Category: Uncategorized

What really matters

Sr. Dorcee, beloved1 Comment

Is Lent about reaching a greater level of perfection?  Read on.

It does not matter what level of perfection you reach.  What others think or don’t think of how much you does not matter, not does your judgment of yourself.  All that matters if that mercy has taken you for ever, for the very origin of your existence.  Mercy called you to love, because mercy loved you.

Holiness means always affirming–before everything else, in everything else–the embrace of the Father, the merciful, pitying movement of Christ, his gesture, that is he himself, independent of everything that stirs and has the appearance of life in us. . . .

We must become more and more aware of God’s covenant with us, of life as God’s involvement with us, and therefore of the absolute and unmistakable importance of the irrational influence of our outbursts, of our projects.

Nothingness, destruction, exile is the life proper to the world, especially our life, without this covenant, which remains in me even in the destruction and in the desolation caused by my wicked heart.  Grace holds fast because God leads me to discover what he is and to understand that from my destruction he makes something new bud forth–an identification with him and the Father.

(Servant of God Luigi Giussani)

The Garments of God

Sr. Dorcee, beloved1 Comment

A Sunday poem about the Lord’s great mercy . . .

Sr. Dorcee, beloved's avatarWitnesses to Hope

The poem I have to share with you this Sunday is another by Jessica Powers:

The Garments of God

God sits on a chair of darkness in my soul.
He is God alone, supreme in His majesty.
I sit at His feet, a child in the dark beside Him;
my joy is aware of His glance and my sorrow is tempted
to nest on the thought that His face is turned from me.
He is clothed in the robes of His mercy, voluminous garments–
not velvet or silk and affable to the touch,
but fabric strong for a frantic hand to clutch,
and I hold to it fast with the fingers of my will.
Here is my cry of faith, my deep avowal
to the Divinity that I am but dust.
Here is the loud profession of my trust.
I need not go abroad
to the hills of speech or…

View original post 35 more words

“You are saved when the Lord looks for you.”

Sr. Dorcee, beloved1 Comment

“Some believe that faith and salvation come with our effort to look for, to seek the Lord.  Whereas, it’s the opposite: you are saved when the Lord looks for you, when He looks at you and you let yourself be looked at and sought for.  The Lord will look for you first.  And when you find him, you understand that he was waiting there looking at you.  He was expecting you from beforehand.

“This is salvation.  And you let yourself be loved.  Salvation is precisely this meeting where he works first.  If this meeting does not take place, we are not saved.”

Pope Francis

The first goal of spiritual combat?

Sr. Dorcee, beloved1 Comment

If you’re like me, one of the things that you battle–especially during a season like Lent–is discouragement.  You just keep failing at whatever.  Fr. Jacques Philippe, as always, has something encouraging to say, something doable.

The real spiritual battle, rather than the pursuit of invincibility or some other absolute infallibility beyond our capacity, consists principally in learning, without becoming too discouraged, to accept falling occasionally and not to lose our peace of heart if we should happen to do so lamentably, not to become excessively sad regarding our defeats and to know how to rebound from our falls to an even higher level.  This is always possible, but on the condition that we not panic and that we continue to maintain our peace.

One could, then, with reason, enunciate this principle: The first goal of spiritual combat, that toward which our efforts must above all else be directed, is not to always obtain a victory (over our temptations, our weaknesses, etc.), rather it is to learn to maintain peace of heart under all circumstances, even in the case of defeat.  It is only in this way that we can pursue the other goal, which is the elimination of our failures, our faults, our imperfections and sins.  This is ultimately the victory that we must want and desire, knowing, however, that it is not by our own strength that we will obtain it and, therefore, not pretending that we can obtain it immediately.  It is uniquely the grace of God that will obtain the victory for us, whose grace will be the more efficacious and rapid, the more we place maintaining our interior peace and sense of confident abandonment in the hands of our Father in heaven.

“As to your Lent . . . I can only tell you my own experience.”

Sr. Dorcee, belovedLeave a comment

Still good advice for this Lent as well!

Sr. Dorcee, beloved's avatarWitnesses to Hope

Wonderful Caryll Houselander writes:

As to your Lent . . . I can only tell you my own experience.  A mass of good resolutions, I think, are apt to end up in disappointment and to make one depressed.  Also direct fault-uprooting: it makes one concentrate too much on self, and that can be so depressing.  The only resolution I have ever found that works is: “Whenever I want to think of myself, I will think of God.”  Now, this does not mean, “I will make a long meditation on God,” but just some short sharp answer, so to speak, to my thought of self, in God.  For example:

“I am lonely, misunderstood, etc.”
“The loneliness of Christ at his trial; the misunderstanding even of his closest friends.”
Or:
“I have made a fool of myself.”
“Christ mocked–he felt it; he put the mocking first in foretelling his Passion–‘The Son of…

View original post 113 more words

To Clasp Hands

Sr. Dorcee, belovedLeave a comment

barnstormingblog's avatarBarnstorming

emmagibson

rockwell_worship Freedom of Worship by Norman Rockwell

To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.
~Karl Barth

Prayer may be easiest for the youngest among us.  It can be amazingly spontaneous for kids — an outright exclamation of joy, a crying plea for help, a word of unprompted gratitude.   As a child I can remember making up my own songs and monologues to God as I wandered alone in our farm’s woods, enjoying His company in my semi-solitude.  I’m not sure when I began to silence myself out of self-conscious embarrassment, but I stayed silent for many years, unwilling to put voice to the prayers that rattled in my head.  In my childhood, prayer in public schools had been hushed into a mere moment of silence, and intuitively I knew silence had never changed anything.  The world became more and more…

View original post 164 more words

” . . . or even just the desire . . .”

