Author: Sr. Dorcee, beloved

I am the one whom Jesus loves.

Look straight up and praise

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I’m still delving deep into Amy Carmichael’s commentaries on the psalms.  I can’t help but share the precious tidbits I keep finding.  Here are her comments on that transition we find in the psalms from weeping to praise, that encouragement to look straight up and praise God with a song (when we least feel like it . . .):

“I have been noticing how in the Psalms every experience of distress turns to a straight look-up, and praise.  I had not noticed till recently that the Psalm of the weaned child (Ps 131) ends like that: ‘O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time forth and for evermore.’ And today I read Ps 69, and there again I found the look-up that ends in praise.  Kay translates v. 10, ‘I wept soul-tears’, and that is just what it is like at times, when all we have done to help another soul seems to end in failure.  Even so, ‘I will praise the name of God with a song, and will magnify Him with thanksgiving’ (v. 30).

 “Surely this emphasis on praise in the Psalms is because to turn from discouraging things and look up with a song in one’s heart is the only sure way of continuance.  We sink down into what David calls mire, slime, deep waters, if we do not quickly look up, and turning our back on the discouraging, set our faces again toward the sunrising.

“Perhaps that is what v. 32 of that Psalm means, ‘You who seek God, let your hearts revive.’

“I found all this very reviving.  It led straight to ‘They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength’ [Is 40.31], and ‘Let them that love Him be as the sun when he rises in his might’[Jgs 5.31].” (Edges, p.159)

“Birds deserve one whole psalm of thanksgiving”

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Birds

That God made birds is surely in His favor.
I write them as His courtesies of love.
Hidden in leaves, they offer me sweet savor
of lightsome music; when they streak above

my garden wall they brush my scene with color.
They are embroideries upon the grass.
I write the gayest stitched-in blossoms duller
than birds which change their patterns as I pass.

I nurse a holy envy of St. Francis
who lured the birds to nestle at his breast.
Yet I am grateful for this one which dances
across my lawn, a reckless anapest.

Subjects for gratitude push up my living
praise to a sum that tempts the infinite;
but birds deserve one whole psalm of thanksgiving
and these words are my antiphon for it.

Jessica Powers (1956)

When we can’t understand

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Often we find ourselves in situations where it is so difficult to understand what God is doing, why He is allowing some particular thing to happen, why it appears that Satan has the upper hand.  Her is a bit of sage wisdom from Amy Carmichael which I trust will provide encouragement for any of you in those types of situations:

Some find it hard to believe that Satan (a conquered foe) can interfere in the affairs of a child of God.  Yet we read of St. Paul earnestly endeavoring to do something and Satan hindering him [1 Thess 2.18].  The reason for Satan’s power was not prayerlessness.  ‘Night and day am I praying with passionate earnestness that I may see your faces’ [1 Thess 3.10 Way].  Satan could not touch his spirit, his heart’s affections, or any other vital thing in him, but he could so order events that the apostle could not do for these children of his love all that he longed to do.  He could only write letters.  He could not be with them

And in the familiar 2 Cor 12.7, we have a still stranger thing, a messenger from Satan allowed to do bodily hurt, and allowed to continue to hurt, we are not told for how long.

So it is clear that there are activities in the Unseen which are not explained to us.  Every now and then the curtain between is drawn aside for a moment, and we see.  But it is soon drawn back again.

Only this we know: ‘On the day I called, thou didst answer me, my strength of soul thou didst increase’ [v. 3].  If that be so what does anything matter? Oh, to use all disappointments, delays and trials of faith and patience as St. Paul used his.  What golden gain came to our glorious Lord because of these experiences.  And see how he closes this letter to the Thessalonians which is so full of human longing: ‘The very God of peace sanctify you wholly: and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.  Faithful is He that calls you, Who also shall do it’ [1 Thess 5.23,24].  Faithful is He: He will do it.” (AC, Edges, pp. 141-142)

I will be able

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“Purgatory: perhaps the deepest but also the most blissful kind of suffering.  The terrible torture of having to settle now all the things we have dreaded a whole life long.  The doors we have frantically held shut are now torn open.  But all the while this knowledge: now for the first time I will be able to do it–that ultimate thing in me, that total thing.  Now I can feel my wings growing; now I am fully becoming myself.” (Hans Urs von Balthasar)

May all the souls of our beloved dead quickly come to the place of becoming fully themselves in God . . .

No obstacles for the Beloved

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The love of our Beloved for us:

One morning during the daily Bible reading on our mission compound in Palestine, our little Arab nurse read from Daily Light a quotation from the Song of Songs, “The voice of my Beloved! behold, he cometh leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills” (Song of Songs 2.8).  When asked what the verse meant, she looked up with a happy smile of understanding and said, “It means there are no obstacles which our Savior’s love cannot overcome, and that to him, mountains of difficulty are as easy as an asphalt road!” (from the preface to Hinds feet on High Places, Hannah Hurnard)

“His answer changed my life.”

Sr. Dorcee, beloved7 Comments

As some of you know, I recently gave a talk at Witnesses to Hope on undoing the sin of Eve by deciding to trust in God’s goodness.  At the end of the talk I shared about what the Lord had been teaching me about the importance of thanking Him in all circumstances.  This morning I was reading from Consoling the Heart of Jesus, a Do-It-Yourself Retreat by Fr. Michael Gaitley.  Fr. Michael was describing a conversation he had had with an older priest about trusting in Jesus.  I was so encouraged to read this conclusion to the conversation:

[The older priest asked:] “And how do you live trust?  What’s its concrete expression in your daily living?”

I was stumped, “I don’t know.”

His answer changed my life: “The way you live trust is by praise and thanksgiving, to praise and thank God in all things.  That’s what the Lord said to St. Faustina.”

“The way you live trust is by praise and thanksgiving, to praise and thank God in all things.”  May we allow that answer to change our lives as well.  I thank God for each of you . . . .

Lift up your eyes

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One of our Sisters is celebrating her birthday today.  We have a strange custom of decorating the bathroom the night before the person’s birthday, so she is greeted first thing in the morning with birthday wishes.  This Sister did not expect this, however, because she was staying at one of our other houses overnight.  That’s the background.

She got up this morning, went to the bathroom, looked in the toilet and saw something red floating there.  She started asking herself: “What is that?!  Is it a bug?!”  A few moments later, she looked up to see all the decorations she had missed when she first walked in.  Including a note about  how beautifully and wonderfully made she was. The “floater” was confetti that one of the Sisters had tossed into the toilet water.  (Like I said . . . strange custom.)  By only looking in the toilet, she had missed the other decorations.

Spiritual lesson to be learned here: Don’t spend your life looking in the toilet and missing the eternal realities.  Lift up your eyes and heart!  😉