Angels are heavenly beings, unseen, supernatural. How many they are and what they do is not yours to know. It’s enough for you to know that there’s an unseen dimension and often a thin line that separates the invisible from the visible. Sometimes the angel who marks your way may be the clerk at the grocery store, a co-worker, or a beggar asking for spare change. The Bible’s word for “angel” is also the word for “messenger.” So angels can be earthy, visible, and entirely natural—the kid next door.

There are saints too, present and past, whose lives guide to you (Hebrews 12.1). Saints are simply those who’ve made it their aim in life to abandon themselves to God. They’re not always nice, and often not pretty. But they’re good.

The point is, as you curve yourself open to the goodness that’s all around you, open also to the serendipitous companions God will send your way today. When you rise and pray, welcoming the “companionship of angels and saints,” you’ve opened yourself to a heavenly and earthly host. They’ll surprise you with a word, a kind gesture, a firm and sometimes-unwelcome challenge, a nudge, a whisper on the wind. Listen. Watch. They’re everywhere.

On this journey, you’re never alone.

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William Dalrymple’s book, From the Holy Mountain: A Journey Among the Christians of the Middle East, helped inspire my own pilgrimage in 2007.  That tale is told in my little e-book, Returning to the Center: Living Prayer in a Distracting Word/The Spiritual Memoir of a Twenty-First Century Pilgrim (available for free download here).

In this essay, Dalrymple explores why the mystic arm of Islam, Sufism, makes a perfect bridge between East and West, moving beyond Islamic, Christian, Jewish, and secular extremism.  It’s an apt corrective to so much of the mis-information being bandied about today, especially as September 11 draws near once again.

I commend not only Dalrymple’s essay (reprinted from the New York Times), but also the website diversejourneys.com, and more, the Rand Corporation’s 2007 Report, Building Moderate Muslim Networks.

You’ve curved yourself open again and embraced the goodness of creation all around you. While you’re at it, curve yourself open to those around you.

The journey you’re on, into the fullness of God, can seem lonely. The traffic’s often going a different direction. Yet God will send companions, but much of the time they’ll not be the companions you’d choose for yourself. This is why paying attention to the curvature of your heart is important. When you feel like you’re traveling alone, you’ll likely curve in upon yourself again. You’ll be tempted to judge others, become self-righteous. Your apparent isolation may make you feel abandoned, and therefore a bit ornery.

Truth is, there are more with you and for you—more who love you—than you have eyes to see (2 Kings 6.16-18). Surely you’ve got at least a few family and friends somewhere around you. With this part of the Rule you express your intention to open yourself to them.

But there’s more. God’s also surrounded you with a host of angels and saints—natural and supernatural beings whose ministry is mostly unseen. So, as you rise today it’ll do you good to say hello to them, and open yourself to whatever they may bring your way.

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That determination means you’ll live a life uncommon.

But it’s you who’ve chosen to work with the grain of the universe, rather than against it. God pronounced the world good, and goodness is the essential nature of things. If you see things any other way you’ll sin against the Sacred and most likely end up with a handful of splinters.

Instead, pick up a ripe midsummer peach. Toss yourself into a pile of autumn leaves. Saunter in the snow. Dance in the rain. Caress a baby’s face. Cradle an old person’s hand. Savor a glass of wine or a fine green tea. Watch the waves crash against the shore. Count the stars. Bend down and pick up a handful of this good earth. Smell the musty aroma of life.

True, the earth can reel and rock. The sea can rise against us in terrifying power. The sky can send a gale to rip and tear at all we hold dear. But pound for pound, goodness far outweighs the bad.

So arise and welcome the zillion tons of goodness beneath you, the infinite benevolence above you, the unbounded charity all around you. And smile. All is good.

But if for some reason things aren’t so good for you right now, if pain and darkness and fear crowd in against you, things shall be good again.

God says so.

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I was once meditating on the first chapter of Genesis, those opening verses of the Bible that survey the splendor of creation. These verses are not science in the Modern sense of the word. Rather, they’re a witness to the most sublime science: the science of prayer. They’re an invitation to curve the heart outward, opening to the Beloved in gratitude, awe, and surrender. They’re a hymn of praise to the goodness of earth and sky and sea, and all that is in them.

