Friday, June 25, 2010
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Friday, June 18, 2010
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
David Adams Richards
I read this essay this morning and am hoping to read more about the Canadian author David Adams Richards. He looks to be a powerful writer, a very truthful one.
Our Night Chanting
I found this site earlier today. It has a nice picture and a recording of us as we chant compline.
Saturday, June 12, 2010
Friday, June 11, 2010
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Refuge in the Heart of God
If the heart’s deepest desire is found and lived through one’s passion, I cannot think of any more meaningful way to live. The desire for an intimate, lasting and loving relationship burns in the heart of every person born into this world. Needless to say, happiness is born from such a life. But it is not the kind of happiness that is easily lost through a rainy day, a broken relationship or painful disappointment. It is the kind of happiness that matures one through both joy and sorrow. It is the kind of happiness you know you have, even when you are crying. It is the kind of happiness that gives you a deep sense of home in this life, even if you must move from place to place against your will.
I once read that the word “blessed” as found in the Beatitudes carries the meaning of being in the right place. To be blessed by God is to be at home in him. It is to know the kind of happiness that flows from finding the right place in and through God.
It is the kind of happiness that learns from the inevitable wounds carried in a heart that knows suffering. To be blessed is take to heart the joys and pains of this life because you experience them as a necessary part of that place you belong in life.
There is a woman in New York who lost her only son. He was her life. She lost him when he was stabbed to death on a street in the city. His killer was never found. Her son was a living part of her heart and he is still there. When she sleeps at night, she wears the clothes he wore and holds the fabric as close to her as she can. There are nights that she will sleep in his bed in the hope that she will dream of him, that he will come to her the only way he can.
I do not know if the woman prays, if she has turned to the heart of Jesus for comfort, for a warm place of understanding, for perhaps an answer to why her son died. But if she has thought of holding a lasting love and then losing it, having it bleed to death on a street, her thoughts cannot be far from God. It may be a different name, one we are not familiar with, or a different way of prayer – a way that uses different words and different ways of communicating – like sobs, tears, holding close a shirt that still has a familiar and heartbreaking scent.
A long tradition of piety would encourage her to seek refuge in the Sacred Heart of Jesus, to turn to Jesus with her sorrows.
But Jesus has already come. He holds her at night, and perhaps comes to her in her dreams. He knows her suffering because he is a living part of it. It is through Jesus that we are all held close by a God who suffers with us, cries with us, and promises something that we know within us – that anguish and pain shall not be the last, the final and definitive words of life. The heart of Jesus draws us in, and it is where we are at home. It is in that heart that we may toss and turn on a sleepless night and reach out to touch someone who no longer seems near.
It is early morning. It is said that time heals all wounds, or, perhaps helps us better live with them. A woman in Manhattan may be rising from her own bed. She has lovingly placed her son’s clothes in a place for safekeeping. She has let him go to his new life.
All things come from God, without exception. Jesus knew pain, knew loss. He knew the taste of tears, his own tears. He shared in the undivided heart of God and sorrow was a necessary part of that.
The heart will of Jesus lives forever. We live from and in that heart, for our very life is of God. There is a saying, too, that the flow of tears can heal. A woman cried herself to sleep in the bed and clothing of her dead son. Someday, she will see him again in a place where every tear will be wiped away. May she then know the healing grace of her own tears and how her broken heart was given her because she loved so much. She will look back, with her arms around her son, and know that God wept with her, too, until it was time to weep no more. For a time came, called eternity, a time to live in the love she thought she had lost. .
If the heart’s deepest desire is found and lived through one’s passion, I cannot think of any more meaningful way to live. The desire for an intimate, lasting and loving relationship burns in the heart of every person born into this world. Needless to say, happiness is born from such a life. But it is not the kind of happiness that is easily lost through a rainy day, a broken relationship or painful disappointment. It is the kind of happiness that matures one through both joy and sorrow. It is the kind of happiness you know you have, even when you are crying. It is the kind of happiness that gives you a deep sense of home in this life, even if you must move from place to place against your will.
I once read that the word “blessed” as found in the Beatitudes carries the meaning of being in the right place. To be blessed by God is to be at home in him. It is to know the kind of happiness that flows from finding the right place in and through God.
It is the kind of happiness that learns from the inevitable wounds carried in a heart that knows suffering. To be blessed is take to heart the joys and pains of this life because you experience them as a necessary part of that place you belong in life.
