Our Hearts: Week 15 of Ordinary Time
Look: Be of Love (a little) More Careful Than of Everything (four works), Corita Kent (Sister Mary Corita) - Source
Listen: The Greatest Commandment, The Porter’s Gate - Lyrics | Spotify | YouTube
Love Will Never Fail, The Porter’s Gate, feat. Leslie Jordan - Lyrics | Spotify | YouTube
Read: (Sunday) Isaiah 35:4-7; Psalm 146; James 1:17-27; Mark 7:31-37
Readings for the rest of the week*: 1 Samuel 18:1-9; 20:1-42; Psalm 101; Matthew 6:19-24; Matthew 13:1-23; 1 Corinthians 13; 1 John 4:7-21
Pray: Book of Common Prayer, Collect for the Fifteenth Week After Pentecost
O Lord God, grant your people grace to withstand the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil, and with pure hearts and minds to follow you, the only God; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Do: For this middle seven weeks of Ordinary Time, we’ll consider a cycle of God’s love that alternates between permission to love ourselves and the imperative to love our neighbor.
Bobby Gross introduces this week’s chapter: “From the heart flow our emotions, passions, desires and loyalties. From the heart comes our inward character and outward behavior. From the heart springs our love, whether for God or lover or neighbor. So we must attend to our hearts and to the things on which they feed and to which they attach. As our passages for this week suggest, a healthy heart will be marked by loyalty, integrity, light, receptivity and, above all else, love.”
As you meditate on the shape of love from 1 Corinthians 13, choose one facet of love to offer each person you encounter this week (including your own self.)
Related: I published a series of posts meditating on 1 Corinthians 13 during Lent 2018. In it, I examined the various postures and counterfeit postures of love. You can browse that series here: Love & Unlove in the Stories of Lent
*During Ordinary Time this year, I’ll be sharing readings from the excellent devotional guide, Living the Christain Year: Time to Inhabit the Story of God by Bobby Gross. While it’s not necessary to purchase the book to follow along with us, it’s an excellent resource we’ve dog-eared so often the pages are falling out of our copy!