Preparing for Advent: A Guided Meditation
Contemplative at Home
A 13-minute guided meditation to help you settle on how you will observe Advent this year. If you're not quite sure what your advent observance will look like this year, or how you will make time to fit prayerful reflection into the busy month of December, or how to balance the sacred time of waiting with the jolly buzz, let me accompany you as you pray through these questions. This guided intention-setting meditation came to me after I listened to this conversation with Tish Harrison Warren, . I commend it to you. Contemplative at Home has meditations to accompany you throughout...
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Steadfast Love : Lamentations 3 : Guided Meditation
Contemplative at Home
A 11-minute audio guided meditation with mindful breath awareness. The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, God's mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning Great is Thy Faithfulness. All blessings as you pause with these profound verses. May they be new to you as you pray. Lissy offers guided meditative prayer - space to slow down and listen to the truth that is being born out of God's love for you today - drawing on Ignatian spirituality and at times, Lectio Divina. Sign up for Lissy's newsletter "" or join our Facebook group You can support the show by...
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The Interior Castle: The First Dwelling: Lectio Divina
Contemplative at Home
A 19-minute audio guided meditation with text from Mirabai Starr's translation of The Interior Castle. In this meditation I invite you to pray with the wisdom of St Teresa of Avila. Listening prayerfully to the text, you are invited to ask: How is the Lord speaking to me in these words? Teresa was given a picture of her inner self, her soul, as mansion, a palace, with many rooms. At the center of this palace is the holy of holies, a place where the Holy One dwells, abides, resides. The text we pray with is this: "Always visualise your soul as vast, spacious, plentiful. This...
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What are we to do?: John 11:45-54: Lectio Divina
Contemplative at Home
A 22-minute audio guided meditation in John’s Gospel, John 11:45-54, using Lectio Divina. In this meditation on John’s Gospel, we consider the variety of responses people made to the radical and astonishing life that Jesus brought. I invite you to consider the ways you might resonate with those who responded with control, as well as the ways you resonate with those who responded with openness. Breath Awareness: If you have any heart issues or if you are pregnant, it is not advised to hold your breath, so please do not pause between the inhale and exhale for a length of...
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We Are One: John 17: Lectio Divina
Contemplative at Home
A 17-minute audio guided meditation in John’s Gospel, John 17:1-4, 10-11, 13, 23, 26, using Lectio Divina. In Jesus' final prayer/teaching before he arrested, in John's Gospel, there is both a summary and climax of the primary messages of John. These messages include: the intimacy or one-ness that exists between Jesus and the Father, the invitation to all Jesus' followers into this Divine Intimacy and Love, and Jesus' great desire that his followers will know the joy of living in this relationship. I hope that you hear the invitation, afresh, to you. You are invited into Love...
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Reflecting on Your Relationship With Christ: John 16:16-27: Guided Meditation
Contemplative at Home
An 18-minute audio guided meditation in John’s Gospel, John 16:16-27, with questions for reflection. This meditation takes on a slightly different pattern as we allow the text to open up questions for our spiritual journey. Firstly we see how Jesus prepares his disciples for his departure, for a radical shift in their relationship to him. All enduring relationships go through multiple stages of change and development. Some relationships grow, some relationships atrophy. Sometimes what feels like crisis or loss is actually a movement towards growth, a deepening development. Secondly...
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The Spirit of Truth: John 16:7-13: Lectio Divina
Contemplative at Home
A 21-minute audio guided meditation in John’s Gospel, John 16:7-13, using Lectio Divina. John 16:7-13 "Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Advocate will not come to you, but if I go, I will send him to you. 8 And when he comes, he will prove the world wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment: 9 about sin, because they do not believe in me; 10 about righteousness, because I am going to the Father, and you will see me no longer; 11 about judgment, because...
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Love One Another: John 15:12-17: Lectio Divina
Contemplative at Home
A 17-minute audio guided meditation in John’s Gospel, John 15:12-17, using Lectio Divina. In this meditation on John’s Gospel, I invite you to join me in taking a ‘long, loving look’ at a few verses of text, beholding the words as living, shimmering, life-giving containers which hold endless layers of wisdom, mystery, beauty and truth. Just for these few minutes, I invite you to leave your dogma, your creed, your thoughts, and your rational mind aside, and become present to your deeper self, your true self or essential self. I invite you to a way of unknowing, a place of...
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Imagining The Vine and The Branches: John 15:1-11: Imaginative Contemplation
Contemplative at Home
A 21-minute audio guided meditation in John’s Gospel, John 15:1-11, using Imaginative Contemplation. We continue our series in John 15 with an imaginative contemplation on the vine and branches, exploring the notion of abiding in God. Imaginative Contemplation invites us to see the scripture in new ways, to attend to it with different parts of our mind and heart so that the Lord might reveal fresh insights through it. Imaginative Contemplation is a gift of Ignatian spirituality. This is the third of three meditations on John 15 for July 2024, and probably my own favourite. I...
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Abide: John 15:5-11: Lectio Divina
Contemplative at Home
A 20-minute audio guided meditation in John’s Gospel, John 8:12-20, using Lectio Divina. "Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit." "Abide in me." "Abide in my love." "I have said these things so that my joy may be in you, and your joy may be complete." This meditation is in the second half of Jesus' sermon on the vine and the branches. All blessings as you pray. offers guided meditative prayer - space to slow down and listen to the truth that is being born out of God's love for you today - drawing on Ignatian spirituality and at times, Lectio Divina. Sign up...
info_outlineA 19 minute audio meditation with John 7, verses 14-18 and 25-31, using Lectio Divina and breath work.
In John 7, the public opinion of the Rabbi Jesus is becoming fraught, with many following, many criticising and others wanting him out of the way.
In todays text Jesus has made his way to Jerusalem for the festival of booths, but has come quietly, on his own, without an entourage or public entrance. In the middle of the festival he stands up and speaks and many are moved by his teaching.
What John reports here is around Jesus' authority, which is very much under scrutiny by those present (and presumably by those amongst and for whom John was writing, decades later).
Jesus reasserts, as he does throughout the book of John, that he is from and of the Father, that he speaks not his own words but the words of the One who sent him, for the glory of the One who sent him.
I am revisiting Teresa of Ávila at the moment, and her teaching takes us to contemplation of the great mysteries of the Divine indwelling in our deepest selves, and the profound union with God of the soul in its most interior places. I can't help but read this text with that in mind. Jesus is entirely centred in and confident of the profound one-ness between himself and the Father.
In verse 18 he talks about what is true and false in a person, and Thomas Merton, a modern contemplative teacher, talked about the true self and the false self. To Merton the false self is the ego attachments to success, power and status. The true self is the deep, inner, soul-dimensions of the self where I am free to give and receive love purely, where I experience and rest in my belovedness.
Perhaps these thoughts will enrich your reading of the text. May you receive from this meditation whatever it is our Lord would offer you.
All blessings.
Contemplative at Home offers guided meditative prayer - space to slow down and listen to the truth that is being born out of God's love for you today - drawing on Ignatian spirituality and at times, Lectio Divina.
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All music by Pete Hatch.