Friday, November 1, 2013

November: Prayer and Thanksgiving Month on The Radical Virgo





Dear Radical Readers,

By now you’ve probably noticed how 2013 has shaped up to become a very theme-oriented year on The Radical Virgo. In April, we had Poetry Month. May brought us the Planetary Fishing Trips where we went on a metaphorical outing to reel in each of our planets in hopes of catching a more personalized relationship with them. In July we did dreamwork. August found us dabbling in oracles.

In September, we celebrated Old Home Month, a homecoming of sorts to the sign this blog was named after and a deeper look at Virgo. During October we hosted my favorite articles from my spirited living blog, Hot Flashbacks, Cool Insights.

But wait—there’s more!

In the USA, we celebrate Thanksgiving in November--the perfect time to pray and count our blessings. Recently my husband had the second of two scary hospitalizations in five months. In an effort to turn the cusp of worry into something more productive and faith-full, I visited the chapel at UC-Davis Hospital in Sacramento. There I found brochures with prayers from every kind of spiritual path: Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Native American and Islam, to name a few. It reminded me how important prayer has always been in my life and what a comfort it is in times of stress. While we tend to pray when someone needs healing or when thing go wrong, the best prayer of all is Thank God he’s going to be all right! Counting our blessings is a positive prayer, thanking God/Goddess/All That Is for what’s right in our world.

In the chapel that day, all alone except for the sound of a beautiful wall fountain running over a metal sculpture to rocks below in the basin, I was grateful for the faith of my childhood. It was both a rock for building a solid spiritual life and a place where there was always a lot of water in the form of holy water and baptismal fonts. As I grew spiritually to encompass the best of many paths, I became more involved in doing eclectic ritual, borrowing from them all, resonating to the core of strength and well-being evoked by prayer and spiritual poems.

You’ll see some of my favorites and new discoveries in November—and we’ll explore why prayer and gratitude are such potent practices for keeping our connection from Earth to Sky wired for miraculous results.

Every sunrise is a gift of the  recurring cycle of life. It deserves my favorite, most simple prayer of all: Thank God. [1] More specifically, thank God for another day of loving.

May every day be Thanksgiving,
Joyce

Photo  Credit: © Bernd S. - Fotolia.com

NOTE:

[1] Throughout this series, I’m going to invite you to substitute whatever is comfortable for you when it comes to describing Higher Power: God, Goddess, All That Is, Spirit, the Universe—or fill in the blank.  Just today a friend told me, “I still have trouble with the G-word.” She was raised in a fundamentalist religion, and having experienced the results of religious rigidity myself, I know how important it is can be to find a new vision of deity or the Divine All Together, as I sometimes call Him/Her/It/Them. What I hope we won’t do is throw out the baby with the holy water when it comes to a great prayer that just may need a minor edit of terms for you to find its healing gold.


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