Author: Sr. Dorcee, beloved

I am the one whom Jesus loves.

We don’t choose our favorite saints; they choose us.

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Someone said to me a few years ago: “We don’t choose our favorite saints; they choose us.”  I feel just that way about St. Thérèse of Lisieux.  She’s been a good friend for a long time.  I’ll let her speak for herself:

therese2Perfection seems easy to reach.  I realize that it is sufficient to recognize one’s own nothingness and to abandon oneself as a child in the arms of God. (LT 226)

The poorer you are the more Jesus will love you.  He will go far, very far, in search of you, if at times you wander off a little.  (LT 211)

Keep in mind the method used to make copper objects shine.  You smear them all over with mud, with things that make them dirty and dull; after this operation, they will shine again like gold.   Okay!  Temptations are like this mud for the soul: they serve for nothing less than to make the virtues which are opposed to these same temptations to shine forth.  (CRM 51)

Love knows how to draw profit from everything: from the good and from the bad that is found in us. (LT 142)

O, Mary, if I were Queen of Heaven, and you were Thérèse, I would wish to be Thérèse so that you could be Queen of Heaven.

More quotes from St. Thérèse can be found here.

Reflecting the light

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Someone shared something with me after the talk the other night that I thought you would all benefit from.  For those of you who weren’tLamp there, one of the points I made towards the end of the talk was that in order for lights to shine brightly, it needs to be dark around us.  In order for our lights to shine brightly in this world, the world needs to get darker.  In order to illustrate this point, I held up a little lit clay lamp and asked someone to turn off the lights.  After the lights came back on, a number of people remarked that the light was reflected brightly in my glasses.  I, of course, was not at all aware of that fact.  This woman who came up to me afterwards pointed out that all too often that is the case with each of us.  We are reflecting the hope of Christ, and we’re not aware of it at all.  So have hope.  You may feel like you’re in the darkness, but if you’re in Christ, you will reflect His light.  You may not see it, but others will.

Quotes from Witnesses to Hope inaugural talk

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It was wonderful to see so many of you last night at the first meeting of Witnesses to Hope.  As promised, you can find the recording of the talk under the tab above: “Talks/Witnesses to Hope”.  And here are some of the quotes from the talks.  Please, if any of you didn’t get to comment last night, feel free to leave one here.  We’d all love to hear from you! (Don’t worry if it doesn’t show up immediately–I have to approve any new contributors.) 

 The yes of Our Lady does not end on Good Friday with the Great Cry and the yielding of the spirit. . . . The faith and love of Our Lady last into Holy Saturday.  The dead body of the Son of God lies in the tomb, while His soul descends into Sheol, the Limbo of the Fathers.  Jesus goes down into the hideous kingdom of death to proclaim the power of the Cross and the coming victory of the Resurrection and to open Heaven’s gates to Adam and Eve and all the souls of the just. The Apostles, hopeless and forlorn, know none of this ‘as yet.’  St. John tells us, ‘they did not know the Scripture, that He must rise from the dead’ (Jn 20:9).  In all Israel, is there no faith in Jesus?  On this silent Saturday, this terrible Shabbat, while the Jews’ true Messiah sleeps the sleep of death, who burns the lights of hope?  Is there no loyal remnant?  There is, and its name is Mary.  In the fortitude of faith, she keeps the Sabbath candles alight for her Son.  That is why Saturday, the sacred day of her physical brethren, is Our Lady’s weekly festival.  On the first Holy Saturday, in the person of Mary of Nazareth, Israel now an unblemished bride, faces her hardest trial and through the fortitude of the Holy Spirit, is triumphant.  (Fr. John Saward, The Beauty of Holiness and the Holiness of Beauty, p. 142)

Give yourself fully to God. He will use you to accomplish great things, on the condition that you believer much more in his love for you than in your own weakness.  (Fr. Joseph Langford, Mother Teresa’s Secret Fire, p. 145)

How important can one small, unspectacular life be? Consider this: the good that each of us can accomplish even with limited resources and restricted reach, not even a Mother Teresa could achieve.  No one else on the planet, and no one else in history, possesses the same network of acquaintances and the same combination of talents and gifts as each one of us does—as you do. (ibid., p. 72)

Hope does not come from what I do, but from the awareness that there is Someone who loves me with this everlasting love, who calls me into being every instant, having pity on my nothingness. (Fr. Julian Carrón, quoted in Magnificat)

Witnesses of hope

It always amazes me how God orchestrates these kinds of things: a reading that probably went to press months ago destined to be read by me today.