There is a woman in New York who lost her only son. He was her life. She lost him when he was stabbed to death on a street in the city. His killer was never found. Her son was a living part of her heart and he is still there. When she sleeps at night, she wears the clothes he wore and holds the fabric as close to her as she can. There are nights that she will sleep in his bed in the hope that she will dream of him, that he will come to her the only way he can.
I do not know if the woman prays, if she has turned to the heart of Jesus for comfort, for a warm place of understanding, for perhaps an answer to why her son died. But if she has thought of holding a lasting love and then losing it, having it bleed to death on a street, her thoughts cannot be far from God. It may be a different name, one we are not familiar with, or a different way of prayer – a way that uses different words and different ways of communicating – like sobs, tears, holding close a shirt that still has a familiar and heartbreaking scent.
A long tradition of piety would encourage her to seek refuge in the Sacred Heart of Jesus, to turn to Jesus with her sorrows.
But Jesus has already come. He holds her at night, and perhaps comes to her in her dreams. He knows her suffering because he is a living part of it. It is through Jesus that we are all held close by a God who suffers with us, cries with us, and promises something that we know within us – that anguish and pain shall not be the last, the final and definitive words of life. The heart of Jesus draws us in, and it is where we are at home. It is in that heart that we may toss and turn on a sleepless night and reach out to touch someone who no longer seems near.
It is early morning. It is said that time heals all wounds, or, perhaps helps us better live with them. A woman in Manhattan may be rising from her own bed. She has lovingly placed her son’s clothes in a place for safekeeping. She has let him go to his new life.
All things come from God, without exception. Jesus knew pain, knew loss. He knew the taste of tears, his own tears. He shared in the undivided heart of God and sorrow was a necessary part of that.
The heart will of Jesus lives forever. We live from and in that heart, for our very life is of God. There is a saying, too, that the flow of tears can heal. A woman cried herself to sleep in the bed and clothing of her dead son. Someday, she will see him again in a place where every tear will be wiped away. May she then know the healing grace of her own tears and how her broken heart was given her because she loved so much. She will look back, with her arms around her son, and know that God wept with her, too, until it was time to weep no more. For a time came, called eternity, a time to live in the love she thought she had lost. .
Wednesday, June 09, 2010
Thoughts on the Sacred Heart of Jesus 2010
One can easily wonder about what kind of compass should be used that would truthfully guide one across the seas of life. The most obvious, and perhaps easiest to find in terms of availability, is one’s religious tradition. If faithfully followed, a religious tradition can safely bring one to the far shore of existence. A religious tradition can discern the stars of a night sky. It can brave the winds of storms and the rising swells of any number of tides. Come home to religion and the promise is that it will bring you home.
We live in a time that offers a plurality of traditions. The religious traditions of the world, once easily discernible as separate, as truthful or not, as guaranteed or as bogus compasses pointing the way to salvation are now not only pressing upon each other. To a measurable degree, they are learning from each other and mingling with each other, even to the point that once clear distinctions are not only blurred but impossible to recover. A new spirituality is being born, one that is a living hybrid of religious truths. For those in need of a sure direction in such times of transformation, their Catholic or Jewish or Islamic compass may be grasped all the more tightly in the hands of those who fear being thrown far off course. But for others, there is the seizing of an opportunity to look at other traditions, learn from them, share meals with them, ride with them on subways and busses, and marry into them, raise children from such unions and in the process find that the compass needle is still pointing in a truthful direction.
I think that the great challenge of this age is to find – with the help of each other, a compass that remains true to one’s tradition and, at the same time, draws us closer to those who are different from us but who are also seeking a way to be at home with us.
I know of no better feast than today from which to draw upon in terms of a contemplative meditation on who we are, what we have within us, where we are going and how God wants us to get there.
The heart is one of the few universal symbols that bridge the many differences of time, peoples and cultures. You can find its expression in poetry from all over the world and from all the ages humanity has known. You will find the symbol of the heart etched on the trunks of trees, on the ancient stones of the Great Wall of China, on the walls of dusty catacombs, on lockets that rest on the hearts of lovers all over the world.
People of all time have known through experience that love entails sacrifice. To be possessed by love is to lose possession of oneself. When a person truly lives for another or others, life is enhanced, is matured through self-denial. To know this for what it is, all one need to do is to look back and ponder those who gave us life, brought us into being, raised us, taught us the good, hoped for us and even may have died for us. The wisest would have known that it all came as a gift, this yearning to love through sacrifice, through the denial of self.
