Louise Danielle Palmer
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There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.

~ Barry Lopez in ARCTIC DREAMS
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Suddenly an influx of light, though it was late, filled my room. I looked out and saw that the pond was already calm and full of hope as on a summer evening, though the ice was dissolved but yesterday. There seemed to be some intelligence in the pond which responded to the unseen serenity in a distant horizon.

~ Thoreau
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Look deeply into your life.
Search out the hidden things
within your circumstances.
The beauty is there.
Comfort and forgiveness are available.
Hope is always waiting
for you to find.

~ from William Martin in THE SAGE'S TAO TE CHING
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Dusty cobblestones glow in the darkness
I walk out thinking the moon is illuminating them
but the sky is only pinkness
A city engulfed in its own smog and light
Red sky prophesies say this is the end of days
A lone frog singing says the days will last
Outside I am overcome
Inside I am too big for my own cage
Shining intensity at my own smog
It glows too brightly
to see the moon
or stars beyond
I wait for a shift
For things to end
Or for a miracle
that will come
and clean everything
Like the rain
the frog is calling

~ Caitlin Chero
Caitlin Chero hope

Hope and fear cannot occupy the same space. Invite one to stay.

~ Maya Angelou
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Wild winter winds depart
in a final, dying howl.
Blackbird returns, a red-winged
oracle of spring,
announcing new life and renewed light,
shimmering with possibilities
of ever-circling Hope.

~ from “Red-Winged Blackbird” in POEMS OF OTHER WORLDS by Richard Bachtold
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February 2014 (Vol. XXVII, No. 2)

Greetings dear friends! Having recently returned from a trip to Israel and Istanbul, I find myself pondering how we nurture compassion within ourselves? What makes one choose gracious hospitality and open gestures of the heart? Bedouin camel herder, Palestinian shopkeeper, Hassidic father, Israeli soldier, Kurdish innkeeper —such a tapestry of religions, beliefs, ways of life, hopes, and fears. Whether we interact through simple kindness and respect or fear and antagonism depends on what we see in the other. Do we look with eyes of the heart to find our common humanity? Do we put relationships in the context of I–Thou or do we build walls and establish divides of right and wrong? Do we allow our eyes to meet and spark a connection or do we turn away? What inner work will help ignite the fire of love?

Love depends upon the capacity to reach beneath the surface of persons, to feel and touch the seed of life that is hidden there. And love becomes a power when it is capable of evoking that seed and drawing it forth from its hiding place.
~ from THE SYMBOLIC AND THE REAL by Ira Progoff
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Love depends upon the capacity to reach beneath the surface of persons, to feel and touch the seed of life that is hidden there. And love becomes a power when it is capable of evoking that seed and drawing it forth from its hiding place.
~ from THE SYMBOLIC AND THE REAL by Ira Progoff
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Compassion takes practice to flow freely from the heart.

~ from LUMEN CHRISTI...HOLY WISDOM by Nan Merrill
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It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love others. The more solitary I am, the more affection I have for them. It is pure affection, and filled with reverence for the solitude of others. Solitude and silence teach me to love others for what they are, not for what they say.

~ Thomas Merton
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We can do no great things, only small things with great love.

~Mother Teresa
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This is what our love is —a sacred pattern of unbroken unity, sewn flawlessly, invisible inside all other images, thoughts, smells, and sounds.

~Aberjhani
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People are too heavy for you? Do not carry them on your shoulders, hold them in your heart.

~Dom Helder Camara
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If you want to be a rebel, be kind.

~Pancho Ramos Stierle, from Bernie Siegel
Pancho Ramos Stierle love

The heart is like a garden. It can grow compassion or fear, resentment or love. What seeds will you plant there?

~from BUDDHA'S LITTLE INSTRUCTION BOOK by Jack Kornfield
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It has been well observed that though nations may differ from nations, communities from communities, and people from people, human nature is the same everywhere. As there is but one sun that warms and gives light to the earth, there is but one God who teaches us to love one another and care for each other.

~Sundar Singh
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How

Did the rose
Ever open its heart

And give to this world
All its
Beauty?