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Sr. Dorcee, beloved1 Comment

Tonight is the inaugural meeting of Witnesses to Hope, so you can imagine my surprise as I read the meditation for today’s Mass found in Magnificat and found these words by Mother Elvira Petrozzi:

Yes, Love generates love, and today there is an immense need of persons able to generate hope in Love . . . [She goes on to describe their work with the poor and destitute.] Daily we live an experience of hope that gives life to those from whom life has been stolen.  Because of this, we belive that in the darkest night it is possible to find light again.  Even in the darkest sadness, joy can be rekindled.  Even in the bitterest loneliness, a friend’s love can pierce a hardened heart.  Yes, we want to be witnesses of this hope.We want to announce to this world that the secret of rebirth is to open our hearts to that marvelous Father who waits for each of us as His most precious child.  (emphasis added)

It always amazes me how God orchestrates these kinds of things: a reading that probably went to press months ago destined to be read by me today.

Loving Love and Beauty seeing

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A beautiful poem on beauty by one of our sisters, Sr. Stacy Whitfield:

                       Beauty

I love your wild extravagance,
          mountain flower and autumn leaves
Endowed with lovely lavishness,
          making much of what none sees.

Yet surely you would not adorn
          with greater glory grassy hills
Than sons and daughters made for joy
           and destined for more beauty still.

Oh give me hope to lift my soul
           to beauties that yet lie unseen,
That wait beyond the shimm’ring veil,
           awaiting Dawn’s eternity.

The wondrous views of heaven’s scope
           from which earth’s grand reflection springs,
The beauty that is fairer still
           than all your earthly artistry.

Oh give me faith and love to long
           to see all beauty’s heavenly source,
From which all loveliness is flowing,
           river-like upon its course.

The fullness of all beauty there
          on which to gaze to soul’s delight,
A heart all pure, a form all fair,
          the fountainhead of love, of light.

I shall abide in blissful rest,
          loving Love and Beauty seeing,
Taking in your loveliness
          with opened eyes, with transformed being.

                                          ©Sr. Stacy Whitfield (revised February 3, 1991)

Praying for our government

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I’ve been waiting for an article I read last month in the print version of Restoration to go online.  (Restoration is a Madonna House publication.)  It’s entitled “Praying for the American Government” and was written by Cynthia Donnelly, a Madonna House staffer, who lives in a house in Washington, D.C.. The house was set up by Cardinal James Hickey specifically for the purpose of praying for the American government.  I share the story here because sometimes I feel overwhelmed thinking about the best way to pray for our government. I suspect there are others of you out there who think the same.  After I read this article, I had hope. I thought, “I can do this–and actually I do do this.”  You can read it here.

God’s look of love

Fr. Conrad de Meester says God has no needs, but if He did, it would be to love . . .

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Continuing from yesterday.  

St. John of the Cross has three chapters in his Spiritual Canticle in which he writes about God’s look of love.  It is God looking at us in love that makes us lovable and beautiful.  “With God, to gaze at is to love.” (SC 31.5)  And it is in His looking at us, loving us unconditionally, that we, in turn, become beautiful. 

By infusing his grace in the soul, God makes it worthy and capable of his love.  (SC 32.5)

He does not love things because of what they are in themselves.  With God, to love the soul is to put her somehow in himself and to make her his equal. (SC 32.6)

St. John says that God’s gaze of love produces four things in our souls: “it cleanses, endows with grace, enriches, and illumines.” (SC 33.1)   And as God gazes on us–as we let ourselves be gazed upon–we become beautiful, and then that beauty draws His gaze even more towards us, and the more He gazes upon us, the more beautiful we become, and so on and so on.  “When God beholds the soul made attractive through grace, he is impelled to grant her more grace.” (SC 33.7)

Who can express how much God exalts the soul that pleases him? [And remember we please Him best when we let Him look at us with His love.]  Who can express how much God exalts the soul that pleases him?  It is impossible to do so, nor can this even be imagined, for after all, he does this as God, to show who he is. (SC 33.8) [emphasis added]

God is Love.  For Him to be is to love.  So the more we let Him, give Him permission, turn our souls toward Him, the more we are letting Him be God, so to speak.

