Monday, October 4, 2020

The Rev. Anne Williamson

Slow me Down

Last weekend there was a wonderful parish retreat at Camp Merrowvisita…I was not there this year, hopefully next year…but I so appreciated Peter Tarlton’s reflection on the retreat, and hearing again a phrase that Ashley Wade, our Director of Communications and Children’s Music and Ministries, has offered to the staff, as well as on the retreat – ‘slowing down to catch up with God’. As I have pondered and prayed over that phrase this week, I was reminded yet again of the gift of slowing down, the gift of taking time out from the doing just to be. Ashley and I spoke on Friday about the gift of contemplative prayer and I commend to you the discipline of taking time each day to be quiet, to ‘slow down to catch up with God’. For some, in the midst of very busy working and/or family lives, that might seem impossible! But I invite you to use this poem as a meditation to allow you to be still, at least briefly, in the busy-ness of a life filled with doing. But what if illness or accident, or life circumstances, means that there is already too much slowing down? I think we can also be busy ‘doing’ in our minds, even if our bodies are not able to do the doing they once enabled us to do! In this 24/7 world, our minds can be as overactive as our bodies, so whatever age or stage you might be experiencing, I invite you to take time to be; to be in the presence of God and to rest in the Divine embrace.

"Slow Me Down Lord"

Slow me down Lord

Ease the pounding of my heart by the quieting of my mind.

Steady me with the vision of the eternal reach of time.

Give me amid the confusion of my days, the calmness of the everlasting hills.

Break the tensions of my nerves and muscles with the soothing music of the singing streams

that live in my memory.

Help me to know the restoring power of sleep.

Teach me the art of taking MINUTE vacations,

of slowing down to look at a flower, to chat with a friend, to pat a dog,

to read a few lines of a good book.

Remind me each day that there is more to life than increasing its speed.

Let me look into the branches of the towering trees

and know that they grew great and strong because they grew slowly and well.

Slow me down Lord

and inspire me to send my roots deep into the soil of life's enduring values

that I may grow toward the stars of my greater destiny.

Slow me down, Lord

Slow me down

Adapted from a poem by Wilfred A. Peterson