Living Tree Poetry

“If one completes the journey to one’s own heart, one will find oneself in the heart of everyone else.”
Fr. Thomas Keating

“We live such separate and often quite removed lives. Yet behind all this seeming separation a deeper unity anchors everything. This is one of the powerful intimations of the great religious traditions. The ideal of community is not the forcing together of separate individuals into the spurious unity of community. The great traditions tell us that community somehow already exists. When we come together in compassion and generosity, this hidden belonging begins to come alive between us.”
John O’Donohue

“The ultimate thing is that we build community not on our love but on God’s love, because we really do not have that much love ourselves, and that is the real challenge. . . . It puts us in a position where sometimes natural community is very difficult. People are sent here and there, and often very incompatible people are thrown together. Groups of people who would never have chosen to be together in an ordinary human way find themselves living together. . . . This is a test of faith. This puts God’s love to the test and it is meant to. . . . It isn’t just a question of whether you are building community with people that you naturally like, it is also a question of building community with people that God has brought together.”
Thomas Merton

“Love is shown more in deeds than words.”
Iganatius of Loyola

“If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.”
1 Corinthians 13:2

MY PRAYER today is for unity, that we might provide a home for others in ourselves, and find a home for us in them.   I look at the picture of the hive below, and I think how God has already, with great care and intention, prepared a home for all of us, and it is up to the community, to follow through God’s plan, of acceptance, inclusion, grace and love.    Today I pray that in the words of John we would, not just love ‘with words or speech, but with actions and in truth.’  Demonstrating the love to which God has pledged himself to us, both in this world and the world to come.

These are drawn from daily prayers and reflections I write for my Chaplaincy colleagues.