Setting the Right Mood

I almost always play music while I read my daily devotions or worship with Morning Prayer. Along with lighting candles, music helps me set the proper mood for my time with God. I frequently play Vox de Nube, a CD that I bought online from the Glenstal Abbey. It has an even more powerful version of this beautiful song based on the Beatitudes. I love that the single female voice, Noirin Ni Riain, lifts above and beyond the voices of the men, almost as if she's singing a separate prayer that wafts towards God.

Blood of Christ

"Blood of Christ, inebriate me."

From the ancient prayer, Anima Christi.

An Ignatian Prayer Adventure

Even though I'm an Episcopalian, I often use Catholic online resources to help me deepen my spirituality and keep me in touch with a worshiping community when I'm far from my own church. I find Ignatian spirituality especially rich. How the Jesuits view God resonates with my own simple faith. This Lenten season I'm using the Ignation prayer adventure as an online retreat for my daily discipline. Using the Examen prayer as taught by St.Ignatius of Loyola, it will help me recognize God's gifts and His presence in my life and help me discern His purpose. My goal is to become what Ignatius calls 'spiritually free.' Free of any worldly attachments that keep me separated from my Creator.

A Lenten Journey

Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. Yesterday Laury asked me if I was giving up anything  for Lent. My reply is certainly not conventional; I don't give things up for Lent. To me, the Lenten season is about discipline, not necessarily about deprivation. I have many bad habits that I could give up, but what I need more are good habits to replace them. Afterall, if the bad habits go away...desserts, excess salt, too much solitaire on the computer...there will be a void. What will fill it? I know that it's supposed to be God who fills those places you empty out, but that doesn't always happen.

So, I choose instead to add a discipline to my daily life, a discipline that reminds me of God's presence and of the journey we're on right now. I choose to use this time to deepen my faith and to connect more fully with God's spirit. I choose to find those things that will grow me from a tightly clenched bud to an open-handed, spiritually filled, spiritually free woman. Like the spring flowers here, I'm on a journey of growth and blossoming. And like these same spring flowers, there will be death and re-birth at the end of the journey...Jesus' death and resurrection, the revitalization of my faith and hopefully, a positive discipline to my life. Blogging regularly here is the first of my Lenten disciplines.

Always We Begin Again...

God nudged me twice this morning! Over coffee, Laury asked me whether I was still posting here at Dona Nobis Pacem. Well...not in several months, I admitted. Then later this morning, I opened an email from a reader in Nova Scotia who just discovered my blog, Melanged Magic. She clicked over to Dona Nobis Pacem as well and in her email provided me with some information about Anglican worship here in the Lot. (She and her husband have purchased a retirement home not far from me after some years of vacationing in the area). Although I've been thinking since I returned here to France that the time was right to revive the blog, I just haven't motivated myself to do so.  Okay, God, I get it. Since Lent is just around the corner, it is, indeed, the appropriate time for a bit of discipline. As St. Benedict says in his Rule..."always we begin again." So, I will. It's nice to know that even saints have to be reminded of that.