Call to prayer, A reflection in Turkey

Call to prayer
slicing through the cold
bended knee
bended heart
contrite
God, in your mercy, hear our prayer.

 Gems of your earth
Shining bling
catch the eye
catch the heart

God, in your mercy, forgive us
our greed
our delight in sparkle



our ability to ignore the consequential poverty
the ravaged earth
the exploited labour
the left-behind children

Bended knee
bended heart
Call for prayer
Call for justice
slicing through the air

God, in your mercy, shower your truth upon us.

Antalya, Turkey
Friday 11 March
Response to hearing the call to prayer at 11:15 am while waiting in our coach after a visit to a gold and gemstone showroom.

Thank God for church!
This might be read by numerous voices, responsively or by a single voice. Remember to pause and focus on firstly each attribute of the Spirit and secondly each specific gratitude. After each refrain, take time to consider specific people, activities, worship words, prayers, songs, sermons, and other aspects of church for which you are grateful.




Spirit of Community         
Thank you for church that brings strangers together...
Spirit of Truth         
Thank you for messages that open my/our ears and minds...
Spirit of Trust
Thank you for familiar words of prayer that provide solid grounding for yet another day...
Spirit of Comfort        
Thank you for the old melodies that reside in the core of my/our being...
Spirit of Eternity
Thank you for the new lyrics set to old tunes that connect my/our today with the yesterday of others...
Spirit of Delight         
Thank you for the questions of children...
Spirit of Generosity
Thank you for the opportunity to share when all week I/we’ve been looking for ways to get more...
Spirit of New Life
Thank you for the challenge to change, to act, to be someone better...
Spirit of Power
Thank you for others with whom to work for justice and peace, so together we can make a difference in our world...
Spirit of Love
Thank you for this community we call Church that defies death and promises companions along this journey of life....

Shared as a Morning Prayer during the iChurch annual on-line festival:
http://windermere.urc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/WO16-Ana-Gobledale-Thursday-Morning-Prayers.pdf

Photos taken at Box Hill Baptist Church, Melbourne, Australia

It's a beautiful day!  No one and no situation can take that away.  Open my eyes to the beauty.  Open my ears to the song of birds and the whoosh of leaves in the breeze.  Open my heart to the glory of creation. Thandiwe, my daughter, shared this magnificent photo with me this morning --Bastei, Elbe, Germany by Boris Buschardt .  It says it all.

Prayer

My first prayer some 30 years ago started, "I don't believe in you, but someone told me to talk to you, so I am."  And my life changed.  And so did my practice of  prayer.  I came to believe in a higher power, and I came to believe in the power of prayer.

I'd love to say that I pray without ceasing, but I do, cease that is.  I would love to say that I pray with understanding, but I often pray from a place of not-knowing.  I would love to say that I pray with a deep sense of connection to the Spirit, but sometimes it feels that only a thin thread of hope connects me to anything.

What I can say is that prayer, the openness to connecting with a higher power, shifts my reality and my experience of it. 

When I stubbornly refuse to pray, refuse to ask for assistance or guidance, the world can seem to be pressing in on me, feeling overwhelming and unmanageable.  When I am convinced of a need to go solo, to handle a situation on my own, the experiences of panic and confusion often slide into my head, and if I persistently continue to withhold prayer, I begin to entertain thoughts of using alternative coping mechanisms, usually unhealthy.

When I open myself to spiritual guidance (whatever that actually is), the pressure decreases, and often recedes completely.  The feelings of being overwhelmed and out of control evaporate like so much mist, as a path to follow becomes illuminated before me.  The panic and confusion subside, replaced by trust and confidence, confidence that I am not alone, that I need not fly solo, and that I am held in love.

Rather than starting with a statement of not believing as I did with my first prayer, my prayers today start with the knowledge that I can never fully understand or comprehend this higher power before which I place my prayer, but I do believe.

Pause

Sometimes I forget to breathe, to pause.  I race through life without stopping long enough to take a deep breath. It happens most often these days on the computer; I approach the keyboard for "just a minute" and look up 45 minutes later, sometimes longer.  I know the wisdom of pausing, of looking up regularly, stretching, taking a break, but I push on.  I know the price --  a stiff neck and shoulders, sore arms,  the realization that I no longer have ample time for other things.  Yet...

Learning to breathe.  Learning to pause.
The day is full of opportunities for a deep breathe.
Breathe in.  Breathe out.

Joy

On each of the past five days a moment of pure joy has settled upon me.  Like a cloud, or aura, the sensation is one of being completely surrounded in a brilliance and sense of delight.  Not a surface glee, but a profound sense of rightness and peace.  A moment of knowing that, as the old hymn goes, "All is well with my soul."  -- at least for a moment! (smile).  I may go several weeks without this sense of joy in its purity, so this past week is almost joy-overload!

 First, on Wednesday in the late afternoon, the feeling overwhelmed me as Tod, my husband, and I strolled through Hilly Fields, the park near my home. The perfect moment -- safe, loved, loving, comfortable in my own skin, enveloped by God's love, grounded -- Joy.

Thursday, purchasing two kitchen pots, again with Tod -- like newly weds, looking forward to using them for years, finding just the right ones with glass lids, first pots we'd bought new since our cast iron stew pot in Zimbabwe some 18 years ago, grounded, comfortable and enveloped by love -- Joy.

Friday, skyping with my daughter a continent away, grateful, proud, not wanting anything to be different, loving and loved, enveloped indeed -- Joy.

Saturday, sitting at the end of the pier at Clacton on Sea, part of a church excursion to the seaside with 200 other people, sipping tea, watching the waves of the North Sea, sun streaming through grey clouds, present, grounded, safe, enveloped by love -- Joy.

Today, at our local pub, the Brockley Barge, enjoying a late lunch with Tod after church, enjoying the Olympics with other local folk, not wanting to be anywhere else, grateful and grounded, enveloped by love from others and for others, and touched by God -- Joy.

Gratitude

Gratitude - for all the spiritual teachers I have had.  Right now I'm reading a book from Phyl in Australia.  As usual I cannot recall the title, but it's about doors -- what doors are open, what doors are blocked, what door describes my life.  An image of a garden door, a half-door, I guess it's called a cottage door, comes to mind.  A bright red one.  Open to the sunlight from outside, yet safe from slithering asps in the grass, and hopping toads.  A door closed, but never closing off the possibility of conversation with a neighbour passing by, never blocking out the wafting aroma of the lavender now in bloom.  A comfortable warm image.