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vonda drees

practicing art & faith

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“The portal [to contemplation] opens when word, song, or movement melds with the internal knowing and recognition of those who participate.” —Barbara A. Holmes, Joy Unspeakable, Contemplative Practices of the Black Church

“Contemplative practices can be silent or evocative, still or embodied in dance or shout. Always, contemplation requires attentiveness to the Spirit of God.” —Barbara A. Holmes, Joy Unspeakable, Contemplative Practices of the Black Church

It’s been a long time since I’ve taken notes during worship. I guess you could say I was a like a sheep stuck in a hole. Grateful for a sermon by @pauldrees this morning that lifted me out of the hole, moving my heart, imagination, and hand.

“...facts are not the heart of my need. I need wisdom. The quality that will make clear to me the significance, the relatedness of things that are my daily experience—this I lack again and again. I need wisdom to cast a slow and steady radiance over all my landscape in order that things, choices, deeds may be seen in their true light—the light of the eternal and the timeless. . . . The wisdom of God can flood even the error of my ways and transform my error into a path of light.” —Howard Thurman, Meditations of the Heart, p. 207-208

“I will sing a new song. As difficult as it is, I must learn the new song that is capable of meeting the new need. I must fashion new words born of all the new growth of my life, my mind and my spirit... that all that is within me may lift my voice unto God.” —Howard Thurman, Meditations of the Heart, p. 206-207

“Waiting in the quiet experience of worship I seek the courage, the push of God, to see the true thing in everything with which I am involved. . . . I seek courage to do the true thing that my own life may not be double talk.” —Howard Thurman, Meditations of the Heart, pages 166-167

Winds of Homecoming

After re-watching PBS’s Frontline episode, Yemen’s Covid Cover-Up from last night, I turned to Howard Thurman’s Meditations of the Heart, pages 83-84:

“Always there is the persistent need for some deep inner assurance, some whisper in my heart, some stirring of the spirit within me—that renews, re-creates and steadies. Then whatever betides of light or shadow, I can look out on life with quiet eyes. God is with me.” —Howard Thurman, Meditations of the Heart, p. 48

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