It felt the encouragement of light
Against its
Being

Otherwise,
We all remain

Too

Frightened.

~ Hafiz
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Maybe the purpose of being here, wherever we are, is to increase the durability and the occasions of love among and between peoples. Love, as the concentration of tender caring and tender excitement, or love as the reason for joy.

~June Jordon
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There is only one breath. All are made of the same clay. The light within all is the same.

~ Guru Granth Sahib
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This rock has seen many storms. Here it stands exposed to the elements, covered with the scars of its past. But one thing that always gave me comfort in coming here—it has not crumbled. It is still standing at the water’s edge, facing the wind and the sea and whatever the future will bring...Our hearts are like this rock. They will not crumble as long as we live and as long as we love.

~from ALL THAT MATTERS by Jan Goldstein
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The insight at the heart of nonviolence is that we live in a tragic gap—a gap between the way things are and the way we know they might be… If we want to live nonviolent lives, we must learn to stand in the tragic gap, faithfully holding the tension between reality and possibility in hopes of being opened to a third way... [of breaking our] collective hearts open to justice, truth, and love.

There is an old Hasidic tale that tells us how such things happen. The pupil comes to the rebbe and asks, "Why does Torah tell us to 'place these words upon your hearts’? Why does it not tell us to place these holy words in our hearts?" The rebbe answers, "It is because as we are, our hearts are closed, and we cannot place the holy words in our hearts. So we place them on top of our hearts. And there they stay until, one day, the heart breaks, and the words fall in."

~Parker J. Palmer in A HIDDEN WHOLENESS
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Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and
laughter at once,

so I see that my joy and pain are one.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up

and the door of my heart

can be left open,
the door of compassion.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh
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Your heart is a seed. Go, plant it in the world!

~Sue Monk Kidd (from Kathleen Roy)
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In spiritual maturity, the opposite of injustice is not justice, but compassion. Not me against you, not me straightening out the present ill, fighting to gain a just result for myself and others, but compassion, a life that goes against nothing and fulfills everything.

~from NOTHING SPECIAL by Charlotte Joko Beck
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To love another is to see the face of the Beloved mirroring your own.

~ from LUMEN CHRISTI...HOLY WISDOM by Nan Merrill
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There is no need for temples, no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple: The philosophy is kindness.

~H. H. the Dalai Lama (from Liz)
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Compassion is not a social facade. Compassion is not a sham designed to mask our essential self–centeredness. Compassion is the emotion that links us to those outside ourselves. It is the capacity for outreach. It enables us, it drives us, to go beyond ourselves to the beating pulse of the rest of the world. Compassion, then, is a dimension of what it means to be fully human.

~ Joan Chittister
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Some day, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we shall harness the energies of love. Then, for a second time in the history of the world, we will have discovered fire.

~Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (from Kathleen Roy)
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January 2014 (Vol. XXVII, No. 1)

Welcome to the unfolding of a new year! At this turning of the season, we look back with gratitude on the past and peer hopefully into the future. Outside, shortened days and wintry chill seem to suspend time as nature burrows in to wait. Snow has cast its icy aura over barren trees silhouetted against a soundless, white landscape. And yet beneath the ice, the seeds of spring are waiting to be born anew. Perhaps we too need to slow our heart rates, burrow down within our souls, and gather near the warmth and light to discover the timelessness of grace. Let the gift of winter be the practice of being fully present to each sacred moment as we wait to see what will be born anew within our hearts.

They are not long,
These days to be,
But a taste of eternity.
Yet in each day,
In each hour,
There is the power
Of a Now
That stretches timeless
In its core
And knows eternity
Be not more.

~ from FROM THE CENTER by Robert J. Hope
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I abandon all that I think I am, all that I hope to be, all that I believe I possess. I let go of the past, I withdraw my grasping hand from the future, and in the great silence of this moment, I alertly rest my soul.

~ from DEEP IS THE HUNGER by Howard Thurman
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For a child, time as the great circus parade of past, present, and future, cause and effect, has scarcely started yet and means little because for a child all time is by and large NOW time and apparently endless. What child, while summer is happening, bothers to think much that summer will end? What child, when snow is on the ground, stops to remember that not long ago the ground was snowless? It is by content rather than its duration that a child knows time, by its quality rather than its quantity — happy and sad times.

