Friday: from the archives
“God loves us not because we are lovable, but because He is love.”
(C.S. Lewis)
Brighter than the sun
“When you are praying alone, and your spirit is dejected, and you are wearied and oppressed by your loneliness, remember then, as always, that God the Trinity looks upon you with eyes brighter than the sun.” (St. John of Kronstadt)
The love of the Father (5)
Picking up again with selections from Fr. Joseph Langford’s, Mother Teresa’s Secret Fire:
“How often, in struggling with our weakness and failures, have we felt alone and ashamed, unworthy of God, tempted to flee from his presence as Adam and Eve after the Fall? After tasting this inner bitterness and pain wrought by our own sin and our own hands, have we not feared being abandoned by Love?”
“[T]he God revealed in Scripture [is] a God whose thirst moves him to reach out to us, to bring us back when we are lost; a God who is always seeking after us, always drawing us to himself.”
“In our darkest moments, in our own dark night of the soul, we all yearn to know that Love has not left us. We long to be assured that God does not flee from our faults, that he does not demand we first scale some moral Olympus before we can win back his favor.”
Petal upon pink petal
A Sunday-poem from Mother Mary Francis:
On Beholding a Field of Pink Lilies
Go, toss your pretty heads!
And who shall blame you,
Seeing your image in the eyes of God?
Petal upon pink petal,
Flirt with breezes
Leaning from dawn to watch your coquetry.
But suddenly my smiles
Of kind indulgence
Melt into tears to see you casting down,
Petal upon pink petal,
Your brief living
Gladly and gaily into the lap of God.
~Mother Mary Francis, P.C.C.
Friday: from the archives
Friday: from the archives
One of our sisters is currently going into Detroit one day a week to work with the homeless. As you can imagine, she can easily experience being overwhelmed by the greatness of the needs she encounters. Any of us can have that same experience: e.g. what difference are we making in the fight against abortion or trying to amend the pending health care package so it will exclude provisions for assisted suicide . . . or “just” trying to instill the truth in a teenager’s mind.
A saying from Mother Teresa comes to mind: “The whole work is only a drop in the ocean. But if we don’t put the drop in, the ocean would be one drop less.”
Don’t cease to put your drops in, drop by drop. Each one counts.
The blessing of the unoffended
Today being the feast of the Passion of St. John the Baptist, I cannot help but return to something about which I have posted before, and that is: the blessing of not being offended by however and whatever God is doing. In Luke 7, we read about John being in prison. He sends word to Jesus wondering, “Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another?” A puzzling thing for John, of all people, to ask. However, considering his situation at the time, not surprising. He’s in prison. Jesus has not come to visit him (as far as we know). So, as for many of us, it would be perfectly understandable to start dealing with doubts about Jesus.
I find Jesus’ answer even more astounding than John’s question. Jesus instructs John’s disciples to go to him and recite a list of the many wonders that Jesus has done. And then He concludes with that mysterious phrase: “And blessed is he who takes no offense at me.” Amy Carmichael was the one who unlocked this mystery for me. She refers to this verse many times in her writings. I’ll let her speak for herself . . . any may each of you respond to the grace of becoming one of the “unoffended.” She writes from the perspective of John’s thinking as he is listening to the report of his disciples:
Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627 – 1678)
Before they got to the end of the mighty things they were to tell him, his heart must have kindled with new hope: My Lord can do all that, He is doing all that, He is omnipotent. He is my loving Lord, and He is very near. I shall soon be free–He who is opening the prison doors of death will open my prison door. Can you not all but hear him say it, or at least feel him think it, as he listens to the story of ‘what things’ these men of his ‘have seen and heard’? And then, instead of a promise, a quick help, ‘Blessed is he who takes no offense at Me,’ and that was all. But it was enough. John accepted the unexplained. And a light shone in the cell, and in that light he lived till his prison door opened, and he stepped across its threshold into the Land of Light.
To many of you this is a familiar word, but to me it came afresh as I read these two verses one after the other last night [Luke 7.22,23], and it spoke to me as I thought of the many who are being trusted not to be offended in Him.
Let us pray for each other to each be able to accept the unexplained and not be offended in Him.
The Love of the Father (4)
More from Fr. Langford on the love of God for us:
“The God who delights in us does not do so from a distance. His longing for union with us, draws him to us constantly. God’s thirst draws him closer to us than we can imagine, closer than we are to ourselves.”
“God attends to every breath we take and every movement of our inmost heart with the fullness of his being. His presence to us is never just a portion of himself–as if the billions of people on the planet only had claim to their tiny portion of the Godhead. God is present to each of us with the totality of his being. No part of the Godhead is ever absent, or distracted, from any of us–so much so even ‘the hairs of your head are all numbered’ (Luke 12.7).
“God’s entire being attends to every faintest whisper of our soul–just as a mother who listens in the night for the breathing of her newborn. We each have, as it were, a personal channel connecting us to God, our own individual frequency to which he is tuned day and night. Even when we are not speaking to or thinking of him, God is listening to us.”
“When you’ve been waiting for an answer . . . and life seems silent”
This is one of those profound “out of the mouths of babes” stories. From Ann Voskamp: “When you’ve been waiting for an answer . . . and life seems silent.”
My heart is singing
A Sunday-poem from Amy Carmichael:
Too High for Me
I have no word,
But neither hath the bird,
And it is heard;
My heart is singing, singing all day long,
In quiet joy to Thee who art my Song.
For as Thy majesty,
So is Thy mercy,
So is Thy mercy,
My Lord and my God.
How intimate
Thy ways with those who wait
About Thy gate:
But who could show the fashion of such ways
In human words, and hymn them to Thy praise?
Too high for me,
Far shining mystery,
Too high to see;
But not too high to know, though out of reach
Of words to sing its gladness into speech.
Friday: from the archives
A day or two ago one who was with me prayed like this, “Lord, help me to welcome interruptions, especially when the interruption seems less important than the work I am trying to do.” That prayer has often been mine. I expect many of you have felt the need of the loving grace of the Lord to help you to welcome interruptions, especially when they do not seem to matter nearly so much as what we are doing at the moment. Thinking of this, I found myself this early morning in Lk. 9.11. The people followed our Lord Jesus (He had wanted to be alone with His disciples just then), and He welcomed them.
It is so easy to be too preoccupied to be welcoming. May the love of our Lord Jesus, for whose sake and in whose service we are here, so overflow from us that it will be natural for us to do as He would and be welcoming.
(Amy Carmichael, Thou Givest . . . They Gather, p. 94)
Witnesses to Hope 