Episcopal Church Foundation Vestry Papers - for leading congregations

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To begin this meditation I invite you to sit comfortably and calmly.

Exhale all tension, worry, pain, and suffering. Inhale tranquility, peace, and harmony. 

Inhale the joy of being all that you are: human beings, grandmothers, mothers, women, daughters, sisters, aunts, friends—givers of life and protection. Your guidance is prudent, tender, and kind, full of love and wisdom for your daughters, sons, and anyone in need of your sage advice. 

Surrounded by the love that emanates from the depths of your souls, feel it vibrating in your entire being. Feel it with an open heart and give thanks for the life around you. Give thanks for your dreams and your strength; give thanks for new life and for your future plans and many wishes. 

Now I invite you to be present, centered, and living this moment in this instant. Don’t think of the past; don’t think of what might come. Focus on the here and now. 

I invite you to look inside your physical self, using your mind. Look at your muscles, the ligaments that connect your bones, the tendons that make your body flexible, internal organs that sustain your life, and the systems that turn food into vital energy.

Look at your skin, feel the legs that carry you through your different paths, the feet that hold the weight of your body, the arms that do your daily tasks, the hands complete with agile fingers that can caress, create comforting nourishment, and express love and tenderness.  

Feel the lips that convey language and sweet lullabies, tender advice, voices of protest. Lips and voices that together with your eyes can be compassionate, fearful, clamoring for justice, asking for forgiveness, seeking the relief of reconciliation. 

Feel the life that flows through your entire body and quietly look at it as a whole. Rock it with tenderness, love, and admiration. Feel how your whole being vibrates with the sacred flame of life, created in the image and likeness of the Creator Spirit. Your body is a perfect, unique creation that radiates its own life and engenders other lives—a creation worthy of being respected for the wisdom acquired from every joy, every tragedy, and every suffering. 

A creation of noble hearts, gentle hearts, generous hearts always ready to provide, to share, to sustain life driving oxygen and pure, clean blood flowing through every nook and cranny of your body. 

Embrace that Creator Spirit that inhabits the deepest part of our beings, the Spirit that gives us the breath of life and heals every wound. It’s a Spirit that lessens every pain and shows us the beauty of waking up full of life.

A Spirit of love that rejoices with our joys and with our victories, a Spirit that delights in seeing us beautiful, strong, loved, brave, generous, and continually starting anew.

A Spirit whose faith and trust in us is strong, a noble Spirit who knows that yes, we can, that it is possible to get up after a fall, that it is possible to be happy. 

I invite you to become part of that inspiring Spirit that promises to never abandon you, a Spirit that renews, transforms, and blesses while curing the ailments of life. Reflect silently for as long as you need to.