God,
We bring you all of who we are today,
Our whole selves,
From our toes to our heels to our knees to our hip flexors to our spines to our shoulders to our brains to our nose.
We give you these breaths,
We dedicate this practice of presence to you,
Our creator.
May it be pleasing to you,
May it bear fruit in your world.
Let's take a few deep breaths as we settle into this time,
To this space,
To the gift that is the now.
Breathe in,
Breathe out.
Again,
Breathe in,
Breathe out.
We are instruments and vessels,
We are conduits of breath,
Of life flowing with energy.
We are creatures created by the Almighty,
Something far beyond our own understanding.
We are humbled by our smallness.
We are just grains of sand,
We are specks in the universe.
We are inconsequential and yet we matter so much.
We were made with love and with perfect intention and we are wired,
Bent toward God.
But we fight that initial spark of imago dei,
Of createdness.
We try to take hold of the reins.
We try to grasp the steering wheel of our lives and it leads to clenched fists and an obsession with getting,
Having,
Being more.
More than we have,
More than we are.
There is a pursuit of the next shinier,
Better thing.
But today we sit,
We sit in our smallness,
In our humility and we practice contentment.
We practice reaching out with receptivity to the bounty that is right here.
As we enter this next part of our practice,
I invite you to listen to these words of scripture and to breathe into them,
To lean into the promises that we find in the pages of our holy text.
The earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.
These words from Genesis remind us that in the beginning God was in the deep.
God swept over the deep and covers all of creation with tender,
Magnificent,
Breathtaking power and care.
God is mother who tenderly holds and comforts and cradles and nestles and loves.
And God is father,
Strong,
Steadfast,
Mighty.
God is eternally everything that we cannot even fathom.
God is abundantly more than we could ask or imagine and God provides abundantly more than we can ask or imagine.
And so as we sit,
I invite you to contemplate your breath,
Your in-breath and your out-breath,
Knowing that you are drawing breath from the deep,
Deep inside of you,
The recesses of your heart,
The bottom of your lungs,
That place that God gifted us with life flow,
Life breath.
We draw from that deep and we know and we trust that we are covered.
God covers the depths of us with beauty and with wind and with spirit.
Sit now in the depths with God.
Nobel Peace people.
It is so normal any time we sit to practice being present that our minds are busy with things from the past that we have regrets about or are ensnared with memories of.
It's equally easy to be distracted by passing noises or planning mind,
Planning the next thing,
The next part of our day,
The next vacation,
The next week,
The next work appointment.
The gift of this time and of this space is allowing these thoughts to float in to our awareness and to gently,
Firmly acknowledge them and to let them recede.
Always staying anchored in our breath,
The center of our being.
When we get lost in thought,
We can always,
Always begin again coming back to the life force that we find in the rising and the falling of our chest.
Like the eternal promise of the sunrise,
Our breath is always ready to welcome us home,
Back to our bodies,
Back to our direct experience,
To the here and to the now,
To where our feet are planted,
To where our bodies rest.
You may feel a warmth of sensation from your hands resting on your knees or on your lap.
I invite you to locate your awareness and focus on your fingers,
On your hands and that sensation of weight and warmth.
How your hand and your fingers cover that little area of space just beneath them.
How your knee is held by your cupped hand and how your hand is at the same time held by the steadfast level of your knee.
This is the sensation,
This warmth of covering,
The way that God covers us,
The way that we are held by God,
Held by the earth God made,
Held by the hand of another person God has created.
Now I close our practice with a few words from Psalm 42,
Echoing the booming magnificence of the God who made everything.
Deep calls to deep at the thunder of your cataracts.
All your waves and your billows have gone over me.
Sometimes it feels frightening to be unmoored,
To know that we are not in control.
But there is so much confidence that comes in trusting we are held even in the billows and the current,
The ebb and the flow of life echoes the ebb and the flow of the breath in our lungs and God holds us in all of it.
Amen.
