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The Center for Christian Spirituality |
PODCASTGregg Taylor, pastor of Mercy Street, and Jerry Webber are producing a weekly podcast. You can find these by copying this URL into your browser: http://www.mercystreet.org/greggandjerry.cfm
A Lenten Mosaic: Devotional Guide for the Season
The Center for Christian Spirituality and the Chapelwood Communications Ministry are producing a unique Lenten devotional resource to help us move through Lent with intentionality and to stretch us farther into life with God. The guide will be available online at www.chapelwood.org/lent throughout Lent so that you can access it from computers and smartphones.
The material for our Lenten prayer and reflection will be poetry. Each day during Lent, a different poem will be posted on the website, along with suggestions for how you might pray with the poem. I have written the reflection material to coincide not only with the specific poem for that day, but also to help you in your Lenten journey. In addition, each day you can click a link on the website to hear the poem being read aloud. Thus, you have the option of both reading and/or listening to the poetry before you reflect on it and make it a part of your prayer.
Why choose poetry for this holy season? Poetry has a unique way of speaking to the human soul. Good poetry connects with us at a deep interior level. It stirs us, creating images and connections with us that may take several paragraphs or pages of prose. In a sense, the poems in this devotional guide will offer a kind of mosaic . . . various poets and poems, with different themes, each providing a slightly different way of seeing ourselves, our lives, and the life we live in the world. It is as if this mosaic – all these bright pieces brought together in one place – offer us a multi-layered way of reflecting our lives back to us. That’s what good poetry does.
Further, poetry doesn’t say everything there is to say. It leaves blank spaces, holes, windows through which each reader may enter the poem. In a sense, there is a bit of space around each piece of the mosaic. Thus, poems often have as many different meanings as there are people who read the poem. For that reason, you don’t have to have any previous experience reading (or even appreciating) poetry to benefit from this guide. The poetry included in the daily readings should be accessible to everyone, at whatever their level of experience.
So beginning Feb. 22, check www.chapelwood.org/lent for the day’s poem. Listen to the poem read on the audio link. (A limited number of printed copies of the poems will be available for those who cannot access the resource via the internet. These printed copies will be available at the receptionist’s desk in the Chapelwood office area.) Then make it a part of your daily devotions during Lent. The Center for Christian Spirituality is an intentional ministry of spiritual formation and contemplative life. The Center exists to companion with persons and congregations by providing experiential resources for the spiritual journey. |