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A blessed Christmas to you all!

Tonight is Witnesses to Hope.   I will be speaking on “The Smelly Stable.”  More information can be found at the “Witnesses to Hope” tab above.  Hope to see you all there.  If you can’t make it, you will be able to find  a recording of it here on this site in the next couple of days.

Laughter is good for the soul.  If you haven’t explored them yet, I’d like to introduce you to two other blogs on which I post periodically: Catholic Kids Say the Dearest Things, a collection of true stories, and Sr. Mary Z’s Wittizizms.  Sr. Mary Z. is one of the wittiest of our Sisters, and I can’t help but want to share her “wittizizms” with you all!

I am sorry that I have not posted for awhile.  I have had to deal with a “family situation” that has taken most of my time and energy.  I hope to reconnect with all of you soon.  In the meantime, dip into some old posts.  There’s good stuff there!  God bless.

From one of my best friends:

When I am incapable of praying, I want to keep telling Jesus that I love him.  It’s not difficult, and it keeps the fire going.  (Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face)

I’ve been thinking about why I am so drawn to poetry and art, and I think my best answer is that they draw me to the borders of God.  God is so un-understandable by us in our lowly humanity.  John of the Cross points out that the intellect “reaches God more by not understanding than by understanding.”  God has placed an insatiable desire in each of us for union with Him: “Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.”  Yet, we are limited in this life as to the satisfaction of that union.  And so for myself, I find myself coming back again and again to true poetry, art, and music–true in the sense that it is directed towards God and not towards itself.  It lifts my heart, it draws my spirit, towards the ineffable God who, as the author of The Cloud of Unknowing says so well: ”

Now you say, “How shall I proceed to think of God as he is in himself?”  To this I can only reply, “I do not know.”

With this question you bring me into the very darkness and cloud of unknowing that I want you to enter.  A man may know completely and ponder thoroughly every created thing and its works, yes, and God’s works, too, but not God himself.  Thought cannot comprehend God.  And so, I prefer to abandon all I know, choosing rather to love him whom I cannot know.  Though we cannot know him we can love him.  By love he may be touched and embraced, never by thought.  Of course, we do well at times to ponder God’s majesty or kindness for the insight these meditations may bring.  But in the real contemplative work you must set all this aside and cover it with a cloud of forgetting.  Then let your loving desire, gracious and devout, step bravely and joyfully beyond it and reach out to pierce the darkness above.  Yes, beat upon that thick cloud of unknowing with the dart of your loving desire and do not cease come what may.

Of course, God means for us to be able to move past all of the unknowns in our lives–the sufferings, the pains, the mysteries–or maybe I should say through all of them–to Him by pure love.  Yet, at the same time, He gives us beauty–found in art, poetry, music, our children, nature, wherever–as a wonderful means of drawing to His borders.  And sometimes we have to decide to make time for those things as well as all the other things in our lives.

Here are some 4-5 minute opportunities (although I’m well aware that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”).  May at least one of them draw you to the borders of God.

For starters:

Open Thou Mine Eyes

Sicut cervus desiderat

This poem and this face

More to come . . .

The quickest way for anyone to reach the sun and the light of day is not to run west, chasing after the setting sun, but to head east, plunging into the darkness until one comes to the sunrise.  (Jerry Sittser, quoted in Mary Beth Chapman, Choosing to See)

I would like to introduce you to the poetry of Paul Thigpen.  If you’re not familiar with his conversion story to Catholicism, you can read it here.  He is a prolific writer in many genres.  The poem below is from a number he has written on the Blessed Sacrament which I came across one day during a time of adoration.  I was so taken by the slim volume that, I must confess, I ignored the “Do not remove from this chapel” in order to “borrow” it for a couple of days in order to copy a few.

Confession Before the Blessed Sacrament

Grain of God,
I was the stone that ground You.
Holocaust of heaven,
I was the flame that consumed You.
Lamb on the altar,
I was the knife across Your throat.
Crucified One,
I was the nail in your hand.

Have mercy, Jesus.
Reshape this guilty soul to make
a stone in Your altar,
a flame in Your lamp,
a knife for Your bread,
a nail in Your table
where the world sits down
to feast.

I don’t believe I’ve recently shared anything written by Anthony Esolen.   Here’s a piece he wrote about the Church, “black but beautiful,” that is well worth reading.  Tony is a gifted writer as well as a lover of the Church.  You’ll get a little insight into the heart of God by reading this.  Click here.

I just got a copy of a little gem of a book, Safely Through the Storm, compiled by Deb Herbeck.  Debbie compiled 120 wonderful quotes guaranteed to help you to “lift up your hearts.”  I already have post-its marking many of them. I have to share at least a couple with you:

All things fail, but You, O Lord of them all, never fail. . . . You seem, O Lord, to give extreme tests to those who love You, but only that, in the extremity of their trials, they learn the greater extremity of Your love.  (St. Teresa of Avila)

Today, O Lord, I felt intense fear. My whole being seemed to be invaded by fear.  No peace, no rest; just plain fear: fear of mental breakdown, fear of living the wrong life, fear of rejection and condemnation, and fear of you . . . .

You, O Lord, have also known fear.  You have been deeply troubled; you sweat and tears were the signs of your fear.  Make my fear, O Lord, part of yours, so that it will lead me not to darkness but to the light, and will give me a new understanding of the hope of your cross.  (Fr. Henri Nouwen)