Godly Desiring - A mini-retreat
Posted on Tuesday 10th November, 2009
“What do you want?” (Matthew 2021,32, Mark 1051, Luke 1841)
The many faces of our desiring:
looking – liking – wanting – longing – yearning
lusting – burning – aching – groaning
– discerning – willing –
watching – waiting
– acting –
Perhaps we don’t know what we want – really, truly, deeply. Normality for many of us consists in meeting the wants of others or trying to live up to some image of our “better self”, and often we feel defeated by our failure to do either. All this is natural and human – and there’s a lot of it about! – and it can include much goodness, self-denial and generosity. But perhaps this is what the poet (T.S. Eliot) has called “living and partly living”. What might “life abundant” look like if freed from the escapist fantasies most of us entertain when our “partly living” becomes too wearisome?
Prayer can be a way of exploring our desires, it can be a safe place to do this when the going gets rough,it can open out on to perspectives we had never dreamt of. –
“Prayer enlarges our desire until it receives God’s desire for us.In prayer we grow big enough to house God’s desire for us,which is the Holy Spirit.”
(Ann & Barry Ulanov, “Primary Speech: a psychology of prayer”, p.20.)
What do we want? What do we treasure?
“Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”
This day will be an opportunity for noticing what absorbs our heart-energy; for gently exploring what we really want, long for, desire, for yielding to the promptings of God’s desire. Brief reflections will be offered as a way into silence in which personal prayer can find its own language, and the mini-retreat will close with a short act of worship together. Welcome.
Details
Date: 28 November 2009, 14.15 – 20.30 (If you need a lift please let us know)
Place: In church
Price: 120 kr. (Anyone wanting to take part who finds this difficult should have a word with the Chaplain)
Further information: A folder with an enrolment slip can be found in the entrance to the church.
Advent is the time when we look forward to the coming of the One who is called “the Desire of all nations”. What might Christmas be like if that were our desire, too?!
John Nicholson
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