Be His still-remaining

Sr. Dorcee, beloved1 Comment

How a poem about our Lady on this Mother’s Day? This is a poem I have posted before. It’s also about the Ascension, about her experience after Jesus ascended. Seems doubly appropriate for today.

Our Lady of the Assumption

Fold your love like hands around the moment.
Keep it for conference with your heart, that exit
Caught on clocks, by dutiful scribes recorded
Less truly than in archives of yor soul.

Turn back from His going, be His still-remaining.
Lift the familiar latch on cottage door . . .
Discover His voice in corners, hear His footfalls
Run down the porches of your thoughts.  No powers

However hoarse with joy, no Dominations
Curved with adoration guess what whispers
Of “Mother, look!” and “Mother, hurry!”
Glance off the cottage walls in shafts of glory.

How shall your heart keep swinging longer, Mary?
Quickly, quickly, take the sturdy needle
Before your soul crowds through your flesh!  the needle
And stout black thread will save you.  Take the sandal

Peter left for mending.  After that,
The time is short, with bread to bake for John.

Mother Mary Francis

May the blessings

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For any and all being ordained to the priesthood this spring. A Sunday-poem by John O’Donohue, a priest himself.

May the blessings released through your hands
Cause windows to open in darkened minds.

May the sufferings your calling brings
Be but winter before the spring.

May the companionship of your doubt
Restore what your beliefs leave out.

May the secret hungers of your heart
Harvest from emptiness its sacred fruit.

May your solitude be a voyage
Into the wilderness and wonder of God.

May your words have the prophetic edge
To enable the heart to hear itself.

May the silence where your calling dwells
Foster your freedom in all you do and feel.

May you find words full of divine warmth
To clothe the dying in the language of dawn.

May the slow light of the Eucharist
Be a sure shelter around your future.

And I would add: May you always find your home deep, deep in the Heart of Christ and never venture from there. 

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In an empty church

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A beautiful short Sunday-poem. Using just a few words, Joseph Massey creates an exquisite image of prayer in an empty church. Do sit with it for a moment.

       In an empty church
in the middle of the day
dark but for stained glass
       flooded with sun, a prayer
held in the breath in my hands. 

 

You can find his latest bestselling book of poems here. 

I wish for a hidden hut

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An anonymous lovely, lilting poem from Sally Read’s 100 Great Catholic Poems that describes the longing of many of our hearts.

The Song of Manchán the Hermit

I wish, O Son of the Living God, O Ancient Eternal King,
For a hidden hut in the wilderness, a simple secluded thing.

The all-blithe lithe little lark in his place, chanting his lightsome lay;
The calm, clear pool of the Spirit’s grace, washing m sins away.

A wide, wild woodland on every side, its shades the nursery
Of glad-voiced songsters, who at day-dawn chant their sweet psalm for me.

A southern aspect to catch the sun, a brook across the floor,
A choice land, rich with gracious gifts, down-stretching from my door.

Few men and wise, these would I prize, men of content and power,
To raise Thy praise throughout the days at each canonical hour.

Four times three, three times four, fitted for every need,
To the King of the Sun praying each one, this were a grace, indeed.

Twelve in the church to chant the hours, kneeling there twain and twain;
And I before, near the chancel door, listening their low refrain.

A pleasant church with an Altar-cloth, where Christ sits at the board,
And a shining candle shedding its ray on the white words of the Lord.

Brief meals between, when prayer is done, our modest needs supply;
No greed in our share of the simple fare, no boasting or ribaldry.

This is the husbandry I choose, laborious, simple, free,
The fragrant leek about my door, the hen and the humble bee.

Rough raiment of tweed, enough for my need, this will my King allow;
And I to be sitting praying to God under every leafy bough. 

“My Mind, My Enemy”

Sr. Dorcee, beloved4 Comments

This is such an incredibly beautiful piece by Sarah Clarkson, one of my favorite writers. Beautifully written with a piece of wisdom we all need to hear.

My Mind, My Enemy

When mental illness struck, my mind became my enemy. Would I battle it, or learn to love it?

When I was a child my mind was a gift.

Not the practical sort you’re supposed to use diligently but the magical kind, the sort of gift you’d find in the hands of your fairy godmother. My imagination was my secret companion. She was mighty and she was wild, and my first memories shimmer and burn with the beauty she revealed. The ordinary scenes of my outdoorsy, bookish childhood became the stuff of high fantasy. She made dryads of my backyard trees, filled the sky with talking stars, and made a heroine of sunburned little me on the commonest of days. I might return from an afternoon at play with the wistful air of an orphan or the lofty brow of a princess in search of her lost throne.

As I grew older, the scenes in my mind spilled into words that I began to scrawl into half-baked poetry and tentative stories about kindly unicorns, then adventure tales, then yearning, windswept epics. As I stood at the cusp of adulthood, I found that my imagination led me into wide, starlit spaces within my own heart, where I lay hushed and wakeful in the long evenings, reaching toward a mystery I desired with all my being.

She brought me so much goodness, until the day she betrayed me.

You can read the rest here. You can also listen to it here.

The woman robed in red

Sr. Dorcee, beloved1 Comment

I’m not sure where I found this Sunday-poem or who the poet is. There are some very beautiful thoughts expressed here which I pray touches your heart and its desires.

