I'm keeping company this Lent with a group of wise women. We're considering courage, from the old French word coeur meaning 'heart'. We're coming together to be a Lenten community that nurtures the practice of living heart-to-heart, asking ourselves what practices will encourage us to resist strategies of invulnerability.
How will we consider our hearts through the metaphor and the meaning of being heart to heart with Jesus as he sets his face to Jerusalem (Luke 9:51-56)? Laying our ear against the heart of the Compassionate One, or standing heart to heart we internalize his pulse. Through the joined beat of our hearts we practice courage in the world.
We read together the wonderful book for children (and adults) The Heart and the Bottle by Oliver Jeffers. And we stepped close to the One who says, Stay with me, through the prayer practice sometimes called Ignatian contemplation.
I invite you to enter listening first to the text and then the words of imagination.