~ from THE SACRED JOURNEY by Frederick Buechner
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I live in unfamiliar places:
The unknowing of empty spaces
Between what was and what is yet to be.
It is the hardest earthly place for me
To dwell within, pause, absolutely still.
Knowing only God and love can fill
The wanting, one drop at a time.

It's only through the heart's abiding
That Wisdom might be found hiding
In the shadows of such Sacred Pause.
I offer up what was to mourn in empty spaces,
Let go of worn embraces
So what is yet to be
May somehow birth in me.

~ Pam Breau in PRESENCE, Vol. 10, No 3
Pam Breau Presence time

In this well ordered universe, the perfect vehicle for our spiritual growth and unfoldment is exactly our present situation.

~ Sevakra
Sevakra time

As spring and summer follow
autumn and winter,
so our lives have their seasons.
Help us to live in the eternal moment,
awaiting your perfect timing
in all things.

~ from #105 in PSALMS FOR PRAYING
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Life may be brimming over with experiences, but somewhere, deep inside, all of us carry a vast and fruitful loneliness wherever we go. And sometimes the most important thing in the whole day is the rest we take between two deep breaths, or the turning inward in prayer for five short minutes.

~ from AN INTERRUPTED LIFE by Etty Hillesum
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In our most ordinary days we have moments of happiness, moments of comfort and enjoyment, moments of seeing something that pleased us, something that touched us, moments of contacting the tenderness of our hearts... It's essential during the day ... to begin to cherish those moments as precious. Gradually we can begin to cherish the preciousness of our whole life just as it is, with its ups and downs, its failures and successes, its roughness and smoothness.

~ Pema Chodron
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Read not the Times,
read the Eternities.

~ Henry David Thoreau
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There has never been a time
when you and I have not existed...
There will never be a time
when we will cease to be.

~ from the BHAGAVAD GITA
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when each day
is sacred
when each hour
is sacred
when each instant
is sacred

earth and you
space and you
bearing the sacred
through time
you'll reach
the fields of light.

~ Guillevic, Breton
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Follow anything in its act of being — a snowflake falling, ice melting, a loved one waking — and we are ushered into the ongoing moment of the beginning, the quiet instant from which each breath starts. What makes this moment so crucial is that it continually releases the freshness of living. The key to finding this moment and all its freshness, again and again, is slowing down. When we find ourselves stalled in our very serious and ambitious plans, we are often being asked to re-find the beginning of time.

~ from THE BOOK OF AWAKENING by Mark Nepo
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Time is not at all what it seems. It does not flow in only one direction, and the future exists simultaneously with the past.

~ Albert Einstein
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What a treasure this life is!
Every second belongs to eternity.

~ St. Therese of Lisieux, Collected Letters #96
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Make me, O Lord, at last, a simple thing
Time cannot overwhelm.
Once I transcended time
A bud broke to a rose.
And I rose from a last diminishing.

~ from "In Evening Air" (abridged) in THE COLLECTED POEMS OF THEODORE ROETHKE, as reprinted in AN ALMANAC FOR THE SOUL by Marv and Nancy Hiles
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December 2013 (Vol. XXVI, No. 11)

Winter greetings, dear Friends! In this busy holiday season, let's stop and contemplate, for a moment, our angel companions. Some say we have angels all around us all the time, unseen and unheard, and that they act as our guardians. Others feel angels are among us as flesh and blood human beings who come along at just the right time when we need them most. Some feel they really dwell within each of us, coming to us as a whisper or an urging of our soul in response to our needs and questions. Whatever your particular feeling about angels, know they are freely available to us in the silence of our hearts, and they always respond to us if we but ask. Angelic blessings to all, in this season of greatest blessing!

