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September Newsletter — Sep 10, 2009
Think back, if you can, to a time in your life when you were truly content. (Of course, it’s even better if that time is now!) Perhaps you were using your skills to the fullest, or perhaps you were in love, or perhaps you were simply present to the extraordinary dimensions of everyday experience. How would you describe the sights and sounds of that time? “For one whole year,” says Br. David Steindl-Rast in a new biographical documentary, “I was housecleaner, just sweeping the monastery from morning to night, whenever the work periods were. I remember when the broom would hit the dustpan it sounded like a gong, and that was such a joy…or when I saw the dust furling in a shaft of sunlight – those things were revelations of the day, and I was perfectly happy.” You can watch this three-part documentary through links on Br. David’s video page:
http://www.gratefulness.org/brotherdavid/video.htm
…and get a feel for a life journey at once remarkable and surprisingly simple.
If the quiet peace of this journey captivates you but you are not on the verge of joining a monastery, you will surely enjoy the experience of practicing the monastic hours – meditative cycles that reflect the rhythms of nature and human life – in this six-week, online retreat:
http://bit.ly/ANGELHours
You can get continuing education hours for the course, and a sharing circle allows you to trade ideas with others eager to explore how to make the Hours a fruitful personal practice. If you need added incentive to sign up, bear in mind that A Network for Grateful Living (ANG*L) receives a percentage of each retreat subscription. In this way, you can support our free services, helping make their inspiration available to people in 242 countries, no matter what their income level. This includes ecards, practice sessions, videos, poems and essays, resource links, the gratefulness labyrinth, our calendar, Word for the day, Light a Candle, and much more.
You can begin to get a sense of the scope of this inspiration when you consider that we have now passed eight million candles lit in our chapel on the web!
http://www.gratefulness.org/candles/enter.cfm?l=eng
Thank you for this radiant show of caring for others: those who are ill, those celebrating birthdays, those grieving the loss of loved ones, those who want to deepen their prayer life…. We know from emails we receive that lighting candles is only one part of what happens with this service. In addition, many people go to the candles simply to send loving thoughts to those who wrote concerns there. “I find it amazing,” A.V. in Austria tells us, “that through this website one can send real messages for peace in the world and can refuel strength and energy. Thank you.”
If you have a Facebook account, you can also show your support by becoming a fan of A Network for Grateful Living (ANG*L):
http://bit.ly/ANGELFacebook
What we enjoy most about this new way to connect is something we should have anticipated but that came as a delightful bonus: seeing so many of your faces! It is one thing to mention eight million candles in the abstract and quite another to think of 30,000 unique human beings reading this newsletter with a unity of spirit around receiving life as a gift and sharing that gift with open hands.
Thank you for bringing your own way of expressing gratefulness – to other people, to our Earth, to the Mystery in which we all live and move and have our being – to this place in cyberspace and heart-space at this point in history. We can only begin to glimpse how all of us together are helping turn the world around in a more sensitive and sensible direction, and even just that glimpse is enough good news to fill our cup of gratitude to overflowing.
Blessings,
Patricia and Margaret
on behalf of our ANG*L Webteam
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