Wednesday, Mark 2, 2009

Today's artwork is entitled Dignity

This week's opening and closing prayers are from Sounds of the Eternal: A Celtic Psalter by J. Philip Newell

Opening Prayer
In the silence before time began,
in the quiet of the womb,
in the stillness of early morning
is your beauty.
At the heart of all creation,
at the birth of every creature,
at the centre of each moment
is your splendour.
Rekindle in me the sparks of your beauty
that I may be part of the splendour of this moment.
Rekindle in me the sparks of your beauty
that I may be part of the blazing splendour
that burns from the heart of this moment.

A Reading from Mark 7:9-23
Then he said to them, “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition! For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother’; and, ‘Whoever speaks evil of father or mother must surely die.’ But you say that if anyone tells father or mother, ‘Whatever support you might have had from me is Corban’ (that is, an offering to God)— then you no longer permit doing anything for a father or mother, thus making void the word of God through your tradition that you have handed on. And you do many things like this.”
Then he called the crowd again and said to them, “Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.”
When he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about the parable. He said to them, “Then do you also fail to understand? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile, since it enters, not the heart but the stomach, and goes out into the sewer?” (Thus he declared all foods clean.) And he said, “It is what comes out of a person that defiles. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”

Closing Prayer
That in the elements of earth, sea, and sky
I may see your beauty,
that in wild animals, birdsong and silence
I may hear your beauty,
that in the body of another and the interminglings of relationship
I may touch your beauty,
that in the moisture of the earth and in its flowering and fruiting
I may smell your beauty,
that in the flowing waters of springs and streams
I may taste your beauty,
these things I look for this day, O God,
these things I look for.