Angels are messengers of God; they do exist. They are love, joy, and beauty. Their message of hope and inspiration is there to open the hearts and consciousness of all people.
~ from TARA'S ANGELS by Kirk Moore
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Our angelic messengers protect us and guide us. Residing in cubbies watching for those moments of peril when they may be handy and of useful service, angels are the power of a higher presence. They are our patrons from the unseen.
~ from THE BUTTERFLY COMETH by Diana Webb
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Silently, one by one,
in the infinite meadows of heaven,
Blossomed the lovely stars,
the forget-me-nots of the angels.
~ EVANGELINE by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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Around our pillows golden ladders rise,
And up and down the skies,
With winged sandals shod,
The angels come, and go, the Messengers of God!

~ Richard Henry Stoddard
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Here in New Harmony, one of my favorite places of prayer is the sculpture of Tobi Kahn, a renowned Jewish artist from New York. The piece is called Shalev, or Angel of Compassion. It is a twelve-foot-high granite archway under which the angel of compassion is passing. She is a life-sized human figure made of gleaming bronze, and her head and entire posture incline with presence. The archway has always felt to me like the archway of the present moment, the archway of every moment. And the angel is like a messenger of the Living Presence, inclining with compassion, accompanying us and our world as we enter the archway of the present.
~ from A NEW HARMONY by John Philip Newell
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I believe we are free, within limits, and yet there is an unseen hand, a guiding angel, that somehow, like a submerged propeller, drives us on.

~ Rabindranath Tagore
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We attract angels by becoming the qualities that are of interest to them. When we focus on such qualities as compassion, faith or tolerance . . . we attract angelic beings that are trying to help develop that in all humanity.

~ K. Martin-Kuri
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I believe that angels are forms, images, and expressions through which the essences and energy forces of God can be transmitted and that, since there are an infinite number of these forms, the greatest service anyone can pay the angelic host is never consciously to limit the ways angels might appear to us.

~ from ANGELS, ANGELS EVERYWHERE by Don Gilmore
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Her eyes were kindled from the lamps of Heaven.
Her voice reached through me, tender, sweet and low:
An angel's voice, a music of its own.
And in the center, great wings spread apart,
more than a thousand festive angels shone,
each one distinct in radiance, and in art.

~ from THE DIVINE COMEDY by Dante
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We should pray to the angels,
for they are given to us as guardians.
~ by St. Ambrose
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The earth has grown old
   with its burden of care
   but in truth it always is young
The heart of the jewel
   burns lustrous and fair,
   and its soul full of music breaks the air
When the song of angels is sung.

~ by Phillips Brooks
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The sun receives information from the center of the galaxy. Light comes from other stars as well as the sun. The universe communicates with itself through light. Light beams are messengers, and one synonym for messenger is "angel." A light ray is an angel. An angel is a being of light carrying information outward from the center of our galaxy, star to star, sun to planet. Our seemingly solid bodies are created from condensed sunlight, making us vessels of light, just like angels. Our true identity is angelic, or light-filled. We are beings filled with the information that comes to earth in light.

~ from BEYOND FEAR by Don Miguel Ruiz
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If we would cooperate with the angels in their work, we must put aside all selfish and self-centered thought and throw ourselves heart and soul into the service of others.

Christmas of the Angels

~ by Dora Van Gelder
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Angels are evidence that God is taking notice of us. They ask the same always: surrender, obedience, submission, and humility before the Holy One. Some say they make us homesick for heaven.

~ by Megan McKenna
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Angels rejoice as we befriend their companioning presence.

~ from LUMEN CHRISTI...HOLY WISDOM by Nan Merrill
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There must be always remaining in everyone's life some place for the singing of angels, some place for that which in itself is breathlessly beautiful, and by an inherent prerogative, throws all the rest of life into a new and creative relatedness, something that gathers up in itself all the freshets of experience from drab and commonplace areas of living and glows in one bright white light of penetrating beauty and meaning—then passes. The commonplace is shot through with new glory; old burdens become lighter, deep and ancient wounds lose much of their old, old hurting. A crown is placed over our heads that for the rest of our lives we are trying to grow tall enough to wear. Despite all the crassness of life, despite all the hardness of life, despite all the harsh discords of life, life is saved by the singing of angels.

~ from DEEP IS THE HUNGER by Howard Thurman, as reprinted in AN ALMANAC FOR THE SOUL by Marv and Nancy Hiles
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