Week #14 E&W

Forty Weeks ~ Sacred Story

Week 14 Encouragements & Wisdom

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E & W reflections are additional helps for your Sacred Story prayer journey. Reflect on them ahead of your prayer exercises for the week or outside of your fifteen-minute prayer windows.

A Beautiful Prayer-Reflection After A Whole-Life Confession

Please be inspired by the consoling words of Symeon, a Church theologian and poet of the eleventh century. I have been trying to convey the hope and consolation we bring to Christ when we take seriously his passion and death and bring him our woundedness, sins and our inability to save ourselves in our confessions.

Julian of Norwich saw in one of her revelations Christ wearing his crown in paradise. There were no jewels in his crown but in place of the jewels were the people whom he redeemed by his cross and passion. We, who are redeemed from our sinfulness and weaknesses by his cross and passion, are his glory — his crown— in paradise. Pray to understand this profound mystery.

We awaken in Christ’s body
as Christ awakens our bodies,
and my poor hand is Christ, He enters
my foot, and is infinitely me.

I move my hand, and wonderfully
My hand becomes Christ, becomes all
of Him (for God is indivisibly whole,
seamless
in His Godhead).
I move my foot, and at once
He appears
like a flash of lightning.

Do my words seem blasphemous?
–Then open your heart to Him
And let yourself receive the one
who is opening to you so deeply.
For if we genuinely love Him,
we wake up inside Christ’s body

Where all our body, all over,
every most hidden part of it,
Is realized in joy as Him
And He makes us, utterly real,

And everything that is hurt, everything
that seemed to us dark, harsh,
shameful, maimed, ugly, irreparably
damaged, is in Him transformed
and recognized as whole, as lovely,
and radiant in His light,
we awaken as the Beloved
in every last part of our body.

Symeon the New Theologian Theologian and poet, 11th century