An Eighth Collection of Reflective Prayers

By William Flewelling

These Reflective Prayers are the result of permitting a gentle reading of the lectionary texts for a given service to resonate in me and emerge as a searching engagement of the word with my spirit in a mood of settled joy. The ninety samples are the most recent, in order, at the time of publication.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Feb 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9798823001236

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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© 2023 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.

Published by AuthorHouse 02/15/2023

ISBN: 979-8-8230-0122-9 (sc)

ISBN: 979-8-8230-0123-6 (e)

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Foreword

In late 1983 I bought a copy of The Prayers of Catherine of Sienna and shortly later read it. The editor, Suzanne Noffke, O.P., in her discussion of the text notes that they seem to have come after Mass and reflected the appointed texts for the day. At least that was the impression I carried with me after my reading of the text. In the following season, I began to muse over a prayer response to the texts I use in worship – I have followed the lectionary since about the beginning of Advent in 1973, near the end of my second full semester in Seminary. I began to experiment with the idea of reflecting this way on the texts for 5 February 1984.

The process took root. In those early years, I would spend Tuesday mornings writing first a For Your Quiet Meditation and then a Reflective Prayer for the second Sunday or service ahead. I recall finding the Reflective Prayers emerging quickly and fervently in those times, often overcrowding the page and taxing the creativity of my secretary, Chris Scott, to get them onto the page! [I produced them on a single page, set so as to be kept on the front and back of a single half sheet of paper.] They quickly became a central part of my dealing with the texts as I headed into preparing sermons and liturgical materials for the upcoming services.

After retirement, the schedule of doing these things altered somewhat but the energy evolved in the process did not. I continue to find the form expressive and alive and vital. The discovery of the prayers at the tip of my pencil remains enticing and exciting to me. I slowly read the three texts – the reader can see they are listed at the heading of the prayer form – and let them mull in my heart and/or mind until an opening emerges, one which propels the ensuing lines. The consistent cadence – iambic in rhythm almost always – provides a sort of drum beat to the prayer and the imagery, either directly or indirectly, comes from the texts or the reading of the texts into my consciousness.

By the time I was settling into the prayers as a more or less mature form, certainly by the time I began collecting them in electronic as well as paper files on 1 November 2009, files subsequently published in Some Reflective Prayers and succeeding collections, the prayers were increasingly expressions of the engagement of the texts with me, my devotional center in the context of my engagement with and experience of God.

I have found the metaphors that play with exposing this interaction to me, to the page, to the reader merging and emerging over the years. They recur, of course, and transmute over years into other suggested ways of heart for dealing with God in this sort of context. And they remain personal even as I put them in a place where they may (or may not, as it often proves) come alive to another, either serially or simply as a single event.

I leave these ninety – each of my collections has ended up with ninety samples, that being the number that accidentally landed in that first collection – to the sampling of my readers in the hopes that they leave echoes in the heart that allow their own sources to emerge afresh, recollected embers come to life for you.

William Flewelling

Note: The Prayers of Catherine of Sienna was published by Paulist Press of Ramsey, NJ in 1983. My copy shows it came in the mail on 8 December 1983. I attribute the impetus to Suzanne Noffke’s work; the development of the form here is entirely mine.

O Lord, your Spirit infiltrates ineffably;

and I imply thy thoroughgoing teeming joy

has come to percolate my hidden heart.

Inside the disappointments of this hour,

discouragements that batter so my battened soul,

your gentle, fond caress incites the Deep

to savor your address.

I so know how the naked feeling lies assured

among life’s ill-accustomed ways.

Yet, in the courtesy of shy and latent, subtle pleasures, I

retain my heart with unexpected ease.

Ours is a supple world that, willow like, absorbs

the rancor and the storm

to savor better peace

than bitter hearts can ever know.

Inside the aftermath of afternoons’ ill ease,

when, in the hidden shades a garden plays about,

awareness strains the boundaries of ease

and reaps embarrassment instead.

I knew the underlying leaps of fear

that turn ‘I hid’ into ‘I was induced’

unnecessarily.