At the end of this grand hymn stand the words, “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good” (Genesis 1.31). I read them and immediately there arose within me another voice, nearly shouting: “But you say, it’s never good enough!”

“Never good enough.” That’s how I lived my life. I’d grown up believing that everything could stand at least a little improvement. And that belief, that view of the world, fed the restless life I was living.

But God called the world and everything in it good.

So who am I to contradict God’s own verdict?

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The way you perceive the world affects the way you live within it. Many people see the world as a dangerous, bad, even evil place. They live with fear and carry hostility and suspicion with them wherever they go.

If you see the world as a dangerous place, a dangerous place it will be. Life will be a struggle, and from the moment you rise each day you’ll find yourself pitched into a battle. The struggle might energize you. You might find pleasure in the competition, the fight, the need to win, to be right or better or wealthier than others. There’s no question that such a view of the world motivates. But there’s also plenty of evidence that viewing the world as dangerous, bad, or evil takes a toll on you—on your relationships, your body, your spirit. Such a view feeds the wars, economic woes, and the environmental troubles we’re facing on this planet.

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When you rise and welcome the day, entering it with intention and prayer, you’re not calling the day to yourself. You have no power to do that. Instead, you’re bringing yourself to the day. You’re praying for power to enter the coming day alert and alive and active—not passive, dull, unconscious.

When you whisper the words, “I welcome to my life,” you’re bending your life open again. Yesterday you did things, said things, heard things, and saw things that frightened or angered, excited or enticed you. To some degree, you went to bed worried or wounded, upset or obsessed. And today you awakened lost in your own little world, absorbed in yourself—curved in upon yourself.

But when you welcome the day, you reverse the curvature of sin. You bend yourself out toward God again. There’s still plenty to worry about. The responsibilities you face are still waiting for you. Trouble or pain will pester you again. And it’s likely that you’ll forget God and get all curved in upon yourself. No worries. Just place yourself in this welcoming posture again. Open rather than closed. Your heart curved toward God, ready to receive.

There’s more goodness coming toward you than you have eyes to see.

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The way you greet the day matters. Your first lucid moments set the course for what follows. Set that course with intention, through a simple prayer, and you’ll be okay. The prayer needn’t be long, but it ought to be clear. In fact, the simpler, briefer, and more focused it is, the better.

For much of your life you’ve let the day start you. Your alarm wakens you, and you stumble out of bed. You start the coffee or a shower. A steady stream of thoughts flows through your head. You fetch the newspaper, turn on music or the TV. Maybe you check your email or head off to the gym. The mental stream swells, and as it does, your body and spirit are pulled along with it. Tension and stress tug at your neck and shoulders, the thought-stream nags at you, demanding more from your body than your body wants to give. So you pump a little more caffeine into your veins or jot another note on your to-do list. These thoughts—largely unexamined—have yanked you into a river whose direction you control far less than you realize.

But if you rise and announce your intention to greet with gladness the day God’s given you—if you breathe from the deep center within you where Christ dwells, if you feel the firmness of the earth beneath you, if you open your arms in a gesture of welcome and arrest those thoughts for just a moment, if you say with purpose, “I rise and embrace the gift of this new day,” then you’ll have altered the course of your personal history, you’ll have announced your intention to go against the stream—or at least no longer to follow blindly when you choose for a time to follow where it leads.

So, rise and embrace the gift of this new day. Arouse your spirit. Embrace the day, and join up with God. The moment of your rising and what you do with it has the power to change everything.

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But without some kind of regula—a Daily Guide or model or pattern for our lives—I don’t think such a life is possible for us uncloistered saints.

Click here to read my Daily Guide.

Why is it, though, that such Guides are common in monastic communities, but not among those of us who choose to walk with God beyond the sacred enclosure and out in the wildness of the today’s world and among it’s many opportunities and dangers?

It seems to me that such Guides are just what we need if you and I intend to live a life of prayer in the midst of this rushing stream and the surrounding wilderness that is our daily life. There is no sound of bell to call us to prayer, no form of daily prayer shared with others committed to the same path, and no regulated rhythm between work and prayer, eating and sleeping. No map. No GPS. Often no praying saint beside us to point the way. Some kind of Daily Guide—patterns and practices that help open our eyes to holiness—are necessary if we’re to see the whole world as sacred and encounter every blessed thing as gift from God.

Click here to read my Daily Guide.