From our Ignatian Prayer work today, comes this reminder and metaphor:
If you’re ending, or beginning a season, consider the altar you’ve built to God in that season’s coming or going. Reflect on the rough stones with which you’ve built this altar and its simple offering – your rough work, rough relationships, rough ideas and rough actions.
You built the altar with the stones available; worship finds its resource in the present people and pieces allotted to us. Allow the altar to be made of those rough and unhewn stones; allow it represent both the strength you’ve taken from the acts of God within that season, and the weakness in you and others that has been revealed in that same season.
Consider the altar, its shape and form, upon which you’ve placed your offering to God in this past season, or the one you are now in.
Take heart in the building, and take heart in the materials with which God has invited you to build.
