Discovering Your Senses

After closing your eyes, be aware of your eyes as they rest behind your eyelids. Feel them resting in their places. What do you know about your eyes? Besides the look of them, their color, shape, and size, what do they see? What do they avoid seeing? What have they helped you to discover in your life? How might you reverently use them during the day to discover what is around you?

After closing your eyes, be aware of your ears resting at the sides of your head. Feel them silently in their places. What do you know about your ears, your hearing? Besides size and shape, and acuteness or lack of it, what do they hear? What do they avoid hearing? What have they helped you to discover in your life? And how might you reverently use them during the day to discover what is around you?

After closing your eyes, be aware of your mouth, and of your tongue, your teeth, and the inside of your mouth. Feel them silently in their places. What do you know of your sense of taste? Is it related to your taste in general? What has your taste helped you to discover? How might you reverently use your taste during the day, especially concerning food and drink to discover what is around you?

After closing your eyes, be aware of your nose, and of your nostrils, and the air coming in and being exhaled. Feel your nose as it gently breathes in and out. What do you know of your nose besides its size, its shape, and whether you like it or not? What has your nose helped you to discover? How might you reverently use your nose during the day, especially in its activity of helping you breathe, to also help you in discovering what is around you?

After closing your eyes, be aware of your fingertips, and of the soles of your feet. Feel the surface of your fingertips are touching; feel the shoes or stockings or surface touching your feet. Try to discover where else on the surface of your skin you are responding to the sense of touch; be aware of your clothing on your shoulders; the feeling at your waist. What do you know of your sense of touch? Do you use your fingertips to sense fully the thousands of different surfaces they touch each day? How might you reverently use your sense of touch to discover the things and people you will contact today?

At the end of fifteen or twenty minutes, take another sixty seconds to be attentive to your breath. Then gently and slowly open your eyes and conclude with either a spoken word such as “good morning” or “amen,” or with a gesture to the mystery within you as an act of thanksgiving.

Invitation to Breathe

Guided meditation for a group. Start with an invitation to close eyes.
  • Where did you wake up today?
  • How did you wake? Was it the sound of an alarm or perhaps morning light? What reaction did you have to the awakening stimulus?
  • What feelings came to you as you laid there?
  • As you began your day, what attitude did you hold: excitement, gratitude, dread, happiness?
  • What did you first eat today? Remember how that food tasted. How did it make you feel?
  • Were you outside at all today? How did the air feel? What was your response to the weather?
  • Think about the people you saw today. The conversations you engaged in, and those you may have avoided. What did you gain from them? Were you inspired, saddened, relieved, disappointed, frustrated, uplifted?
  • Were you alone at all today? What did that time look like? What feelings came to you? Did you fill that time with media, literature, silence? Were you able to listen to yourself?
  • Perhaps this is the first moment you have had to yourself all day, sitting with yourself. How do you feel? What feelings have you brought with you to this space?
  • Are those positive feelings of joy, presence, solidarity, love? Or are you experiencing something negative: frustration, discomfort, stress?
  • Are you breathing?
  • Breath.
  • Notice your breath. Whatever you have been through today, this week, this year, hold it in your mind, then breathe it in. Now let it go. Again breath in. And let it go.
  • Feel yourself here and now. Feel the freedom of the present moment. The simple joy in feeling your breath, your limbs and your heart.
  • Without opening your eyes, feel the presence of those around you. Know that we are all bound by this moment.
  • Breath in… and out.
  • When you are ready, open your eyes and enter the space.

To Have Hope

By the Missionary Sisters of St. Charles Borromeo, Honduras

To have hope
is to believe that history continues open to the dream of God and to human creativity.

To have hope
is to continue affirming that it is possible to dream a different world,
without hunger, without injustice, without discrimination.

To have hope
is to be a messenger of God, tearing down walls, destroying borders, building bridges,

To have hope
is to believe in the revolutionary potential of faith.

To have hope
is to leave the door open so that the Spirit can enter and make all things new.

To have hope
is to believe that life wins over death.

To have hope
is to begin again as many times as necessary.

To have hope
is to believe that hope is not the last thing that dies.

