{"id":17595,"date":"2018-12-13T09:27:35","date_gmt":"2018-12-13T14:27:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=17595"},"modified":"2018-12-13T09:34:28","modified_gmt":"2018-12-13T14:34:28","slug":"contemplation-week-1-a-prayer-for-living-and-dying","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=17595","title":{"rendered":"Contemplation: Week 1;  A Prayer for Living and Dying"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Contemplation: Week 1<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>A Prayer for Living and Dying<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Thursday, December 13, 2018<\/strong><br \/>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/g02mOpdNDtY\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><br \/>\nA friend and former CAC Board Member, Susan Rush, has served many years on hospice and palliative care teams. She has also worked closely with Contemplative Outreach, an organization founded by Thomas Keating and others to renew the Christian contemplative tradition by teaching Centering Prayer. She reflects on the gift of this practice, which she says is key to spiritual resilience:<br \/>\nA wise person once said, \u201cFind a spiritual practice and do it as if your life depends on it.\u201d In my case, that practice is Centering Prayer. Centering Prayer is a prayer of intention, a prayer of consent, a prayer of surrender. It is a prayer that allows us to touch the Divine Ground of our Being, a prayer that helps us see our true self and get a glimpse of the Love that lives within us and in all creation. It is a prayer for living and a prayer for dying.<br \/>\nOne comes to the practice of Centering Prayer with only one intention\u2014to consent to God\u2019s presence and action within. Because of that intention, commitment to the contemplative journey through a daily practice of Centering Prayer involves more than just setting aside time to pray; it also means opening ourselves up to a conversion of our will and total transformation.<br \/>\nWhen we first start Centering most of us are amazed at how busy our minds are. The silence we long for eludes us. We can\u2019t hear God. But as we continue to practice\u2014time and time again letting our thoughts go and returning ever so gently to our intention\u2014we realize that this is all an Ultimate Mystery and requires a graced trust. With committed practice, gradually we are able to embrace the Divine Dwelling within us. There is a knowing, a conviction, that we are with God.<br \/>\nIf we stay faithful to the practice, our false self begins to be dismantled and we live more and more from our center, from that Divine Ground of Being, from our true self. We are transformed. As the beloved Thomas Keating, who spent his life conceptualizing and teaching this prayer form, wrote, \u201cBy consenting to God\u2019s creation, to our basic goodness as human beings, and to letting go of what we love in this world, we are brought to the final surrender, which is to allow the false self to die and the true self to emerge. The true self might be described as our participation in the divine life manifesting in our uniqueness.\u201d . . . [2]<br \/>\nI once heard a patient say that her dying process was an \u201cego-ectomy.\u201d The contemplative life through the practice of Centering Prayer can be an ego-ectomy, too. We come closer to our dying every day of our living, so let us live our lives to the fullest, for God\u2019s sake. Let us do our spiritual practice as if our lives depended on it\u2014because they do. Let us welcome our ego-ectomy through the dismantling of the false self now\u2014in life\u2014in order to experience each day as a sacred gift.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Contemplation: Week 1 A Prayer for Living and Dying Thursday, December 13, 2018 A friend and former CAC Board Member, Susan Rush, has served many years on hospice and palliative care teams. She has also worked closely with Contemplative Outreach, an organization founded by Thomas Keating and others to renew the Christian contemplative tradition by [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17595"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17595"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17595\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17598,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17595\/revisions\/17598"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}