Daily Signet

May our sacred history be enlivening. 
May our margins be wide enough for illustrated lettering
and our words deep enough to cast shadows. 
Visit, O Holy Spirit this dedicated company: 
create worlds, virgin births, miracles within us. 
Stay with us through the night. 
Through the silence, 
quicken, rewrite, edit again the living word. 
Guide again the logos, 
the delicate dance of material and immaterial, 
of words that will make visible that which is invisible, 
of words that will speak the unspeakable. 
Inspire our hearts and minds with the breath that is eternal.
May all that is timeless be quickened within us.                                            

Teri Martin

On This Day…

Winter Solstice: nights begin to grow shorter as the sun enters Capricorn

St. Thomas the Apostle

Benjamin Disraeli (First Earl Beaconsfield) born 12-21-1804 in London: conservative politician, twice Prime Minister for Queen Victoria, and author of novels Endymion, Vivian Grey and Sybil. Died 4-19-1881
Quotes: “The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches but reveal to him his own.” "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

Daily Signet

We hear the call.
A birth into death that a star can be born.
The death of a way that a way can be shown.
And that which is born shines out over the stable
where there is no where or no how or no why
it just shines—shining as the world’s chance to be.
The ascended light
hovering over the descended spirit.

Lead us on, oh Christmas Star. 
Lead us on, oh Light, from death!

Benjamin Martin

Daily Signet

….When you’re dying, what do you know for sure and will bet your soul that you have a certain answer? Nothing. Admit it. Nothing. You began in mystery; you lived through mystery by answers that never survived you. Now you die in mystery.  Praise be to the mystery. Glory be to the mystery. In ever end, it wins from behind its cloud of unknowing.

Answers? No. Answer? No. Always let them go except for the nano moment you found use for them. Can you remember your answers from age 16, age 30, age 50?  All past and passed.

….I live by my choices, create my life and am responsible for them, but none of them are answers. They are another breath in my breath of life. I live by the Holy Spirit that gives my breath and so gives me life—especially breath of the spirit as well as breath of my body.

Breath of the Spirit. Breathe it. Nano now.

….Go fully conscious, in the mystery. Embrace it. Belove it and listen. See. Push your ego out of your way; never let it guide you, counsel you, never let it command you. Then you will be one with the Holy spirit within. Come here to breathe it in. Come to breathe spirit where it lives. Feast around the table and let your ego serve you. Let the Holy spirit guide you.

In the blessed new year, there are only nano nows of great riches waiting in the mystery and this is paradise.                                                                                                                   

William Boast

Daily Signet

Tis a season when the boundaries grow thin between kairos, deep time, and chronos, linear time, between the possible and the impossible. It’s a season of pondering; when words point, but can never explain—when truth rings in bells, flickers in candlelight, is carried in the fragrance of evergreen. Tis a time to ponder the mystery of the dance between life and death called “incarnation”—of words made flesh, of gardens, Gethsemane and Eden. It is a time where what cannot be, is and where what cannot merge, does: past and future, transcendence and immanence, the womb and tomb. 

During this time of signs and wonders, I can’t help but ponder the import of Christuman and its significance in our lives. Tis the season to open our inner eyes and look up into our soul’s December night sky where a star stands over us and we know that the Holy Spirit is still at play in the world. That we, like Simeon, the old servant of the Temple of Jerusalem to whom Mary presented the Christ child, are witness to the presence of a child of the spirit in our midst, a child we call Christuman. In this season of hope, this child of the spirit announces that within each of the most ordinary of moments is the potential for the extraordinary: that in this matter-of-fact world, we can grow soul that matters.  

As did Mary listening in astonishment to the pronouncements of Gabriel, we may ask, “How can this be?” How can we believe that in the midst of so much ordinary, that such extraordinary can occur?  Christuman is both the source and object of hope and beloving, the belief that God eternally and universally reveals Himself through the Holy Spirit. That just as have been so many who have gone before us, we are called upon to participate in a dispensation of Holy Spirit in our time and place, a dispensation we call Christuman—where a star becomes a world’s chance to be.

Teri Martin

Daily Signet

O Beloved Spirit, 
You are made alive in us 
not through our worthiness 
or by the appeasement of our good deeds 
but through an awakened imagination – 
a full, intercoursing flow of our mater and our star.

Awaken us to unceasing prayer.
Rather than prayers fragmented, 
chopped into corners of time 
subject to the invasion of the urgent.  
Instead, may we find unceasing prayer 
and secure timeless days 
though there be endless waves of too much to consider 
and too much to repair.

Awaken us to unceasing prayer.
Rather than fragmented outbursts
of wishes and wants.
Instead, may we find unceasing prayer, 
where the valves of our heart flow unconstricted 
in a heartbeat of communion,
the hope we would seek to sustain.   

Awaken us to unceasing prayer.
Rather than fragmented  
and categorized for special occasions,  
instead may we hold to the timeless, 
constantly move from the light of the inner
though the outer be darkened with the constantly unfinished.  

Our days are such that there is no time to take for prayer.
Our only hope – to be in unceasing prayer,
An awakened imagination,
to the unceasing mix of the mater 
of what we must do 
with the star of what is possible 
and in that balance, though all else be askew, 
an unceasing conversation with You.   

Teach us unceasing prayer, O Beloved Spirit. 
Teach us an awakened imagination.  Amen.

Benjamin Martin

On This Day…

Saki (Hector Hugh Monro) born 12-18-1870 in Burma. Writer of mischievous and often macabre stories satirizing Edwardian culture; Chronicles of Clovis, The Unbearable Bassington. Died 11-13-1916
Quotes: “A little accuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation.” “He’s simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed.”

Ossie Davis born 12-18-1917 in Cogdell, Georgia: film, TV, stage actor, director, poet, playwright, author and social activist. Died 2-4-2005 Quotes: “I find in being black, a thing of beauty; a strength; a secret cup of gladness.”
“Struggle is strengthening. Battling with evil gives us the power to battle evil even more.”