To have hope
is to believe that hope cannot die, that hope no longer dies.

To have hope
is to live.

 

The Missionary Sisters of St. Charles Borromeo is a Catholic religious order that was founded in 1895. This prayer can be found in God’s Good Earth: Praise and Prayers for Creation (2018, edited by Anne and Jeffrey Rowthorn). 

The Romero Prayer

By Ken Untener 

It helps, now and then, to step back and take the long view.

The Kingdom is not only beyond our efforts; it is even beyond our vision.

We accomplish in our lifetime only a fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work.

Nothing we do is complete, which is another way of saying that the kingdom always lies beyond us.

No statement says all that could be said.  No prayer fully expresses our faith.  No confession brings perfection.  No pastoral visit brings wholeness.  No program accomplishes the church’s mission.  No set of goals and objectives includes everything.

This is what we are about.

We plant the seeds that one day will grow.  We water the seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise.  We lay foundations that will need further development.  We provide yeast that produces effects far beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.  This enables us to do something and to do it well.  It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest.  We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker.

We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.

We are prophets of a future not our own.

Ken Untener was a Roman Catholic bishop in Saginaw, Michigan. 

Two Hands of Nonviolence

By Barbara Deming

The two hand of Nonviolence metaphor comes from the writings of the late Barbara Deming, a feminist writre and activist. In her book Revolution and Equilibrium, Deming’s metaphor of the two hands underscores the creative tension that fuels both interpersonal transformation and social change.

With one hand we say to one who is angry or an oppressor, or to an unjust system, “Shop what you are doing. I refuse to honor the role you are choosing to play. I refuse to obey you. I refuse to cooperate with your demands. I refuse to build the walls and the bombs. I refuse to pay for the guns. With this hand I will even interfere with the wrong you are doing. I want to disrupt the easy pattern of your life.”

But then the advocate of nonviolence raises the other hand. It is raised out-stretched – maybe with love and sympathy, maybe not – but always outstretched with the message that, “No, you are not the others; and no, I am not the others…” With this hand I say, “I won’t let go of you or cast you out of the human race. I have faith that you can make a better choice than you are making now, and I’ll be here when you are ready. Like it or not, we are part of one another.”

 

Barbara Deming was an American feminist and advocate of nonviolent social change in anti-war and women’s movements. 

To My Daughter Kakuya

By Assata Shakur

i have shabby dreams for you
of some vage freedom
i have never known.

Baby,
i don’t want you hungry or thirsty
or out in the cold.
And i don’t want the frost
to kill your fruit
before it ripens.

i can see a sunny place—
Life exploding green.
i can see your bright, bronze skin
at ease with all the flowers
and the centipedes.

i can hear laughter,
not grown from ridicule.
And words, not prompted
by ego or greed or jealousy.

i see a world where hatred
has been replaced by love.
and ME replaced by WE.

And i can see a world
where you,
building and exploring,
strong and fulfilled,
will understand.
And go beyond
my little shabby dreams.

 

Assata Shakur is an American political and civil rights activist who was a member of the Black Liberation Army (BLA). 

Let America Be America Again

By Langston Hughes

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.

O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!

 

Langston Hughes was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist, and an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance. He made the African American experience the subject of his writings. 

radical gratitude spell

by adrienne maree brown

a spell to cast upon meeting a stranger, comrade or friend working for social and/or environmental justice and liberation:

you are a miracle walking
i greet you with wonder
in a world which seeks to own
your joy and your imagination
you have chosen to be free,
every day, as a practice.
i can never know
the struggles you went through to get here,
but i know you have swum upstream
and at times it has been lonely

i want you to know
i honor the choices you made in solitude
and i honor the work you have done to belong
i honor your commitment to that which is larger than yourself
and your journey
to love the particular container of life
that is you

you are enough
your work is enough
you are needed
your work is sacred
you are here
and i am grateful

 

adrienne maree brown grows healing ideas in public through her multi-genre writing, her music and her podcasts.

