Author: Sr. Dorcee, beloved

I am the one whom Jesus loves.

Oh, My beloved

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One of my favorite meditations this time of year.  So utterly profound.

Jesus is sweet in the bowing of His head and in death, sweet in the stretching out of 15863His arms, sweet in the nailing together of His feet with one nail.

Sweet in the bowing of His head; for bending down His head form the cross He seems to say to His loved one: ‘Oh My beloved, how often hast thou desired to enjoy the kiss of My mouth, declaring to Me through thy comrades, “Let Him kiss me with the kiss of His mouth.” I am ready, I bow My head, I offer My mouth to be kissed as much as thou wilt.  And say not in your heart, “I seek not such a kiss which is without beauty and loveliness, but I seek a glorious kiss which the angelic citizens of heaven seek ever to enjoy.” Be not thus mistaken, for unless you kiss that first mouth you will never reach to that other.  Kiss therefore the mouth that I now offer to you, for though it be without beauty or loveliness it is not without grace.’

Sweet in the stretching out of His arms; for in extending His arms He reveals how He desires our embraces, and seems to say: ‘O all you that labor and are heavy burdened, come and be refreshed within My arms.  See how I am ready to gather you all within My arms; then come all.  Let no one fear to be repulsed, for I desire not the death of the sinner but that he be converted and live.  My delights are to be with the children of men.’

Sweet in the opening of His side; for that opening reveals to us the riches of His goodness and the charity of His Heart towards us.

Sweet in the nailing of His feet with one nail; for by that He says to us: ‘Lo, if you think that I must flee from you, and so are slow to come to Me, knowing that I am swift as the hart, see that My feet are fixed by a nail, so that I can in no wise flee from you, for mercy has me bound fast.  I cannot flee from you as your sins deserve, for My hands are fixed with nails.’

Good Jesus, humble Lord, dear Lord, sweet in mouth, sweet in ear, unknowable and untellably pleasant, kind and merciful, mighty, wise, benign, generous but not rash, exceedingly sweet and gentle!  Thou alone art the highest good, beautiful above the sons of men, fair and comely, the chosen of thousands and all-desirable!  Fair things become the fair.  O my Lord, now my whole desires Thine arms and Thy kiss.  I desire nought but Thee, as though no reward were promised.  If hell and heaven were not, yet would I long for Thee, for Thy sweet good and for Thyself.  Thou art my constant meditation, my word, my work.  Amen.”

– St. Anselm

and Angels danced

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A Sunday poem . . .

Sr. Dorcee, beloved's avatarWitnesses to Hope

A wonderful poem about the joy of the angels when any of us repents of our sin:

Choreography for Angels

I say to you, that there is joy among the angels in heaven upon one sinner doing penance . . . (Luke 15.10)

Who spun these Angels into dance
When wars are needing artillery
Of spirits’ cannonading.  Armistice
Wants first the over-powering wings, and they
Are occupied with pirouettes!  Who did this?

Gone penitent, I caused it.  I confess it.

Who tilted flames of Seraphim
In arabesques of pure delightedness?
Is not the cosmic crisis begging fire
For full destruction of hate’s hazarding?
Why Seraphs swirling flames on floors of heaven?

I lit the heavens, when I bent my head.

Who lined mystic corps-de-ballet
Of Cherubim?  Who set in pas-de-deux
This Power with this Principality?
Why these Archangels not on mission sent
Today, but waltzing on stars, and singing?

I…

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If you see a man with one eye

Sr. Dorcee, beloved1 Comment

Good advice.

Christians . . . should strive in all things and ought not to pass judgment of any kind on anyone, neither on the prostitute nor on sinners nor on disorderly persons.  But they should look upon all persons with a single mind and a pure eye, so that it may be for such a person almost a natural and fixed attitude never to despise or judge or abhor anyone or to divide people according to categories.  If you see a man with one eye, do not make any judgment in your heart, but regard him as though he were whole.  If someone has a maimed hand, see him not as maimed.  See the crippled as straight, the paralytic as healthy.  For this is purity of heart, that, when you see the sinners and the weak, you have compassion and show mercy toward them.  (Pseudo Macarius)

And I would add: “If you see yourself with one eye, do not make any judgment in your heart . . . and so on.”

Nothing is too small, pathetic or shameful

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I’m one of those people who constantly gets stuck in the rut of trying to fix myself, to make myself better, and then to approach God.  Be perfect before I seek His help.  Well, you can imagine how well that works out.  God, in His great mercy, keeps working on changing that attitude.  That’s why I love this piece by Sister Ruth Burrows.  The answer is in the second to the last sentence.  Read on.

Let me stress a little more the supreme importance of refusing to evade our own personal poverty, refusing to be discouraged by it.  Only too easily, self-disgust and discouragement become spiritual waste.  I think it is of utmost importance to use everything for loving.  After all, our lives are made up of “nothings”!  We can be on the lookout for the big occasions and let slip the hundreds of little opportunities when divine love is asking to be let in.

