Some Reflective Prayers

By William Flewelling

The prayer-poems of this collection are spiritual reflections on my engagement with the three readings listed at the top of each reflective prayer. They are intended to invite the reader into a world of engagement with the spirit in the texts. As poems, they are meant to become poets, writing meaning in the engagement of a reader with the words and rhythms and images portrayed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Sep 16, 2011
• ISBN: 9781463416881

William Flewelling

I am a retired minister from the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) living in central Illinois. Led by a request from Mildred Corwin of Manua OH when I arrived there in 1976, I long developed and led a series of bible studies there and in LaPorte IN and New Martinsville WV. These studies proved to be very feeding to me in my pastoral work and won a certain degree of following in my congregations. My first study was on 1 Peter, chosen because I knew almost nothing about the book. I now live quietly in retirement with my wife of 54 years, a pair of dogs and several cats.

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© 2011 by William Flewelling. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 09/13/2011

ISBN: 978-1-4634-1689-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4634-1688-1 (ebk)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011909758

Printed in the United States of America

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Foreword

These reflective prayers as I have called them arose from reading The Prayers of Catherine of Siena early in 1984. Suzanne Noffke, O.P. edited the book for Paulist Press in 1983, noting in her introduction that the prayers appear to follow the readings Catherine heard while attending mass. The prayers were Catherine’s own, written down from her oral prayer by her confessors.

As I reflected on the prayers and on Sr. Suzanne Noffke’s observation, I thought that such an exercise might benefit my reflection over the readings I would be doing for an upcoming service and I began preparing them. That was on 5 February 1984. The selection offered herein begins 1 November 2009, the 1199th sample over the years. I then continue through that prepared for the lections of 22 May 2011, the 1284th prayer meditated over the years.

I have found them very useful for my inner purposes and several of my readers have found them so as well. For example, on 13 September 2008 Lois Richardson offered the response: I am in the gentleness of life now after reading your reflective prayer. I hope you also find them of value.

William C. Flewelling

1 November 2009                                        1199

Ruth 1:1-18              Hebrews 9:11-14              Mark 12:28-34

Against the boundaries of my designed restrictions, you enforce

the deviation of attributed designs that in this passion I

might contemplate the last lost boundary of hope.

And in this contemplation I begin to learn the stay

that ever weighs upon my reticence to stand.

Shall I begin to qualify the lapse of pasts departed through

an elemental folding rue? I find myself re-bound

into the livery of liberty; the bathed anointing mine

for forging in a force field of the welling lisp

you countenance engorges as my hope.

My Lord, I founder in this wasteland, linger lean

and miserable within the caustic crags

of distance, loneliness not yet become a solitude –

enough and ripe enough to stay

the dawdling want that is the way

contriving to conceal my will.

You, Lord, have found my foundering, established grace

to lave my face, provide the winsome trace

that leads inviolably into your reach.

So teach my negligence, my Lord, the steady view of your desire,

that inculcating wisp of wonder etched on lintel, limen, jamb

until I understand the wandering detachment-bond –

my instinct to the fervent flare of love’s design.

There is this categorical conditioning of presence: here

I linger in accepted courtesies beyond the limit set

for ordinary bounding as the zealous tie,

more visceral than I imagine, vital than I own.

You are, my Lord, the instant weal

that circulates within my bole

that I might find the penetrating mist

of your implied ripe satisfaction kissed

in absolute delight.

I do not comprehend myself

in this oblique and abject situation, Lord.

I am confused in swirling sands of desert lands

too incomplete, unmarked and random for

the slightest knowing to divulge.

May I, then, countenance the whole,

discovering in otherness the soul

of my recidivist desire,

the roiling constancy of fire

igniting me into a pyre of love?

It is the love you nurture, wring

unto the arrow-like, the quiver-full design

of ultimate and furied wiles

that I may tarry in an undesigned delight.

Again, again, my Lord, I find the nearness of the kingdom dawns

upon the shadows of my varied ways.

