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A poem from Luci Shaw:

God Speaks in Blue

My friend hands me a gift
from overseas.  “Here,” she says.
“For you.”  The small packet rustles
with dry particles.  Through thin paper
my fingers feel the nubs.  I thank her,

 turning over the plain brown envelope.
There from the other side a photo–
the vivid, blunt cross of Mecanopsis Betonicifolia,
a Himalayan Blue Poppy–looks at me with
its gold eye, four azure petals blazing.

A blue to color a dream.  The blue
of Mary’s mantle according to Raphael.
The blue at the heart of a gas flame, within
an ice cave, one a cerulean door in a white wall
on Santorini, a kind of blue that

catches my heart ajar and blows it wide open.
Dry seeds and a picture, until next spring.
But, oh, if only I could be alive enough
to burn like this flower.  If only
I could bloom…

Yesterday I was talking a walk around Gallup Park along the Huron River.  When I turned one corner, I was struck by the brightness of the sun being reflected off a portion of the river.  I started thinking about how that brightness was the result of the sun being reflected of many individual drops of water.  We are like those drops of water.  Many days we can wonder whether our life counts for anything.  We’re just living our ordinary daily lives, trying to love God and love His people.  Who even knows about us?  Yet, we are part of a people, the people of God. And when His light shines on us, we do reflect it.

In order for light to reflect off of something, the object must be pure, and that requires purification –the purification that happens right there in the ordinariness of our lives. This reminds me of…

A Sunday-poem for you:

And That Will Be Heaven

and that will be heaven

and that will be heaven
at last      the first unclouded
seeing

to stand like the sunflower
turned full face to the sun    drenched
in light    in the still centre
held    while the circling planets
hum with an utter joy
seeing and knowing
at last     in every particle
seen and known     and not turning
away
never turning away
again

~Evangeline Patterson

In Genesis 28, Jacob, after his dream of the ladder, says a very profound thing: “Surely the Lord is in this place; and I did not know it.”  How many of us do not recognize that the Lord is in the very places of our lives.  We wonder: “Where are You?”  Or we shout: “Where are You?”  And like Jacob, we fail to see that He is surely in this place.

In a marvelous little book, Into Your Hands, Father, Fr. Wilfrid Stinissen writes:

“There is not a single moment when God is not communicating himself to us.  Most of what occurs in our lives seems to happen accidentally and at random.  Now and then God reveals his presence. At times we see the thread and we thank him, but he is always there; everything speaks of him.” There is an unbroken continuity in God’s action.  ‘He who keeps…

Just after the climax of the trilogy The Lord of the Rings, Sam Gamgee discovers that his friend Gandalf was not dead (as he thought) but alive.
He cries, “I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself! Is everything sad going to come untrue?”
The answer of Christianity to that question is – yes.
Everything sad is going to come untrue and it will somehow be greater for having once been broken and lost.

Embracing the Christian doctrines of the incarnation and Cross brings profound consolation in the face of suffering.
The doctrine of the resurrection can instill us with a powerful hope.
It promises that we will get the life we most longed for,
but it will be an infinitely more glorious world
than if there had never been the need for bravery, endurance, sacrifice, or salvation.
~Pastor Tim Keller in Reason for…

I love pondering the post-Resurrection appearances of Christ.  I guess I feel in good company when those who had spent three solid years with Christ failed to recognize Him.  It’s always a reminder to me of the need to sharpen our eyes of faith, to look for Him in His many disguises.  In today’s Gospel, we see Jesus showing a sense of humor (in my opinion).  He repeats advice that He had given them when He first met them: put the net down on the other side.  How many times does that happen to us, that God comes to us in a familiar way?  Let’s not miss His appearances to us in our every day life.

{This is a repost . . .]

Have you ever wondered why Saturday is traditionally observed as the day of Our Lady? A few years ago I was reading a book by John Saward (The Beauty of Holiness, the Holiness of Beauty), and, in a section about our Lady, he described Mary’s unfailing faith through the long, terrible day after Christ’s death when she alone kept faith in her Son.   I had never before heard of this mariological foundation for Saturday being traditionally her day:

The yes [her continued yes to the Lord that began with her Annunciation yes] of Our Lady does not end on Good Friday and [Christ’s] 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…

Following up on yesterday’s gospel which is one of my very favorite readings:  I did a study once on all the New Testament scriptures that talk about women at the feet of Jesus.  I usually meditate on various of them this time of year because most of them occurred near and at the time of the Lord’s Passion (like yesterday’s reading).  Luke 7 recounts a story similar to yesterday’s Gospel, but in a different context, and in it, it is said that the woman “covered his feet with kisses” (Lk 7:38).  Jesus himself remarks on this to Simon (at whose house he was) and actually upbraids him for not welcoming Him in the same fashion. “You did not give me a kiss . . . ”  Let not the same be said of us.  Let us then not hold back our kisses for His sacred feet.  Mother Teresa once said…

“See where he stands behind our wall.  He looks in at the window, he peers through the lattice.”  (Song of Songs 2.9)

This is the point of Lent: to open up to our Beloved who is looking in at us through the window.  Fr. Blaise Arminjon writes:  “For if God is love, there can only be in the final analysis a single sin: not to love, to refuse to open oneself to the waiting love.”  After Adam and Eve sinned, the first words of God to them were “Where are you?” (Gen 3.9)  God is all about relationship.  He experienced the loss of relationship with Adam and Eve.  His first words to them were not: “What did you do?” but “Where are you?”  And that is what Lent is supposed to be all about for us: our relationship with Him, not what we have done.  (If we concentrate on relationship…

photo by Josh Scholten

Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.
~Mary Oliver, “The Uses of Sorrow”

The bright sadness of Lent
is a box full of darkness
given to us by someone who loves us.

It takes a lifetime to understand,
if we ever do,
this gift with which we are entrusted
is meant to
hand off to another and another
whom we love just as well.

Opening the box
allows light in
where none was before.
Sorrow shines bright
reaching up
from the deep well
of our loving
and being loved.