These words are offered only as a beginning invitation. Your body will divine its own meaning.
Invocation: (Done only once as a prelude.)
- Offering: Intention/prayer/self-oblation
- Sign of Cross: intersection of horizontal and vertical (at the heart space)
We move from the horizontal to vertical not by achievement or climbing, but by release, surrender, divestment, etc.
The Six Gestures of the Prayer: (Repeated three times in group prayer, but an unlimited number of times otherwise.)
- Being: Prayer Position of Hands Folded: I am here—with openness, sincerity, authenticity, and purity of heart.
- Bowing: I acknowledge that I am standing in, with, and before wholeness and holiness. I bow to the whole of which (whom) I am an integral part. I submit to this wholeness and empty myself into its mystery.
- Opening: We are embodied receiving units of divine energy and spirit. Opening, our capacity to receive this loving energy deepens. In this “open-heartedness,” our hearts get cracked wide open (raising hands up)
- Receiving: Having consented to a process of emptying, there is in us a certain spaciousness to receive. We drink deeply of divine love. Here we are offered not certainty, but a growing sense of our place in the family of things (bringing hands to chest)
- Sharing: But this is not to be grasped or horded. Indeed, it can’t be. It is most deeply held as, paradoxically, it is shared and given away. There is nothing here that can be controlled. Turning from one side to another, arms wide open, look around and see how the seeds of this mysterious love are being scattered and multiplied.
- Grounding: All this is being carried in an embodied being who is connected to both earth and heaven. I am here. I am awake. I am connected. I am home (hands placed down, flat at one’s side, grounding into the earth)