Fr. Conrad de Meester says God has no needs, but if He did, it would be to love . . .    So let Him love you . . .

The Christian life is not a beauty pageant

God “did not love us to leave us to our ugliness but to change us and, disfigured as we were, to make us beautiful.” (Augustine)

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Sr. Dorcee, beloved3 Comments

I don’t know about you, but most of my life growing up I never considered myself as beautiful.  None of my girl friends really were either.  We weren’t part of the homecoming court or a cheerleader.  So what to do with all that I’ve been sharing about beauty?  Hopefully, most of us have made the important transition in our thinking to the realization that beauty is more than skin deep, as they say.  It’s the beauty of the soul, of the spirit that is most important.
      Unfortunately, too many of us who “know that in our heads” still feel like we fall short.  We don’t feel all that beautiful in our souls.  But the Christian life is not a beauty pageant.  Our beauty comes from within, from God who dwells within us.  St. Augustine says in one of his commentaries:

What then is this love that makes the loving soul beautiful?  God, who is always beautiful, who never loses his beauty, who never changes: he loved us first, he who is always beautiful.  And what were we when he loved us if not ugly and disfigured?  But he did not love us to leave us to our ugliness but to change us and, disfigured as we were, to make us beautiful.

It’s almost like sunbathing. We turn ourselves toward Him, and it is He who makes us beautiful.  We just need to be there in His presence.  It’s the sun that makes us tan; it’s the Son who makes us beautiful.  It’s not what we do, but what He does.  Fr. Blaise Arminjon in his Cantata of Love addresses this very point in his commentary on Song of Songs 4.1 “How beautiful you are, my love, how beautiful you are”:

This is why the Bride [and we are each His bride] would be quite wrong in worrying whether she is truly lovable or not or worthy or not of love since all her beauty is made of her resemblance to her Bridegroom, whole holy face was engraved in her since the very first day and wants to be more and more deeply engraved in her.  Thérèse of Lisieux understands this very well when she reads this verse of the Song: ‘Adorable face of Jesus, only beauty ravishing my heart, deign to imprint on me your divine resemblance so that you may not be able to look into my soul without seeing yourself.’

To be continued tomorrow . . .

Jacques Fesch

The power of music.

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Sr. Dorcee, beloved5 Comments

I am currently reading the prison letters of Jacques Fesch (book details above under “Books to read – biographies”), a self-described juvenile delinquent, found guilty of robbery and murder, but subsequently gave his life fully to Christ.  A very inspiring read.  His cause for canonization is now open.  The thing I wanted to share here is a paragraph from a letter in which he described a bit of what his life was life before conversion.  (Read it, and then I’ll comment on what struck me.)

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Jacques Fesch

During the six or seven years when I lived without faith, I did evil, much evil, less through deliberate malice than through heedlessness, egoism and hardness of heart.  I was incapable of loving anyone.  Father, mother, wife, child–I was indifferent to them all.  I felt no warmth of emotion for anyone or anything, unless perhaps it was music. (p.32)

It was that last phrase that struck me–and reminded me of the then Cardinal Ratzinger’s reflections in my previous post about the power of music.  It wasn’t music that brought about Fesch’s conversion, but it is striking to me that that was the only thing he mentioned as evoking any emotion in him at that time in his life.  Music, reflecting the true beauty of God, is extremely powerful.  I think of pieces like Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “The Lark Ascending” which I had the privilege of hearing performed in a Scottish cathedral years ago, or Rachmaninov’s liturgical pieces that move one’s heart to worship. 

What music moves you to greater love of God?

As for God, His way is perfect

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Some thoughts from Amy Carmichael that have inspired me time and again:

Ps 18.30: As for God, His way is perfect.

God is love, so we may change the word and say, As for Love, His way is perfect.  This has been helping me.
     One of the ways of Love is to prepare us beforehand for any hard thing that He knows is near.  Perhaps this word will be His loving preparation to some heart for a disappointment, or for some trial of faith, or some secret sorrow between the Father and His child.  As for Love, His way is perfect.  (Edges of His Ways, p. 131)

If we take this word seriously, it will be life-changing.