Woman of fire,
woman of desire,
woman of great passions,
Woman of the lavish gesture.
Mary of Magdala!

The icons show you robed in red,
covered in the blood of the Lamb,
a living flame, a soul set afire.
You are there at the foot of the cross:
kneeling, bending low, crushed by sorrow,
your face in the dust.

You love,
but in that hour of darkness,
dare not look on the disfigured Face of Love.
It is enough that you are there,
brought low with Him,
Enough for you
the Blood dripping from the wounded feet
Blood seeping into the earth
to mingle with your tears.

You seek Him on your bed at night,
Him whom your heart loves.
David’s song is on your lips:
“Of Thee my heart has spoken. Seek his face.
It is Thy Face, O Lord, that I seek;
hide not Thy face from me” (Ps 26:8-9).

His silence speaks.
His absence is a presence.
And so you rise to go about the city,
drawn out, drawn on by Love’s lingering fragrance.
“Draw me, we will run after Thee, in the odor of your ointments” (Song of Songs 1.3).

You seek Him by night
in the streets and broadways;
you seek Him whom your soul loves,
with nought by your heart’s desire for compass.
You seek Him but do not find Him.

In this, Mary, you are friend to every seeker.
In this, you are a sister to every lover.
In this you are close to us who walk in darkness
and wait in the shadows,
and ask of every watchman,
“Have you seen Him whom my soul loves?”

Guide us, Mary, to the garden of new beginnings.
Let us follow you in the night.
Wake our souls before the rising of the sun.
Weep that we may weep
and in weeping become penetrable to joy.

The Gardener waits,
the earth beneath His feet watered by your tears.
Turn, Mary, that with you we may turn
and, being converted,
behold His Face
and hear His voice
and, like you, be sent to say only this:
“I have seen the Lord” (John 20:18). 

Red Cast rehearsal of LDS Church’s “Savior of the World” – Conference Center – Salt Lake City, Utah

Hold onto him!

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I must confess that I have always been bothered by Christ’s words to Mary Magdalene at the tomb, telling her to not hold on to him. I’ve read many commentaries on that passage but still find my heart protesting. How can you ask her–how can you ask me–to not hold on to you? But then I came across this:

“Yes, by all means, hold on to him! Grasp his cloak or grasp his legs, or throw your arms around his body and hold him tight! But you must do this in the right way, for he cannot be held by merely human arms. Rather, it is the love of your heart which alone can hold him, the faith and hope that impel you to surrender yourself trustingly into his embrace. You can hold him when you let yourself first be held.”
(Joshua Elner)

“Noli me tangere” – Giotto

A prayer for Holy Saturday

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I found this prayer somewhere–sorry, I have no memory of where–and since then we have prayed it together in our community every Holy Saturday morning.

Lord Jesus Christ, in the darkness of death; in the abyss of the deepest loneliness abides now and always the powerful protection of Your Love; in the midst of Your hiding we can by now sing the Hallelujah of the saved. Grant us the humble simplicity of faith, which will not be swerved when You call us in the hours of darkness and abandonment, when everything seems difficult: grant us, in this time when a mortal battle is being fought all around You, enough light not to lose sight of You; enough light that we can give it also to those still in need of it. Let the mystery of Your Easter joy shine like the light of dawn on our days; grant us that we may be truly men and women of Easter in the midst of the Holy Saturday of history. Grant us that through the bright and dark days of these times we may always with a light heart find ourselves on the path towards Your future glory. Amen.

Fr. Gregory Kroug

Kisses

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I want to share one more thing this Good Friday from almost twenty years ago when I was meditating on this painting by Giotto.

As I prayed with this image, I placed myself at the feet of Jesus, my heart so deeply desiring to venerate his most sacred feet, even in his death, but feeling so extremely unworthy. This is the prayer that I then prayed:

“I will kiss your feet while your Mother kisses your Holy Face–and You will be so wholly taken by her kisses that you will mistake mine for hers and be so perfectly comforted in your Passion that you will not notice those of your betrayers . . . Jesus, I offer you her sweet kisses. Be taken by them. In the company of the myriad of those who kiss your hands, your handmaids who have gone before me, those you have lifted up by your favor. We will cover you with kisses . . . Who am I that I even dare to touch your sacred feet with my sullied lips? Yet I give you my poor little kisses; your sacred flesh will purify them as does a hot burning coal (cf. I 6:6-7)”

Addendum:
In the years since then, the Lord has shown me clearly how much he values my kisses. And, to be sure, yours as well. 

Smite a rock

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Good Friday

Am I a stone and not a sheep
  That I can stand, O Christ, beneath Thy Cross,
  To number drop by drop They Blood’s slow loss,
And yet not weep?

Not so those women loved
  Who with exceeding grief lamented Thee;
  Not so fallen Peter weeping bitterly;
Not so the the thief was moved;

Not so the Sun and Moon
  Which hid their faces in a starless sky,
A horror of great darkness at broad noon–
  I, only I.

Yet give not o’er,
  But seek Thy sheep, true Shepherd of the flock;
Greater than Moses, turn and look once more
  And smite a rock.

Christina Rossetti

K. Arguello