You are the dawning in unknowing as I gasp

to know the greatness of your gentle care,

your infiltration of my insufficiency

that I might rise to contemplate

simplicity in fullness of my life.

I rise, that is, within the cast asperges of your offering

that once for all designed my wary way in rapt delight.

You lure me into bliss, sublime enough to keep

my dalliance in tow and my conditional desires

the reason for my waiting while.

Become, then, Lord, within this glen

the lea of surety, spent wantonly

on prodigal delights, all thine and thine’s.

Amen.

8 November 2009                                       1200

Ruth 3:1-5; 4:13-178              Hebrews 9:24-28              Mark 12:38-44

Immediately lithe, my Lord, you intersperse my thought

with implicating pleas of utter joy. The bonds that keep

from boundaries that brim into the rest

of living lease their energy from fear.

Yet in this categorical revision of delight

you thoroughly impel my wont into the leap

beyond capacity, beyond appearances

into the ecstasy that is the possible and whole.

I hear of widow’s mites, entire subscription to the grace

that evermore insinuates the grasp exceeding grasp,

the reach into impossibility, enormity of life.

I would then qualify my wish and excavate desire

that in the excess of my visceral release

I might succumb to your intrinsic glee,

delighting in the sanctuary molded heavenward,

not made with hands but manufactured by the bliss

and breath of God, the place, my Lord,

where you attend

the fathomless delight of God.

Within the faithful moment care exerts on ordinary lives

you cultivate trajectories of honor and respect,

the answers to the needing by the caliber of debt

that frees the will to circulate in wonder and delight.

So simply pieced, these slight insinuations on the trek

we manage in the currency of life’s immutable designs,

the ones that merely happen though they might

as well have twisted otherwise around

well meaning schemes and yawns and tries,

become the ligaments on wonder, tendons

bonding awe.

And in this mingled chalice, I

discover in recovery the crux of life in flower.

A certain nonchalance surprises me.

You manage, master all the liens on me

and open in the subtle trysts of more or less

remote designs the gracious sweeps

your instant lithe resolve allows.

So here I garner effort, quite enough to find the keep

an open, blithe security for hope to leap and dance,

to prance and sweep real elegance

into your gentle ways’ appeal.

Although the straits of rampant greed, the tightened squeeze

of pride

resort to clamoring to stake the claim preferment wills

against the moot charades that mean so much

in tawdry eyes, so little in the care you open here

there is yet constancy at heart.

My Lord, repeating hearing of the tale

re-finds us settled into pure neglect.

We founder on the brink of pretense, how the lisp

begins to countenance propriety

in singular neglect.

Against these rudimentary entrapments – snarls

that hamper, clinging cockleburs that dig

into the ankles, hold exactingly onto the loss

we own too terribly – we find

yet in this eager will to wait with seeking weal

you leave allowance for endowment toward a joy

eclipsing my ellipsis on a yawn.

Beginning now, my Lord, I ponder over limps

and leases, linger over crimps and creases

all the cramps that clamp my wanton judgements down

into the futile ground too suddenly apprised

of how your fervent graciousness abides.

I stumble, stagger, rise to take surmise

that in this instance, as the mite is whole and spent

in prodigal exaction, I am almost blithe

enough to countenance in eagerness

your rampant joy.

Amen.

15 November 2009                                       1201

1 Samuel 1:4-20              Hebrews 10:11-14, 19-25               Mark 13:1-8

Beyond the edge my expectation posits, Lord, you lead

impossibility into the throes of awe, proposing in my grist

the unimagined magnitude of majesty, the entryway

into the sanctuary of my God.

In this implosion, where dejection mates desire

in silent desperation and arises to aspire beyond all ken,

I dandle mystery in misery, and play

my ordinary sways in swagger time.

Evacuated in this breathless pause

the regulation causes all disintegrate,

dissembling on a vacant, vagrant sigh.

Shall reconstruction on the lam allow the breakage care

enough to reassemble with a dew-like touch

that offers cloture in the sealing of chinks

and cracks and varied crevices that mark

the matrix of my time?

