Third Commandment: Do not take the name of the Lord in vain

God asks us for reverence and respect. In my Church, we take communion on Sundays and it is a reverent experience. With reverence congregants prepare for communion. With reverence congregants approach the table. With reverence congregants take the body and blood of Christ. This is a holy time set aside for worship and God, as is the Sunday worship experience.

Part of this experience in the Christian faith is remembering Christ, it is a memorial of his death and resurrection. Communion in my Church is a source of entering into and receiving God's love. A difficult experience to communicate, this Sunday communion, these words by Thomas Merton are a help.

Thomas Merton writes of a first Communion experience:
For now I had entered into the everlasting movement of the gravitation which is the very life and spirit of God. God's own gravitation towards the depths of His own infinite nature. His goodness without end. And God, that center Who is everywhere, and whose circumference is nowhere, finding me, through incorporation with Christ, incorporated into this immense and tremendous gravitational movement which is love, which is the Holy Spirit, loved me.

From The Seven Storey Mountain: An Autobiography of Faith by Thomas Merton, p. 246.

Third Commandment
By Peter Menkin

Entertaining the mystery of God:

Doing as prayer says,

Hallowed be thy name.

Examined by the Ten Commandments.

This is some of the way.

Oh, Third Commandment of mystery and cloud,

so says the Lord,

You Shall not take the Name of the Lord in vain.

So direct; yet we contemplate

the many spiritual dimensions that light the way

to know the will of God brought by Moses.