Invested in Faith – Week 2
Calm in chaos
Musical interlude
I need thee every hour
By Annie S. Hawks and Robert Lowry
Performed by Girl Named Tom
Arranged with Lucas Morgan
Listen now
(via YouTube)
Words to ponder
“Hope” is the thing with feathers
By Emily Dickinson
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.
This poem is in the public domain.
Stories of hope and action
Remembering that we are surrounded by good and that we can make a difference.
- Brooklyn landlord cancels rent for hundreds of tenants
- Working out at home
- Praxis Funds join international investor coalition addressing coronavirus crisis
For further reflection
Over the coming weeks, we are partnering with a sister organization, Herald Press, to offer a chapter of one of their devotional or inspirational books for those who have a bit more time to spend in reflection.
Too Reactive to Receive
Two contemporary teachers of contemplative prayer offer us two helpful, but quite different, pictures of what it looks like to pray today. Both pictures will help us consider the influence of thoughts and emotions in our attempts to be present and aware of God.
Martin Laird writes about the movement of our thoughts from reactive mind to receptive mind to the peaceful awareness of God with what he calls luminous mind. Many of us begin praying in a state of reactive mind. When I have been engaged in social media, especially after replying to combative comments, I have very much felt the burden of reactive mind as I process ideas, struggle with anger or disappointment, and analyze my over analyzing. Laird suggest that reactive mind feels a bit like being trapped in a phone booth with a bee. We feel agitated, fearful, and on high alert, reacting in the moment to the perceived threat before us. Perhaps the good news is that the bee is easily avoided if we know how to depart form the phone booth and disengage from our thoughts. Nevertheless, if we carry social media with us on our smartphones and other devices wherever we go, our reactive minds will have no shortage of material to work with since we have locked ourselves in the reactionary phone booth - and unlike a certain police call box, this booth is not bigger on the inside. We'll remain in the phone booth, swatting furiously and never seeing the emptiness of these thoughts. In relation to the false self, Laird notes that those who leave behind reactive mind are also leaving the thoughts bouncing around that are "generating story upon story to such an extent that we derived a sense of identity from our tightly-wound world of thoughts. Or... we derived a sense of identity based on what we thought others must be thinking of us."
Be well, be renewed, be at peace.
From all of us at Praxis Mutual Funds