Amy at Texas Faith: A cup of coffee and other holy rituals

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Texas Faith: A cup of coffee and other holy rituals

question by Rudolph Bush

Every faith has its rituals. Hopefully these help put us in the mind of being with God and make us more present in our prayer. Our lives have their little rituals too. In a recent article,Rabbi Patrick “Aleph” Beaulier wrote about the ritual of a morning cup of coffee.

The coffee is a pleasure certainly, but it is also a moment set aside, at best, for a little peace, perhaps silence and reflection. These moments apart are important to our lives as people of faith, as people who are trying to draw ourselves nearer to God. We have our rituals in our religious ceremonies too, often freighted or filled with symbolism and intended, in their own way, to draw us away from the run of our thoughts and into the peace we hope faith will bring.

How can our little daily rituals bring us closer to God? How can we make sure that, in everyday moments, we are building our path to the divine?

Read the Panel

AMY MARTIN, President Emeritus – Earth Rhythms
When I wake in the morning and go outside, my first thought is that I live on a planet. I remind myself that it’s where I live, on a spinning sphere of rock zooming around a star, which is zipping around the center of our galaxy, which itself is hurtling through an infinite universe. That is God’s ‘hood. The divine exists everywhere, and we are always at its center.

Join me in letting that be your focus in the morning, even just for a moment, when you feed the birds, fetch the paper or take out the trash. Stop and look up! Does it not make our triumphs and turmoils seem conflated? Does not the majesty of such a divine manifest — this infinite celestial fusion endless creating and recreating itself and forming the atoms that make us in the process — teach us humility?

Leave this world of human travail. Seek the source. Step with me into the light each day and stop our business for 60 simple seconds. Let us look at the Sun and understand that it is our star, at the perfect size and distance to give us the perfect warmth and light. Then feel the Earth beneath our feet that provides air and water essential to life. Know that we, as upward-standing human beings, are the connection nexus.

Stand beneath our star and breathe in with me. Feel your tailbone move slightly downward, tapping into the gravity that tethers us to the world. Pause your breath for a moment and feel in that emptiness the pure potential of life. Breathe out and feel the magnetism emanating from the molten iron core, pass through the Earth, through our bodies. Those magnetic rays infuse us as they shoot out past the stratosphere to form the magnetosphere shielding our planet from the immense amount of cosmic debris the universe flings about. At that moment, know that you are home.

 

 

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Amy Martin is the author of Wild Dallas-Fort Worth: Explore the Amazing Nature of North Texas (https://moonlady.com/amy-martin-selected-to-write-wild-dallas-fort-worth-explore-the-amazing-nature-of-north-texas/), to be released by Timber Press in 2022. She is the North Texas Wild columnist at GreenSourceDFW (https://greensourcedfw.org/) and author of Itchy Business: How to Treat the Poison Ivy and Poison Oak Rash (http://itchy.biz/). She was the senior comedy, magic and cirque critic for TheaterJones, The Aging Hippie columnist for Senior Voice, and the Taoist panel member of the Texas Faith blog of The Dallas Morning News. A journalist for over 40 years, she wrote for Dallas Observer, Dallas Times Herald, Dallas Morning News, Senior Voice, and D magazine, and was contributing editor and columnist for Garbage magazine. She was known by many in North Texas as the Moonlady for her alternative newservice of 15 years, Moonlady News, and served as creator/producer/promoter of the acclaimed Winter and Summer SolstiCelebrations for 20 years.

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