From Cardinal Dolan a few minutes ago:
“A big chunk of my morning prayer are the words of St Peter. Prayers like ‘Lord, it’s good to be here’ and ‘Save me Lord, I’m drowning!'”
Author: Sr. Dorcee, beloved
I am the one whom Jesus loves.
The elevator of love
Your soul is called to raise itself to God by the elevator of love and not to climb the rough stairway of fear.
I have been meditating on this from St. Thérèse for a number of months now. My problem is that I keep getting off before reaching the top and start climbing the stairs. Then I remember the elevator! How about you?
Do not be preoccupied with your weakness
Mary words
“It is in Our Lady that God fell in love with Humanity.”
~Caryll Houselander
Friday: from the archives
Friday: from the archives
“God loves us not because we are lovable, but because He is love.”
(C.S. Lewis)
Brighter than the sun
“When you are praying alone, and your spirit is dejected, and you are wearied and oppressed by your loneliness, remember then, as always, that God the Trinity looks upon you with eyes brighter than the sun.” (St. John of Kronstadt)
The love of the Father (5)
Picking up again with selections from Fr. Joseph Langford’s, Mother Teresa’s Secret Fire:
“How often, in struggling with our weakness and failures, have we felt alone and ashamed, unworthy of God, tempted to flee from his presence as Adam and Eve after the Fall? After tasting this inner bitterness and pain wrought by our own sin and our own hands, have we not feared being abandoned by Love?”
“[T]he God revealed in Scripture [is] a God whose thirst moves him to reach out to us, to bring us back when we are lost; a God who is always seeking after us, always drawing us to himself.”
“In our darkest moments, in our own dark night of the soul, we all yearn to know that Love has not left us. We long to be assured that God does not flee from our faults, that he does not demand we first scale some moral Olympus before we can win back his favor.”
Petal upon pink petal
A Sunday-poem from Mother Mary Francis:
On Beholding a Field of Pink Lilies
Go, toss your pretty heads!
And who shall blame you,
Seeing your image in the eyes of God?
Petal upon pink petal,
Flirt with breezes
Leaning from dawn to watch your coquetry.
But suddenly my smiles
Of kind indulgence
Melt into tears to see you casting down,
Petal upon pink petal,
Your brief living
Gladly and gaily into the lap of God.
~Mother Mary Francis, P.C.C.
Friday: from the archives
Friday: from the archives
One of our sisters is currently going into Detroit one day a week to work with the homeless. As you can imagine, she can easily experience being overwhelmed by the greatness of the needs she encounters. Any of us can have that same experience: e.g. what difference are we making in the fight against abortion or trying to amend the pending health care package so it will exclude provisions for assisted suicide . . . or “just” trying to instill the truth in a teenager’s mind.
A saying from Mother Teresa comes to mind: “The whole work is only a drop in the ocean. But if we don’t put the drop in, the ocean would be one drop less.”
Don’t cease to put your drops in, drop by drop. Each one counts.
The blessing of the unoffended
Today being the feast of the Passion of St. John the Baptist, I cannot help but return to something about which I have posted before, and that is: the blessing of not being offended by however and whatever God is doing. In Luke 7, we read about John being in prison. He sends word to Jesus wondering, “Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another?” A puzzling thing for John, of all people, to ask. However, considering his situation at the time, not surprising. He’s in prison. Jesus has not come to visit him (as far as we know). So, as for many of us, it would be perfectly understandable to start dealing with doubts about Jesus.
I find Jesus’ answer even more astounding than John’s question. Jesus instructs John’s disciples to go to him and recite a list of the many wonders that Jesus has done. And then He concludes with that mysterious phrase: “And blessed is he who takes no offense at me.” Amy Carmichael was the one who unlocked this mystery for me. She refers to this verse many times in her writings. I’ll let her speak for herself . . . any may each of you respond to the grace of becoming one of the “unoffended.” She writes from the perspective of John’s thinking as he is listening to the report of his disciples:
Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627 – 1678)
Before they got to the end of the mighty things they were to tell him, his heart must have kindled with new hope: My Lord can do all that, He is doing all that, He is omnipotent. He is my loving Lord, and He is very near. I shall soon be free–He who is opening the prison doors of death will open my prison door. Can you not all but hear him say it, or at least feel him think it, as he listens to the story of ‘what things’ these men of his ‘have seen and heard’? And then, instead of a promise, a quick help, ‘Blessed is he who takes no offense at Me,’ and that was all. But it was enough. John accepted the unexplained. And a light shone in the cell, and in that light he lived till his prison door opened, and he stepped across its threshold into the Land of Light.
To many of you this is a familiar word, but to me it came afresh as I read these two verses one after the other last night [Luke 7.22,23], and it spoke to me as I thought of the many who are being trusted not to be offended in Him.
Let us pray for each other to each be able to accept the unexplained and not be offended in Him.
Witnesses to Hope 