For the “Little People”
A beautiful Sunday-poem from Paul Thigpen:
For the “Little People,” Before the Blessed Sacrament
Tiny round God,
weak and small, You could fit in my hand, yet
all the span of the universe cannot contain You
all the powers of the cosmos cannot resist You.
You have made Yourself like those
who are close to Your Heart.
I carry them here with me today
the “little people”
invisible to the mighty but not to the Almighty.
The world reckons them a zero:
without wealth, without power,
without name, without face,
without arms, without voice.
But You too, Lord, are a Zero,
a white, wheaten Cipher,
a Figure on whom
they have failed to reckon.
When You foes seek to multiply
You will invade their equation
and bring them to naught:
You will nullify their pride,
annihilate their power,
annul their schemes
of domination.
But those of lowly degree
You will stand beside
to magnify.
Tiny round God,
blessed are You
who gather the poor
into the ring of Your riches,
the empty
into the cup of Your fullness,
the weak
into the crown of Your might,
the sorrowing
into the circle of Your dance.
Blessed are You,
encompassing Your people
without beginning, without end,
in Your love.
Far, far better things ahead
Let us long
“Let us long for those who are longing for us, hasten to those who are waiting for us, and ask those who look for our coming to intercede for us. . . . Thus, what is beyond our own powers to obtain will be granted through their intercession.” (St. Bernard of Clairvaux)
Let not your heart be troubled
Is your heart troubled by some way that you have failed the Lord? Amy Carmichael shows us the truth about how the Lord looks upon our failings:
John 13.38: Jesus answered him, . . . The cock shall not crow until you have denied Me three times.
John 14.1: Let not your heart be troubled.
“After speaking of Peter’s fall, which He foresaw, our dear Lord immediately says, Let not your heart be troubled. He saw across that day of grief to the restoration that would follow. His eyes were not fixed on the sad interruption to fellowship and joy, but on the hour when Peter would be back in love again, never again to grieve his Lord like that. And so to the surprised and surely greatly troubled little company He said, Let not your heart be troubled.
“Most of us have things which would naturally greatly trouble us. Let us face these things as our Lord Jesus did in John 13.38 and then go straight on into chapter 14.1.”
Staring at a Mirror
Fr. Pat McNulty from Madonna House’s reflections on the Gospel reading today:
Staring at a Mirror
by Fr. Pat McNulty.
I don’t understand why you’d do somethin’ like that right out before God an’ everybody.
Well, there was a trend in the ‘60’s to learn how to be at home “in your own skin,” your own emotions and fears. Since all of that was quite new to us bourgeois thinking folk we needed some help.
One of the popular methods in psychology at the time was called, “group therapy”—basically like-minded people working things out together with professional guidance.
Why didn’t y’all just go fishin’ and talk it out with God?
I guess because along the way we learned that some inner lies just don’t get unravelled in your life unless you “talk it out” with another human being who can challenge you and support you. (By the way, that’s really part of the genius of confession in our Catholic tradition.).
So one of the things we did in our group was to sit in front of another person and look into that person’s eyes for thirty seconds while repeating our own name over and over slowly without blinking or turning away. Then we changed places and let them do the same with us.
Afterwards we would come back together in the larger group and talk about what was going on during the eyeball-to-eyeball.
You can read the rest here.
Friday: from the archives
Rebbe Nachman of Breslov wrote this:
Know this: You should judge every person by his merits. Even someone who seems to be completely wicked, you must search and find that little speck of good, for in that place, he is not wicked. By this you will raise him up, and help him return to G-d. And you must also do this for yourself, finding your own good points, one after the other, and raising yourself up. This is how melodies are made, note after note.
The hallway
“I lost my tooth. The Lord has blessed me.”
That’s how Ann Voskamp’s daughter announced it to her:
When she’s in from the barn, she slams that back door, her hair dripping like she drowned in that shower that doused her curls and the smell of hogs, and she comes grinning and looking for me, holding out her hand.
She announces it like a heralding:
“I lost my tooth. The Lord has blessed me.”
In the east, the sun burns away the mist and I come to.
The Lord has blessed me.
How does she do that? How does she fill her gaping with celebrating and who sees blessing in loss and how can you just hold on to some peace and sanity and your half of the quilt even in nightmares?
You can read the rest here: “How to Handle Losses”
Witnesses to Hope 