We may understandably find the future worrisome since the way is obscured with clouds of religious uncertainty and dogmatic doubts. We are encouraged today to look back and remember how we got here. The heart of God has been given to us, and has brought us to this place. And in the decades ahead, that heart will guide us still. We will look to each other to find the sacred in life and to live from it. And the compass that will guide us will be that of the heart of Jesus – divine in its origin and deeply human in its expression.
One can easily wonder about what kind of compass should be used that would truthfully guide one across the seas of life. The most obvious, and perhaps easiest to find in terms of availability, is one’s religious tradition. If faithfully followed, a religious tradition can safely bring one to the far shore of existence. A religious tradition can discern the stars of a night sky. It can brave the winds of storms and the rising swells of any number of tides. Come home to religion and the promise is that it will bring you home.
We live in a time that offers a plurality of traditions. The religious traditions of the world, once easily discernible as separate, as truthful or not, as guaranteed or as bogus compasses pointing the way to salvation are now not only pressing upon each other. To a measurable degree, they are learning from each other and mingling with each other, even to the point that once clear distinctions are not only blurred but impossible to recover. A new spirituality is being born, one that is a living hybrid of religious truths. For those in need of a sure direction in such times of transformation, their Catholic or Jewish or Islamic compass may be grasped all the more tightly in the hands of those who fear being thrown far off course. But for others, there is the seizing of an opportunity to look at other traditions, learn from them, share meals with them, ride with them on subways and busses, and marry into them, raise children from such unions and in the process find that the compass needle is still pointing in a truthful direction.
I think that the great challenge of this age is to find – with the help of each other, a compass that remains true to one’s tradition and, at the same time, draws us closer to those who are different from us but who are also seeking a way to be at home with us.
I know of no better feast than today from which to draw upon in terms of a contemplative meditation on who we are, what we have within us, where we are going and how God wants us to get there.
The heart is one of the few universal symbols that bridge the many differences of time, peoples and cultures. You can find its expression in poetry from all over the world and from all the ages humanity has known. You will find the symbol of the heart etched on the trunks of trees, on the ancient stones of the Great Wall of China, on the walls of dusty catacombs, on lockets that rest on the hearts of lovers all over the world.
People of all time have known through experience that love entails sacrifice. To be possessed by love is to lose possession of oneself. When a person truly lives for another or others, life is enhanced, is matured through self-denial. To know this for what it is, all one need to do is to look back and ponder those who gave us life, brought us into being, raised us, taught us the good, hoped for us and even may have died for us. The wisest would have known that it all came as a gift, this yearning to love through sacrifice, through the denial of self.
We may understandably find the future worrisome since the way is obscured with clouds of religious uncertainty and dogmatic doubts. We are encouraged today to look back and remember how we got here. The heart of God has been given to us, and has brought us to this place. And in the decades ahead, that heart will guide us still. We will look to each other to find the sacred in life and to live from it. And the compass that will guide us will be that of the heart of Jesus – divine in its origin and deeply human in its expression.
On Movement
A handwritten letter came in the mail a few days ago from a friend of mine who lives in Chicago. She is a member of a religious community of sisters and has been retired for many years. She has remained healthy and active throughout all her years as a professed religious. About a year ago, her community decided it was time to relocate. They will soon be moving to Iowa to a larger retirement facility. It is a beautiful place – I visited there a few years ago. It is a lovely spot, high on a hill with a clear view of the Mississippi River.
My friend is very upset and anxious about the move. I can understand that. For years, she felt at ease with the sense of stable familiarity that her home offered in Chicago. I think her love for the place deepened as the years passed. Being an outgoing and giving person, her life expanded through the growing family of people who befriended her all through the years. Chicago offered her a rich life. I can sense in her recent letters a deep sense of sadness and a gnawing anxiety. But she knows that in the overall picture, the move is a necessary one for her community. But that knowledge does not assuage her apprehensions and her dread of going through the process of relocating.
So I wrote to her and tried to find words that might ease her situation. I had to dig a bit into my own past to find them.
I well remember many moves I made in my life. In my younger years, I moved from rectory to rectory as parish assignments changed. It was hard to say good-bye to friends and to allow time to sink roots in a new place with new people. I bounced around quite a lot. My family moved, too, from one state to another. My brothers and sisters gradually moved to different states. Our mom and dad retired in Louisiana, the place where they grew up. They raised us in New York, New Jersey and, lastly, Connecticut. Looking back, it isn’t too difficult to recall the discomfort of all that movement. But once I arrived in a new place, there were people who went out of their way to make me feel at home, to settle me down and draw me into their lives. Friendship has been an abiding gift to me, offered all along these meandering corridors of life.
