God in Our Neighborhood
For love of my brethren and friends I say: Peace upon you.
For love of the house of the Lord I will ask for your good. Ps 122:8-9
Over the next two weeks you are asked to undertake some reading/listening/watching of material that pertains to the population of North Omaha. Your prayer will focus on your own reactions to the material: thought reactions, feeling reactions, and sense of choice about the world of North Omaha. One piece of this will be simply information gathering and absorbing, another will be questions about what choices and behaviors of persons in Omaha, in the State of Nebraska and in the United States brought about the circumstances of the world of North Omaha.
Sometime during this week, I urge you to take your 30 minutes of prayer time and drive through some streets of the area North of Cuming and East of 40th Street. Look all around you and get a “feel” of this set of neighborhoods.
I also urge you to watch a video of some of the history of North Omaha that is the area where our three Church are located. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0XnM4Iqu4w
After each of these experiences take some time to examen your own feelings, thoughts and impulses of choice. Where is God in this community? Where is God asking the Catholic Church to be especially present and transformative in this area.
This coming weekend we will hear from local secular leaders about the East side of North Omaha now – years after the events described in the video. Be prepared to listen closely to what the needs are in this community now, especially needs that the Gospel of God’s great love is inviting this community to hear. What and who are being served? What continues to be neglected (or we don’t have information about)? What resources do we need to think through and pray about? Where is God present obviously, where does God invite us specifically to make the Divine Presence felt and known?
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As you pray with Scriptures this week, ask for the grace to know what we together have as gifts to give and how God wants to match our gifts with needs of this community.
Each day for the next two weeks pray with alternate texts from the Mass of the day and each fourth day do a repetition of the prayer that disclosed grace of absence of grace the other three days. When you groups get together spend time on two rounds of sharing or spiritual conversation. The first round is what each person received in prayer these days and the second round is what did you hear from each other that stirs something in you.
So we are moving to two levels of listening:
Listen to your own prayer and examen experience
Then take a short period of silence to ask what you heard of each other’s sharing (be as specific as possible)
Then share what you heard and determine if there are convergences or divergences in what you heard? How does this make you feel? What are you thinking?
More about this process will be talked about early Saturday morning before we hear the panel of the “signs of the times.”
For prayer each of the two weeks:
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Graces to request continuously – to where God is acting in this area of the city.
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To know more clearly how to listen carefully (without a lot of judgement) to what is emerging in your prayer, the other others who are sharing, and in the content of what you are observing
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To know what God is calling us to do to respond to the needs of the signs of the times.
Pattern of prayer: Days 1, 3, – the first reading of the day. Days 4 and 7 repetition. Days 2, 5 and 6 Gospel of the day.
Follow the same pattern in week 22. NOTE: Be sure to keep up with the two examens per day as well as your prayer period.