Sr. Dorcee, beloved1 Comment

I just started reading Pope Francis’ book, The Name of God is Mercy, and I’m already hooked.  Here’s a little bit from the “To the Reader” section by the editor, Andrea Tornielli.  He’s describing Pope Francis’ comments on part of the first draft.

Pope_Francis_greets_pilgrims_in_St_Peters_Square_before_the_Wed_general_audience_on_April_16_2014_Credit_Daniel_Ibanez_CNA.jpg“We discussed the difficulties of acknowledging ourselves as sinners, and in the first draft, I wrote that Francis asserted, ‘The medicine is there, the healing is there–if only we take a small step toward God.’ After reading the text, he called me and asked me to add ‘or even just the desire to take that step.’  It was a phrase that I had clumsily left out of my summary.  This addition, or rather, the proper restoration of the complete text, reveals the vast heart of the shepherd who seeks to align himself with the merciful hear of God and leaves nothing untried in reaching out to sinners.  He overlooks no possibility, no matter how small, in attempting to give the gift of forgiveness.  God awaits us with open arms; we need only take a step toward him like the Prodigal Son.  But if, weak as we are, we don’t have the strength to take that step, just the desire to take it is enough.  It’s already enough of a start for grace to work and mercy to be granted in accordance with the experience of a Church that does not see itself as a customs office but as an agent that seeks out every single possible way to forgive.”

Remember that God loves you

Sr. Dorcee, belovedLeave a comment

This is so important to know and remember.

A Year in the Word: God Loves You. Remember That!

dementia
JANUARY 24, 2016

WEB-BIBLE-VERSE-MACRO-LOVE-Wellford-Tiller-Shutterstock_9805444

The Lord, your God, is in your midst, a mighty savior; he will rejoice over you with gladness and renew you in his love. He will sing joyfully because of you.

—Zephaniah 3:17

So humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, that he may exalt you in due time. Cast all your worries upon him because he cares for you.

—1 Peter 5:6-7

More than anything in the world, I wish I could convince people that God loves them. It’s the reason I’m a missionary, the heart of every talk I give, the subtext of every chat I have with a small child: I want every person I meet to have a sense of the passionate, all-consuming love of God that I’ve had some small taste of.

As Christians, we hear that message over and again, but it’s been castrated, whitewashed and ground down until it means nothing. “God likes you,” or perhaps, “God is mildly fond of you.” Love has become some vague sense of approval instead of the stern-as-death, burn-away-your-sins, wild rejoicing love Scripture tells us of. And “God is friendly” doesn’t change lives. It doesn’t heal broken hearts or pull addicts from the miry pit or give anyone a reason to wake up in the morning. It doesn’t make saints.

So if there’s one thing I want us to come away with at the end of the Year in the Word, it’s a conviction that we are deeply, powerfully loved in a way that has to change our lives. There isn’t much you find more often in Scripture than this and many of my favorite verses (Isaiah 49:13–16; Isaiah 62:4–5; Song of Songs 4:7; Romans 5:8; Isaiah 54:10–11 to name a few) are just God finding yet another way to tell your heart how inestimably precious it is to him.

You read the rest here.

His goodness is never one whit diminished

Sr. Dorcee, belovedLeave a comment

Sr. Dorcee, beloved's avatarWitnesses to Hope

In the matter of
God’s goodness
we have got to be
irrational.

This is the way it is,
with love, for instance,
and with any other
deep down, visceral persuasion.
We go beyond reason,
we do not trust
appearances.
All surface indications
to the contrary
we have got to believe that
God is good,
unfailingly good to us.
Even in the thick
of troubles,
in moments of dire tragedy,
calamity,
disaster,
God is being good.
This is illogical,
it is nonsense
but it is true.
His goodness
is never
one whit diminished,
obscured
or blunted.

Monsignor James Turro

View original post

“Let Him find you everywhere he may look . . .”

Sr. Dorcee, beloved1 Comment

In this Year of Mercy, it is important for you to remember that the Shepherd is looking for you, not just everyone else.  We are all, in some sense of another, lost sheep.  Let Him find you.

232d18bcad3b096f6645381dd2c797ce.jpg

“The Gospel tells us that the Lord went in search of the lost sheep.  How are we to understand this search?  . . . Now if anybody seeks anything earnestly, it is not in one little corner only, but in every corner and place till he finds it.  And so God seeks you–let him find you everywhere he may look, in all circumstances of your life.  Whatever shame comes on you, know that that is the place in which God is looking for a gentle and meek soul; therefore suffer yourself to be constantly trodden underfoot until you have well learned your lesson of meekness.

“God is looking for a poor man; therefore if anyone will take from you your money, your property, or your friends, let him do so, that you may be found poor by God, who is looking for you in just such a state.  . . . Whatever happens to you from friends or from foes, nay from your very mother or sister–no matter how it comes or from whom, all whatsoever that comes to you prepares you for God’s searching and finding.”  (John Tauler)