Vapor

Our community group this year is going to listen to various podcasts and focus on the meditation and reflection sparked by those podcasts.  If you’d like to follow along with us, you can check out my notes here on the blog each week.

Liturgy

On the first Tuesday of each month, rather than discuss a podcast or share an #AwkwardTuesday meal, we set aside time for quietude, meditation, prayer, reflection.  We’re using the liturgies put out by The Liturgists to guide us.   Last night I selected the one titled Vapor because it seemed an apropos title for the day after Halloween.

The Vapor liturgy is based on the teachings of Kohelet (Qoheleth), or The Teacher, in Ecclesiastes about the vapor of all things.  I’ve always struggled the grasp the whole “everything is meaningless” part of Ecclesiastes and this liturgy helped me lay hold of it in a new way.   Listening to the first track, I still wrestle with the thought that dang, this is depressing as hell, but I’m reaching for the freedom that is supposed to come with the releasing of all things to the vapor of it all.

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Pale Blue Dot

This is the image mentioned in the first track, taken by famous astronomer & astrophysicist Carl Sagan.

“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