I founder now; I banter over images that shred

impossibility into impassibility and shed the tears

that tear charades into processions bent on bliss.

And all the while I stagger to conceive my trust

where entrance gains the crest of awe

and presence rides the tide applied,

the blood washed from a side to reap

the stagger set beyond the last

rejoinder, past the last restraint

to dally in sublimest bliss.

Now I, my Lord, must countenance this banter at the limes

of my acquaintance, at those last remote, lone

fortified constraints

intending to abide against the restless desert clime.

There is no instance now of knowing how the break

begins to isolate, at once entwining in the deep

of deepest rue, intrigue and promise – life

become the curate of this poignant bliss

I barely understand, my Lord;

I am dependent on your Spirit’s glazing of my gaze

that I might be the comprehended aim

of your insatiable delight.

Old rumors often times recur, devouring passions day

and night. I follow how projected schemes allow

endowance of sclerotic means.

There is in this desire to know manipulation’s kin:

for if the mechanism comes to hand

by revelation, wit or trick.

we may induce supposed ways

and understand the weary cry

of here or there, of now or soon.

Beginning in this crucible of faith, my Lord,

I find my sundering insistence moot.

I bind by foundering resistance roots unknown,

beyond my ken.

What residential mood is this

that rakes the favored images into a heap

like autumn leaves inviting leaping spills

to frolic noisomely about the frills?

Whatever may intrude, I find the desert spare

and bare, an open waste inviting pause

to countenance the stab or awe

in raw condition of the soul

at entrance far beyond my ways.

Your excess, Lord, endows a confidence that rises, stands

upon unwonted brinks, in breathless awe

and saturated bliss. As risen now past stones

of glory glittering delights, I compass life

in awe’s abyss.

Amen.

22 November 2009                                       1202

2 Samuel 23:1-7              Revelation 1:4b-8              John 18:33-37

Immediately clear, this clean intensity becomes the spire

that lingers as the inspiration of a fresh desire,

this meeting with your presence, Lord –

a presence fired with all imagination seines

from raw experience and life.

I understand the undercurrent strife imposes here,

my Lord; I comprehend the elemental grist

that grinds contentment into dust,

allows the dust its dew to mingle into mud

and thence endow the glaze on joy.

I am become the laden lode of your assigned delight.

I would achieve the lapse – perhaps to slide

into the remedy of my remote desires

except for your endowment of the heart

that brings a leaping pleasure to the fore

and lingers in my latent lore.

You, Lord, become the reign that organizes ruth;

your truth entails my longing, leads my pining will

into the shill of anguish lest I fail

and in my flailing miss the aim

that would allow my eyes to glance

thy reigning reach into the deep

recesses of the latent keep I am.

Within this intervening scale of interest, Lord,

I founder in unknowing. Certain is the just

that shines immaculate upon the land

against the all-consuming fire that raids

the iron in hand that clings upon despair.

I founder: yet, my Lord, I learn your implicating joy,

the means of my arising to achieve what I have lost.

You are the cost of my arising, Lord. You are the prize

for my attempt to climb beyond my dread

and learn of yearning in your stead, the bounty I

might yet achieve in wild unknowing’s cleave.

Internally alert, at awesome rest, within the flex

of vexing moments, where the balance takes a stress

and dandles mystery remotely whole –

here, Lord, I would rely upon the tottering remorse

if you would not avail my lingering desire,

ignite my currency of visceral allure.

For all in this composite moment justifies

my least obscurity, my wreaked and abject plea

for something bearing metaphoric glee.

You come, my Lord, to reign

while seining miseries to sain the wreck

I am. By such I rise; by such I prize

and follow fallow ways until

your majesty beguiles my joy

and I am sated, just and whole.

By freedom bound, by joy infused, by wonder wrought,

stagger to the front of your complete fresh consummation

of delight

within the whole of Alpha and Omega, all the tryst

that entertains my viscera and my inclement life.

You infiltrate with leaven, leaven of sublime release –

you infiltrate my sullen mien, exposing me

to regal matters past my ken

yet integrally