Reflection for January 13, 2010

Imagine that the world is a circle, that God is the center, and that the radii are the different ways human beings live. When those who wish to come closer to God walk towards the center of the circle, they come closer to one another at the same time as to God. The closer they come to God, the closer they come to one another. And the closer they come to one another at the same time, the closer they come to God.

St. Dorotheus of Gaza, Monastic, c. 500 – 560

It takes a lifetime to really understand that God is in what is standing in front of us. Most of our lives are spent looking, straining to see God in the cloud, behind the mist, beyond the dark. It is when we face God in one another, in creation, in the moment, that the real spiritual journey begins.

Joan Chittister, Called to Question

Reflection for January 6, 2009

FOR YOUR BIRTHDAY

Blessed be the mind that dreamed the day

The blueprint of your life

Would begin to glow on earth,

Illuminating all the faces and voices

That would arrive to invite

Your soul to growth.

Praised be your father and mother,

Who loved you before you were,

And trusted to call you here

With no idea who you would be.

Blessed be those who have loved you

Into becoming who you were meant to be,

Blessed be those who have crossed your life

With dark gifts of hurt and loss

That have helped to school your mind

In the art of disappointment.

When desolation surrounded you,

Blessed be those who looked for you

And found you, their kind hands

Urgent to open a blue window

In the gray wall formed around you.

Blessed be the gifts you never notice,

Your health, eyes to behold the world,

Thoughts to countenance the unknown,

Memory to harvest vanished days,

Your heart to feel the world’s waves,

Your breath to breathe the nourishment

Of distance made intimate by earth.

On this echoing-day of your birth,

May you open the gift of solitude

In order to receive your soul;

Enter the generosity of silence

To hear your hidden heart;

Know the serenity of stillness

To be enfolded anew

By the miracle of your being. To Bless the Space Between Us, John O’Donohue

Reflection for December 30, 2009

Spot Clean

When did my housekeeping shift from

Smooshing bugs and wiping away their traces,

to capturing and relocating

because I want to train them to stay outdoors.

When did my housekeeping shift from

Brutal scrubbing under harsh lights,

to only a first pass without my glasses

because – quite frankly – I really don’t want to know.

Did it happen at a specific time

when failures torqued my priorities?

Did it happen at a certain age

when heartache taught that spotlessness brings no love?

-- Heather Young

Clean Sweep

Cleaning, clearing.

Clearing, cleaning.

Breezy, sneezy.

Sponging, expunging.

Partings, startings.

Fresh for new beginnings.

-- Heather Young

Reflection for December 23, 2009

Sigrid Undset

1882-1949

Blessed Christmas from Julian Cell

December 2009

Reflection for December 16, 2009

The Gift

I will not die an unlived life.

I will not live in fear

of falling or catching fire.

I choose to inhabit my days,

to allow my living to open me,

to make me less afraid,

more accessible,

to loosen my heart

until it becomes a wing,

a torch, a promise.

I choose to risk my significance;

to live so that which came to me as seed

goes to the next as blossom,

and that which came to me as blossom,

goes on as fruit.

D. Markova

Reflection for December 9, 2009

Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin

“Do listen to me, my littlest one, honorable Juan. I truly want it, very much desire it, that here in this place there be raised an honorable temple, at this site here I will reveal myself, here I will come down from above, here I will give myself to you, all my love and affection to you, my compassion to you, my help to you, my blanket of protection for you. Because I am your compassionate mother. In company of all people who are here throughout this land together, in company with other various and different people whom I also love, who call out to me, who seek me, who place their trust in me.

“Climb up, my littlest one, to the top of the small hill, and to the place where you first saw me, when we were together and I gave you orders. There you will see spread about a variety of flowers. Cut them, collect them, gather them together: then right away come down, and here in front of me do bring them. My littlest one, these various flowers are themselves the proof, that sign you are to carry for me to the Bishop.

On my behalf you are to say that in them he should see my will, with them truly is placed my will, my desire. And you I am sending as my messenger because you are so trustworthy.

…And at that moment when he was opening his white tilma in which he had wrapped the flowers, and they began to fall down, all the various Castillian flowers, then suddenly right there her image was made on it, revealing the beloved likeness of the perfect Virgin Holy Mary, Mother of God that is so honored today, which itself is now so reverently kept at its beloved home, its temple of Tepeyac, which has been given the honored name of Guadalupe.

From the Nican mopohua

…at that very moment when imperial conquerors imbued with religious absolutism…were meting out death and defeat to indigenous peoples considered “pagans”…this marian revelatory event signals the birth of a new reality, a new humanity…God breaks through – with flower and song! This is no longer an exterminator God but is, rather, the God of pleasure and harmony. …Then one discovers that God is on the side of the poor, the raped, the defeated, the exploited, pouring out compassion and challenging consciences. The figure of Guadalupe is a living locus of the experience of the compassionate God in female form.

Elizabeth A. Johnson

Reflection for December 2, 2009

Angels are speaking to all of us-
Some of us are only listening better.
Anonymous

I saw the tracks of angels in the earth.
The beauty of heaven walking by itself
on the world.
Petrarch