This week has been a struggle to maintain my usual pace. As I sit here to write this essay, I find myself gazing out the window into the grey sky more than I am completing a sentence. Perhaps it is the surprise I felt at Fall’s arrival. It seemed like she was hiding in the bushes somewhere in my yard and sprung out with her arms flailing. And I don’t have many bushes in my yard, so kudos to her. Nevertheless, I welcome the presence of chilly mornings and the collecting of dust on my cold brew maker. I welcome the slowness of this season as the leaves around me gradually convert from their life-giving greens to dying shades of orange and red. It’s a forced welcoming in some aspect, as I have no power to extend the heat of summer, but I welcome it nonetheless.
In my attempts to embody the practice of the Welcoming Prayer this summer, I have also been learning more about St. Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle through the Center for Action and Contemplation with Jim Finley. If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ve already heard much about St. Teresa, the 16th-century Spanish nun of the Carmelite order and a writer of the mystic tradition. Her work in the Interior Castle addresses how aware a soul is with an awareness of God and what deepening this awareness of one’s soul to the presence of God looks like. I know, that’s a mouthful and it becomes more difficult to describe the further you go. Yet, St. Teresa has much to say about the practice of welcoming; her word, however, is cooperation.
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