But folly is so natural, a bend in time

to situate a sheltered clime

wherein life may pretend.

Pretending is so fable-full, a sliding from the Spirit’s soar

into some fantasy that limps erratically

about the necessary truth.

But no, my Lord, this battened soul,

protecting, as it were, against the throes of peace,

insists it owns a readied mist,

a cautious time of hiddenness.

And, all the while, your Spirit is in style

abjectly current in the inner reaches of despair.

You play that earnest amply, Lord,

so adequate that fear must well deplore.

My Lord, they said you are beside yourself,

quite out of step with those who only know

the landscape of adjusted guile.

They say your Spirit is unclean,

inadequate to dominate the scene.

They speak as if Beelzebul adorn

your inscape haughtily.

My Lord: you yet instill my breath and will,

your Spirit in my midst,

unwitting though I be.

It is as you, inside yourself with peace,

contend with raw affliction here

to settle hope from fear.

Incorrigible as time must be, my Lord,

I entertain your singularity and leap

as joy induces awe, and keep

as incidents must circulate in Spirit’s maw.

Within this thoroughgoing while,

I find my style revamped to hold

the steeping of your joy

in ample days as I employ

your gracious undercurrent sway.

Is there a residue in my decay,

a breach where I may lie away

or stand in isolated plan –

a strait to stay the hour?

I must suppose despair disposes love

what you, as Spirit thrives in love,

unwind, a nurtured soul like mine.

Amen.

As interrupted in my surety, O Lord,

I pass before your witness toward my awkward eyes.

This notice of the evidence that I accumulate

begins the out-of-step derision I assay

within the balance of my heart.

My Lord, you instigate surprise

that I surmise the balance posed

incredibly elusive to my mind.

Or is it, rather, as my heart is rent

by your eluctable designs?

As altogether on the mend, or on the bend, my Lord,

I station your provision for my ilk

in burlap parody of silk.

Construction on the lees

of my residual intent

become the sediment, advised intent

that lures a blessing on my way.

Or so must I imagine my redress upon your flight.

Indeed, I cauterize my eager ways

in order that I may yet contemplate

the subtlety of your desires.

For I am in the place of thy desire,

the nurture of the humble when

you implicate my slight

by sleight of wit

to satisfy your joy.

By your surprise, I resonate afresh on your delight,

enticed by your enticing flight.

I am redundant; yet I stand

for your elusive brand

and, in the consonance of your precise intent.

I dangle mystery as pleasure in your eyes.

Life interviews my wayward days

and leads to answers that confuse good courage with

the urgency of your insistent way.

I qualify my sometimes proposition that I may

again, again survey the work you give

unto the lottery of joy.

For you construe me by your lore,

construct me in coherence with your touch,

conscript me into your unwitting ecstasy.

In every way, the realignment of my wit

plays on the softest common breaths

to infiltrate my wary run, my plight.

Re-figured in perspective on the crest of life,

I am reformulated by your eager will

into the satisfaction of your hope.

My Lord, the pleasure of my ken

is keening on the brink of your desire.

And yet I parry certainty and long to find

awareness to suffice for love.

In all of this dissembling fray, the mystery of your delight,

I linger in confusion as you tease surprise

in break of wayward dawn

upon my late reluctant thoughts.

But no: herein is my increasing play,

the play of overt dancing joy

that subtly, amply amplifies

the uninhabited delight

you breed of me.

And yes: herein the simple doth invite

the pure exuberance of fractal mystery

to master my subliminal desire

and ply my shy retreat

into the modular desire you wreathe of me.

Amen.

Acceptable, the hour of your insistence, Lord.

For I encounter you in your delight. I come

and savor your intensity and presence, all

your standard at the break of sea.

Yet, in my intimate despair, I call.

You rise and stop the waves, define the place,

inserted into boundaries of grace.

And yet I do not understand. I pause and gape.

I flail against inept desires,

the ones that sever mind and hope.

I batter insolence within my heart

and you preside with vigor and desire.

The sea arises; danger plies the Lord’s intent.

And I am nearly swamped with earnest lost