There are not many of us who can escape some serious movement in life. Even if we stay still in a place for a long time, we can get knocked off our feet by the changes brought on through the ravages of loss or illness and other unexpected wallops that can destabilize our comfort zones.
Iowa is a beautiful place. As I write this, there are people there who are preparing all kinds of welcomes for a newcomer who is coming from Chicago. They will go out of their way to find out about her likes, her favorite things and will offer these and more to her. They will make a home for her through the wondrously woven tapestries of friendship. She will receive what she has so freely given her life.
And then the move will soon lose its sting.
When the Big Move comes from this life to the next, it is common place for us to wish Eternal Rest to the blessed departed.
Yet I wonder if that is such a good or even real thing.
Growth entails movement. There is nothing in the universe that is not moving. Even God moved from somewhere to here. And there are the mysteries of movements within the Trinity itself. An eternal give and take of love – which is shared with us, which is why we are here and why we are going to the Ultimate “there” of eternity.
Jesus said that there are many mansions in the Kingdom of his Father. There might be moving vans too. Someday, there will come a young woman wanting to find a nice big house, high on a hill, a lovely spot from where can be seen the moving waters of the River of Life. She will want a big home, large enough for her to welcome friends who will come from Chicago. But there will be others. Friends will visit her from a place she grew to love most of all in the late afternoon of her life, a place called Iowa.
A handwritten letter came in the mail a few days ago from a friend of mine who lives in Chicago. She is a member of a religious community of sisters and has been retired for many years. She has remained healthy and active throughout all her years as a professed religious. About a year ago, her community decided it was time to relocate. They will soon be moving to Iowa to a larger retirement facility. It is a beautiful place – I visited there a few years ago. It is a lovely spot, high on a hill with a clear view of the Mississippi River.
My friend is very upset and anxious about the move. I can understand that. For years, she felt at ease with the sense of stable familiarity that her home offered in Chicago. I think her love for the place deepened as the years passed. Being an outgoing and giving person, her life expanded through the growing family of people who befriended her all through the years. Chicago offered her a rich life. I can sense in her recent letters a deep sense of sadness and a gnawing anxiety. But she knows that in the overall picture, the move is a necessary one for her community. But that knowledge does not assuage her apprehensions and her dread of going through the process of relocating.
So I wrote to her and tried to find words that might ease her situation. I had to dig a bit into my own past to find them.
I well remember many moves I made in my life. In my younger years, I moved from rectory to rectory as parish assignments changed. It was hard to say good-bye to friends and to allow time to sink roots in a new place with new people. I bounced around quite a lot. My family moved, too, from one state to another. My brothers and sisters gradually moved to different states. Our mom and dad retired in Louisiana, the place where they grew up. They raised us in New York, New Jersey and, lastly, Connecticut. Looking back, it isn’t too difficult to recall the discomfort of all that movement. But once I arrived in a new place, there were people who went out of their way to make me feel at home, to settle me down and draw me into their lives. Friendship has been an abiding gift to me, offered all along these meandering corridors of life.
There are not many of us who can escape some serious movement in life. Even if we stay still in a place for a long time, we can get knocked off our feet by the changes brought on through the ravages of loss or illness and other unexpected wallops that can destabilize our comfort zones.
Iowa is a beautiful place. As I write this, there are people there who are preparing all kinds of welcomes for a newcomer who is coming from Chicago. They will go out of their way to find out about her likes, her favorite things and will offer these and more to her. They will make a home for her through the wondrously woven tapestries of friendship. She will receive what she has so freely given her life.
And then the move will soon lose its sting.
When the Big Move comes from this life to the next, it is common place for us to wish Eternal Rest to the blessed departed.
Yet I wonder if that is such a good or even real thing.
Growth entails movement. There is nothing in the universe that is not moving. Even God moved from somewhere to here. And there are the mysteries of movements within the Trinity itself. An eternal give and take of love – which is shared with us, which is why we are here and why we are going to the Ultimate “there” of eternity.
Jesus said that there are many mansions in the Kingdom of his Father. There might be moving vans too. Someday, there will come a young woman wanting to find a nice big house, high on a hill, a lovely spot from where can be seen the moving waters of the River of Life. She will want a big home, large enough for her to welcome friends who will come from Chicago. But there will be others. Friends will visit her from a place she grew to love most of all in the late afternoon of her life, a place called Iowa.
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