Wishful Thinking

By Alexis Pauline Gumbs

dedicated to the black women at Duke and North Carolina Central
Universities and you

1. you wake up each day
as new as anyone
there is no reason to assume
you would be supernaturally strong.
there is no reason to test your strength
through daily disrespect and neglect.
you don’t need to be strong.
everyone supports you.

2. if you say ouch
we believe that you are hurt.
we wait to hear how we can help
to mend your pain.

3. you have chosen to be at a school,
at a workplace, in a community
that knows that you are priceless
that would never sacrifice your spirit
that knows it needs your brilliance to be whole

4. your very skin
is sacred
and everything beyond it
is a miracle that we revere

5. we mourn any violence that
has ever been enacted against you.
we will do what it takes
to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.
to anyone.

6. when you speak
we listen.
we are so glad that you
are here, of all places.

7. other women
even strangers
reach out to you
when you seem afraid
and they stay
until peace comes

8. the sun
reminds everyone
how much they love you.

9. people are interested
in what you are wearing
simply
because it tells them
what paintings to make.

10. everyone has always told you
you can stay a child
until you are ready to move on

11. if you run across the street
naked at midnight
no one will think
you are asking
for anything.

12. you do so many things
because it feels good to move.
you have nothing to prove
to anyone.

13. white people cannot harm you.
they do not want to.
they do not do it by accident.

14. your smile makes people
glad to be alive

15. your body is not
a symbol of anything

16. everyone respects your work
and makes sure you are safe
while doing it

17. at any moment
you might relive
the joy of being embraced

18. no one will lie to you,
scream at you
or demand anything.

19. when you change your mind,
people will remember to change theirs.

20. your children are safe
no one will use them against you.

21. the university is a place where you
are reflected and embraced.
anyone who forgets how miraculous you are
need only open their eyes.

22. the universe conspires
to lift you
up.

23. on the news everynight
people who look like you and
the people you love
are applauded
for their contribution to society.

24. the place where knowledge is
has no walls.

25. you are rewarded for the work you do
to keep it all together.

26. every song i’ve
ever heard on the radio
is in praise
of you.

27. the way you speak
is exactly right
for wherever you happen
to be.

28. there is no continent anywhere
where life counts as nothing.

29. there is no innocence that needs your guilt
to prove it.

30. there is no house
in your neighborhood
where you still hear screams
every time you go
past.

31. no news camera waits
to amplify your pain.

32. nobody wonders
whether you will make it.
everybody believes in you

33. when you have a child
no one finds it tragic.
no map records it as an instance of blight.

34. no one hopes you will give up
on your neighborhood
so they can buy it up cheap.

35. everyone asks you your name.
no one calls you out of it.

36. someone is thinking highly of you
right now.

37. being around you
makes people want to be
their kindest, most generous selves.

38. there is no law anywhere
that depends on your silence.

39. nobody bases their privilege
on their ability to desecrate you.

40. everyone will believe anything you say
because they have been telling you the truth
all along.

41. school is a place, like every other place.
no one here is out to get you.

42. worldwide, girls who look like you
are known for having great ideas.

43. 3 in 3 women will fall in love with themselves
during their lifetime.

44. every minute in North Carolina
a woman embraces
another woman.

45. you know 8 people
who will help you move
to a new place
if you need to.

46. when you speak loudly
everyone is happy
because they wondered
what you were thinking about.

47. people give you gifts
and truly expect nothing
in return.

48. no one thinks you are
over-reacting.

49. everyone believes
that you should have all
the resources that you need,
because by being yourself
you make the world so much
brighter.

50. any creases on your face
are from laughter.

51. no one, anywhere, is locked in a cage.

52. you are completely used to knowing what you want.
following your dream is as easy as walking.

53. you are more than enough.

54. everyone is waiting
to see what great thing
you’ll do next.

55. every institution wants to know
what you think, so they can find out
what they should really be doing,
or shut down.

56. strangers send you love letters
thanking you
for speaking your mind.

57. you wake up
new
as anyone.

 

Alexis Pauline Gumbs penned these words of affirmation in April, 2007, but they are helping her achieve her dreams in the present. She is a radical feminist, artist, and media activist who spreads knowledge, healing, and empowerment.