Nothing about us is hidden from the loving, compassionate eyes of God, but when we are feeling miserable within, shamed, silly, dirty even, we hide away.  God isn’t in all this, we implicitly assume.  But God is in all this, to us, contemptible stuff.  We love very much by this lack of childlike trust.

Through what is happening to us, we are brought to face our sinfulness, our selfishness, our inadequacy or whatever it is.  Yet this is God’s moment.  It, I believe, in the constant, almost hourly choices that these humiliating, self-revealing experiences afford us, that true holiness and union with God is brought about.  I’m sure that what God longs for us to do is never to stop looking in his compassionate eyes.  Nothing is too small, pathetic or shameful to be used for love.

A heartfelt sigh to God

Sr. Dorcee, beloved1 Comment

And what about those times when you feel like you’re just not making a good confession?

No matter how weak you are, do not think that what you need to do in order to enjoy his redemption is impossible or so difficult that you have to despair of obtaining it.  It is enough for you to direct a heartfelt sigh to God, with sorrow for having offended such a Father and with the intention of amendment.  Make known your sins to a priest who can absolve you.  For your greater consolation, even your ears of flesh will hear the sentence of your trial in what is said to you: “I absolve you from all your sins in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

Even if it seems to you that your sorrow is not as perfect as it ought to be, and for this reason you lose heart, do not be discouraged.  So great are the Lord’s desires you be saved that he supplies what we lack with the privilege he gave to his sacrament of making one who is without sorrow to be contrite.  If it seems to one that you are not even capable of doing this little bit, I tell you not to presume to do it on your own, but call upon the heavenly Father.  Ask him, through Jesus Christ, his Son, to help you to be sorry for your past life, to propose amendment for the future, to confess well, and finally, for whatever else may be necessary.  He is such that there is no reason to expect from his hands anything other than every kind of tenderness and help.  Since he is the one who gives pardon, he inspires disposition for it.

If, with all this, you do not feel consolation, even though you have heard the sentence of your absolution, do not be discouraged or abandon what you have begun.  If in one confession you do not experience consolation, in another or in others you will . . . . Certainly it happens that the words of sacramental absolution may not give the man such certainty of pardon that he may have security or evidence of it.  But they do provide such rest and consolation that the powers of his soul, humiliated and broken by sin, rejoice.  (St. John of Avila)

“The depressed wait for long nights to end . . .”

Sr. Dorcee, beloved1 Comment

A very good article by Stephen H. Webb on depression from First Things:

Christians don’t talk enough about depression. Emotional pain, for one thing, can be hard to share. Despair can feel very physical for the sufferer, weighing heavily on the heart and clogging the brain, but its surface features can be easily overlooked or
missing altogether. A depression that finally lifts leaves no scars on the
skin to show how deep the wound was and how long the healing took. Besides, such anguish is so personal that it is hard to share it with anyone other than members of the family or the medical profession.

Those who suffer from depression are usually very grateful for all the pharmacological breakthroughs man_head_hands.jpegsurrounding serotonin and other neurotransmitters. Philip Rieff brilliantly criticized the triumph of the therapeutic in American culture, but the fact is that chemistry has rendered psychology suspect at best or irrelevant at worst in the treatment of mental illness. This trend has not served the church well. Theology is a form—arguably the original form—of therapy, and if the church is to compete with the pharmacy, it has to have some good news of its own concerning depression.

Depression is a complex phenomenon with multi-causal roots. Medical definitions are informative and essential, but no other kind of pain has such a visceral spiritual component. Ironically, faith can be a source of aggravation as well as relief. Anyone who even thinks about suicide typically feels deeply ashamed, but Christians in this situation have even more guilt heaped upon them due to the way suicide is usually treated as the gravest of sins. The helpful sometimes tell Christian depressants that they should look outward, to the service of others, and upward toward God rather than obsessing over inward states of mind that are typically defined in secular psychological terms. This is surely right, but Paul tells us that the faithful have the mind of Christ. Does that apply to the faithful whose minds have become utterly confused?

Many depressed Christians instinctively turn to God-help, not self-help, literature, but there is little of that out there, and God himself is distant to their cries. Perhaps that can serve as a theological definition of depression: When your need for God is as great as your feeling of God’s absence.

You can read the rest here.

A story of a monk

Sr. Dorcee, beloved1 Comment

“James writes, ‘Mercy triumphs over judgment’ (2.13).  He is probably talking about the mercy practiced by human beings, but the statement is true to a much greater extent if it is applied to God’s mercy.  It will be God’s mercy in the end that will triumph over all injustices and the lack of human mercy.  The author of the life of Silvanus of Mount Athos narrates a rather significant episode about a holy monk.  This monk, a great man of God, had attained such a compassion for humanity that he was always weeping and imploring God’s mercy for himself and everyone else.  One day when he was close to despair, the Lord appeared to him and asked, ‘Why are you weeping like this?  Do you not know that I am the one who will judge the world?  I will have mercy on every person who called on God even once in his life.'” (Fr. Raneiro Cantalamessa, The Gaze of Mercy)