Soothe My Tiredness

So I’d like to do a stilling exercise, a centering prayer with you. And I want to use a prayer written by Ted Loder called – Gather Me Now To Be With You.  

It’s important when we read this prayer together, that you understand the importance of recognizing that we live our spirituality in an embodied place. To recognize an embodied spirituality  is saying that where God is, is in every part of you. And so the place the Spirit intersects is not just your mind, not just your heart, not just in your body, but all those places.  So we read paying attention to what’s going on in my heart, what’s going on in my thoughts, what’s going on in my body, and where I have resonance. And as I do that, I begin to understand that place where the Spirit may be leading.  

So let me read you this prayer- Gather Me Now To Be With You by Ted Loder. And as I read it, pay attention to what is going on in you as you hear these words. I’ll read it twice. 

Oh God, gather me now to be with you as you are with me. 

Soothe my tiredness 

Quiet my fretfulness 

Curb my aimlessness 

Relieve my compulsiveness 

And let me be easy for a moment 

Oh Lord, release me from the fears and guilts which grip me so tightly 

From the expectations and opinions which I so tightly grip 

That I may be open to receiving what you give 

To risking something genuinely new 

To learning something refreshingly different 

Oh God, gather me to be with you 

Now let me read it again, again paying attention to where your own heart or mind find identification or longing. 

Oh God, gather me now to be with you as you are with me. 

Soothe my tiredness 

Quiet my fretfulness 

Curb my aimlessness 

Relieve my compulsiveness 

And let me be easy for a moment 

Oh Lord, release me from the fears and guilts which grip me so tightly 

From the expectations and opinions which I so tightly grip 

That I may be open to receiving what you give 

To risking something genuinely new 

To learning something refreshingly different 

Oh God, gather me to be with you 

Now as we sit in silence, is there a phrase, a word, that you can say silently back to God, expressing what is true, what is honest?

And then within spiritual direction, we would end our time of prayer, and I would ask the person sitting across from me – Where did you find your own place of longing or desire or resonance with any of the things that were expressed in the prayer? And we would begin a dialogue. Whatever they share I will ask and explore – What might that be about?