I came across this quote again today and wanted to reshare it with all of you. So encouraging.
In Paradisium
One of our Sisters wrote this incredibly beautiful version of In Paradisium. Here she is playing it while Sister Rachel sings it at the funeral of a dear friend.
Light-through-darkness
We all go through periods of darkness. I hope what Dom Hubert vanZeller has to say in his book, The Inner Search, helps you as much as it has helped me.
“Darkness is not only prayer going wrong; it is everything going wrong. And over and above this it is having to believe that everything is going right.”
“Darkness is failure . . . Darkness is fear, is regret, is doubt. Darkness is looking back an saying: ‘I have been deluded from the start; it has all been a mistake.’ Darkness is looking forward and saying: ‘I do not know what to do next; I have lost m way and it is too late now to find it.’ It is the endlessness of darkness that constitutes a peculiar pain.”
“Darkness is not only when our ideals are shown to be unattainable, but when they are shown to be not ideals at all. When they are seen to be selfish ambitions.
“Darkness is not only when our motives are misunderstood and condemned, but when they are seen by ourselves to have been worthy of condemnation–when we realize that we have ourselves misunderstood them all along.
“Darkness is not only when our zeal for souls is blocked at every turn, but when we discover that it never has been zeal for souls. Darkness is seeing what a zeal we have for self.
“Only when we know that we have nothing of our own to show for our service of God, that we have no offering to make but our failures, sins, helplessness and folly are we made empty enough to be restocked with new graces. It is light-through-darkness that brings us to this stage.”
“We have to be disillusioned.”
“The essential vocation, the primary call to which our response is of supreme moment, is not to this or that exercise but to love. This is the initial grace–love. To work out this grace on our own is beyond us. We need more grace. We need Love itself to do it for us.
“Love works in faith, and faith means the night . . . . Anyone can give a notional assent to the proposition: ‘I am a weak man’; what God want is a more absolute recognition than that.”
“Neither books nor directors nor penance nor systems of prayer can do service for the training which the Spirit Himself imparts. The soul must ‘be still and wait for the Lord.’ Always there will be that pendulum swing of darkness and light, knowing and unknowing, learning and unlearning, losing and finding again.”
A Year of Jubilee
It’s Sunday, and since it is indeed a Year of Jubilee, I thought it would be appropriate to share this poem by Anne Porter. My favorite part is her ending.
A Year of Jubilee
You grew up like a sapling
With fishermen and shepherds
And the God-haunted mountains
Of your small holy country.
You looked the same
As all your people
So for a time
You went unnoticed
You who were later killed
Most cruelly
One Sabbath morning
You stood up in the temple
Young village rabbi
From the provinces
And you unrolled the scroll
And read aloud form it
The Word welled up to us
Out of Isaiah’s book
As fresh as the clear streams
That well up in the mountains
“The Spirit of the Lord
Has come upon me
He has anointed me
To bring glad tidings
To the poor
To heal the brokenhearted
To give the blind their sight
To free the captives
Release the prisoners and proclaim
A year of jubilee.”
We recognized the voice
This was the Promised One
This was the Shepherd
Our hearts were burning
We listened when you told us
About our heavenly Father
Who wishes us
To cherish one another
To be forgiving, generous
As he is himself
And festive, carefree
As the meadow-flowers
Lights as the swallows
He wishes us
To be like children
You also told us
Our Father
Blesses us most of all
When we are poor
As even when our bodies
Have grown old
And our heads are filled with confusion
He will not love us
Any the less for that.
A hole in our hearts
This beautiful woman just passed into the full presence of Jesus. Deanna was a woman filled with light and love. She joins another of our former speakers, Kathleen Kustusch, in the line of the saints. Here is a link to her Witnesses to Hope talk from 2014. Give it a listen–it’s only 18 minutes long.
“Rejoice always, pray constantly, give thanks in all circumstances.”
How much you are loved
This is how much you are loved:
“God loves us as he loves himself. The Father does not love us any less than he loves his only-begotten Son. In other words, with an infinite love. God does not love less, because he loves first, from the very beginning!” (Pope Leo, Jubilee of Families, Children, Grandparents and Elderly)
Look at Him who is looking at you
“Holiness consists in enduring God’s glance. It may appear mere passivity to withstand the look of an eye; but everyone knows how much exertion is required when this occurs in an essential encounter. Our glances mostly brush by each other indirectly, or they turn quickly away, or they give themselves not personally but only socially. So too do we constantly flee from God into a distance that is theoretical, rhetorical, sentimental, aesthetic, or, most frequently, pious. Or we flee from him to external works. And yet, the best thing would be to surrender one’s naked heart to the fire of this all-penetrating glance. The heart would then itself have to catch fire, if it were not always artificially dispersing the rays that come to it as through a magnifying glance. Such enduring would be the opposite of a stoic’s hardening his face: it would be yielding, declaring oneself beaten, capitulating, entrusting oneself, casting oneself into him. It would be childlike loving, since for children the glance of the father is not painful: with wide-open eyes they look into his. Little Thérèse–great little Thérèse–could do it. Augustine’s formula on the essence of eternity: videntem videre–‘to look at him who is looking at you.'” (von Balthasar)
Stay close to the fire
“If you are cold, do you think it sensible to move away from the fire? Precisely because you feel your heart frozen you should go more frequently to Holy Communion, provided you feel a sincere desire to love Jesus Christ.” (St. Alphonsus Liguori)
Letting Jesus look at us
“Contemplation is always the meeting of two looks: our look at God’s and God’s look at us. If, at times our gaze weakens, God’s never does. Sometimes Eucharistic contemplation just means keeping Jesus company, being there under his gaze, giving him the joy of contemplating us, too.” (Cardinal Cantalamessa)
A Song for Caitlin
Sharing this lovely poem by J.B. Toner. May you be blessed.
Song for Caitlin
God’s earth is full of beauty, that I know;
It scintillates and dances in my eyes,
Her laughter rolls and rings and multiplies
And makes the turning vistas chime and glow–
But little peace it grants me, even so:
I cannot cling to bright salvation’s prize;
The Heaven-light that lights my way soon dies,
For want of faith (perhaps) through which to flow.
And yet my world holds hope and purity,
Our Lady’s Son redeemed the depths of Hell–
And traces of her grace I still can see,
Like sun-sparked droplets from a silver well:
This medal round my neck which is, to me,
Three strands of hair from my Galadriel.
Witnesses to Hope 