Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
– Carl Sagan
At Third Thursday last week, we followed a liturgy produced by a group (aptly) named “The Liturgists”. Vapour is a liturgy based on the teachings of Kohelet (The Teacher) in Ecclesiastes about the vapour of all things. We started with a time of centring prayer when we were guided in focusing not our thoughts but our very being on God, this then led on to a reflection on Ecclesiastes about the vapour.
If you would like to follow the liturgy yourself, you can find it by clicking here. Find a quiet, dark and comfortable space to listen and focus without distraction. The whole liturgy takes about 30 minutes or you can just do the centering prayer or reflection with music which each takes about 15 minutes.