Today’s question: IN PLAY TIME TODAY RISK GETTING LOST. WHAT HAPPENED?
This is Day 28 of the 5-week Lenten journey with The Society of Saint John the Evangelist and their daily meditation on TIME.
See Br. Jonathan Maury on the video (3:10) below, or to leave comments on the Brothers' website, go here. (http://ssje.org/ssje/2015/03/16/play-3-spontaneity)
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Question: IN PLAY TIME TODAY RISK GETTING LOST. WHAT HAPPENED?
Transcript of Video:
Seeing that, as we’re Brothers – monks, dressed in black – one might get the impression, particularly when seeing us in church, that there could be no playfulness here whatsoever, that we’re sad and solemn; we’re talking heads of wisdom and sobriety. But I find, oftentimes, that the liturgy is a time for playfulness, particularly when there’s a spontaneity about it: when we enter into it with a spirit of discovery or exploration, seeing what happens. I think also, in Genesis, when God has created the heavens and the earth, he’s then creating creatures to be companions with the first human, with Adam, and just delighting in what Adam names them – giving them names. And in the liturgy I think we’re kind of – we have the opportunity to create, spontaneously, and see what comes out of it. To see what God is creating in us and around us. And it comes in companionship with others. It’s in the companionship with others.
I think my favorite moments in the liturgy are when there’s something – may catch somebody’s sense of humor in a way that it doesn’t for others, and there’s a spontaneous kind of response that may get my attention back to the fact that when we are ¬– particularly in making Eucharist – we are engaged in a kind of divine act of play, that the Eucharist is an enactment of all that God has done for us. We’re playing creation; we’re playing salvation; we’re playing eternal glory. And I don’t think that’s very far from the kinds of ways in which I played as a child, when I would inevitably be the friar or the monk when we were playing knights or Robin Hood, drawing it all together into a spontaneous act of joy. Losing ourselves in the moment: that’s to play.
-Br. Jonathan Maury
Blessings on our journey to re-order time in our lives,
Agatha