I just came across a copy of the "intentional vows" I wrote on New Year's Eve, 2016 and still intend/deepen in 2018. Here I offer to anyone who might welcome a wording of intention in her/his own life at this time:
Intentional Vows, 2017 –
During the past few weeks I have again become aware of the vows I made as a young woman, hardly re-visited, taken for granted. During the past week I have delved into what those vows mean to me now, how they “translate”
into my lived reality forty-seven years later. I credit my colleague and friend Diarmuid O’Murchu for his most recent writing on the vows, from which much this expression arises.
Poverty has become for me now a vow of Mutual Sustainability and whatever contributes to
it. I make more conscious choices with a sense of the Whole of creation. I practice a contemplative sense of vigilance; I endeavor to unclutter my own life on all levels, not just materially; I study and speak to the forces that exploit and brutalize creation’s
resources. I practice living every day in the realization that all around me is gift, and that I am here because of the interdependence within the web of life. Mutual Sustainability translates into Gratitude.
Chastity has become for me now a vow of Relatedness, a vow to Love.
This vow moves me towards an intentional engagement with the “foundational eroticism” which is the basis of all emerging life. It is the “creative, divine eroticism in the whole of creation: my body – and all bodies - are Temples of
Relatedness: the physical world (cosmos) includes the whole of the Earth, Animals, Humans – and is the Source from which all things arise into being and fall away in its own time.
Obedience has become for me a vow of Mutual Collaboration. Purposefully engaging in practicing
silence, solitude, prayer, heart resonance and heart presence, inner emptying and receptivity, study, reflection, speaking and writing, I also invite others of similar searching and values to enter into regular contemplative conversations. Our intention
is to shed the residues that still ensnare us in the wake of centuries of Church and State conditioning that no longer serves the world of today.
From this Contemplative Heart Engagement
I commit to a renewed vowed life of inner and exterior speech and action, searching out and collaborating with others of resonant visions, with searching, willing and open hearts, for intensifying Good in our world.
(Through the Mercy of God and Catherine McAuley, in the Circle of Mercy…)
On January 1, 2017, I affirm and invite others to affirm these values and to enter into dialogue with any who wish to cultivate their heart’s longing and their heart’s willingness to closely inquire into self,
relationship, communities, and the world itself, fully embracing the paradoxical nature and vision of these vows.
Some visible practices might be:
♥ Embracing gratitude
♥ Keeping
promises
♥ Living truthfully
♥ Practising inconvenient hospitality
♥ Interrupting treasured schedules
♥ Deliberately and knowingly stepping past old habits
of thinking/doing
Brenda Peddigrew, 31 December 2016
“If all one can do is sit alone
and intend concentration – and fail –
then…the patterns of exchange with friends
will bring that which is needed:
the temenos, the sanctuary,
the protected place of the Mercy.”
(Helen Luke, in Stuff as Dreams are Made of)