Feast of the Incarnation

This beautiful Christmas hymn has been a favorite of mine since I was a child.

May the blessings and joys of Christ's holy incarnation be with everyone this day and always!

 
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Coming!

(Image from Wikimedia Commons)

"Kingdom people are history makers. They break through the small kingdoms of this world to an alternative and much larger world, God’s full creation. People who are still living in the false self are history stoppers. They use God and religion to protect their own status and the status quo of the world that sustains them. They are often fearful people, the nice proper folks of every age who think like everybody else thinks and who have no power to break through, or as Jesus’ opening words put it, “to change” (Mark 1: 15; Matthew 4: 17)." 

 -Richard Rohr, "Preparing for Christmas: Daily Meditations for Advent"
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The true consolation of Advent

When I was a little girl, my Sunday School teachers and church choir director made it very plain that Advent was only partly about the coming of Christmas. It was really more about Christ's second coming in glory.

Some time ago I found a blog with a posting that talks about that by referring to the Book of Revelation - also known as the Apocalypse:

Spoiler alert: if you want to know what the Apocalypse is about, I will happily summarize it for you in two words: God wins. The longer version is that no matter how mighty and oppressive earthly powers may be and no matter how dire the plight of the faithful may be, the victory is ultimately God's and those who hold fast to God and remain faithful will share in God's victory. All the rest, as they say, is commentary.

This is a book written from a pastoral perspective to people in times of persecution and affliction, a book designed to strengthen faith and give hope, a book that calls us all to repent and turn from the ways and values of the world and hold fast to God.
-- Paul

God wins. With the world (and the earth) facing such horrible calamities today, that's a good thing to know.
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The time for contemplation

(Image from Wikimedia Commons)

Here's something Thomas Merton said that I had not come across before today:

"The time for contemplation is the spring that feeds our action, and our action will be as deep as the spring. We need time to allow the spirit to clear the obstacles - the clinging debris and mud - that keeps the spring from flowing freely from its clear, deep source. And we need time for the spring to overflow into insightful and compassionate action."

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The Feast of Christ the King

Image from Wikimedia Commons

I have long admired the Jesuit priest, Fr. John Kavanaugh who died earlier this month. Here's something he said in a reflection about yesterday's observance:

In answering Pilate, Jesus says that his kingdom is not of this world. It is a kingdom not fought for with old means of warfare. Rather, it testifies to truth. It will not kill for the truth, it will die for it. If Jesus is king, he will be a suffering king. He will not demand ransom. He will be ransom. He will win, not by spilling the blood of others, but by offering up his own.

Over the centuries Christians have had trouble with this new kind of king, so much have we hungered for the earthly assurances of conquest and control. But it is equally true that the centuries have seen men and women who recognized in Jesus a kingliness that summoned nothing less than the loyalty of a free human heart. Something was unlocked in them when they discovered a "lord of life" whose ambition was not to dominate humanity but to save and serve it.

Those words, "the loyalty of a free human heart", are very powerful. If this is what Christ wants from us, how can we possibly justify the oppression of others or even stand by passively when we see that oppression?
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Election Day, 2012

"Election Day in Philadelphia"

Artist: John Lewis Krimmel

Did you know that at one time Election Day sermons were customary? Here's an excerpt from a more up to date one by Forrest Church:

But, in the largest sense of the word, neither [candidate] is going to save us. Here the old Puritan preachers were right. The votes we cast for president are much less important than the votes we cast with and in our lives. Then God, greater than all and yet present in each, will save us. God will save us by looking through our eyes, and touching our hearts, and applying our hands to the saving work of neighborly love. Conversely, wherever you see neighborly hate, God is absent. God's love unites us, it doesn't divide us, either within or among ourselves.

If the United States of America is about anything it is about unity amidst diversity. E pluribus unum. Not one for many, but out of many, one.

May we all pray for our nation this night and extend compassion and lovingkindness in our prayers both to the candidates we support and to the candidates we oppose. And let us do what we can to make our nation just and good whatever our personal political outlook may be.
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St. Francis of Assisi

Someone gave me the above icon a number of years ago. I have affixed it to the wall just beside my front door so that I see it whenever I leave the house by that way.

Here is something St. Francis said:

Where there is charity and wisdom, there is neither fear nor ignorance. Where there is patience and humility, there is neither anger nor vexation. Where there is poverty and joy, there is neither greed nor avarice. Where there is peace and meditation, there is neither anxiety nor doubt.

And here's something I found about Francis that I think is quite beautiful:

St. Francis of Assisi fully understood this mysterious relationship between the world and the person seized by God's love. At times, Francis could perhaps seem to us to be too simple, too naive, to content our complicated modern minds. We pass far too quickly over his suffering, his hard and penitential life, his long hours of contemplation, his courage in face of the challenges of his time. What was the fruit of this life entirely given to God? A man that the animals considered their friend; a man who considered the sun and the moon as members of his family; a mendicant monk who gave all to the poor and who called death his sister. Francis dared to plumb the depths of the mystery of creation: everything was created for the glory of God; everything should render God this glory.

-- Sister Marjorie Keenan, RSHM

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What color is an apple?

"Still Life - Apples and a Jar"

Artist: Samuel Peploe

Image from Wikimedia Commons

I found this on the Spiritual Literacy blog that is kept by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat:

We always like to keep up with what Robert Fulghum is writing about in his online journal. He has a knack for finding delightful things in the ordinary experiences of everyday life. In an entry for May 31, 2009, he shares an encounter with a group of little children out for a stroll after a rainstorm. One of the children steps out of the line because he's seen a rainbow — not in the sky but in a puddle of water. His act of wonder opens the eyes of the other kids and the teacher to the path of imagination. This teaching story reminds us of the boy who, when asks the color of apples, says "white." The teacher says apples can be red or green or yellow, but the boy has looked inside them.

Wonder. Do you have it?

What's inside. Do you look?
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Forgiveness as defiance

Artist: Rembrandt

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Forgiveness as defiance. Now there's a concept, isn't it? Take a look:

Forgiveness is an embrace, across all barriers, against all odds, in defiance of all that is mean and petty and vindictive and cruel in this life.

— Kent Nerburn in Calm Surrender

Worth pondering. With sincere thoughtfulness.
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Every bit of love

Artist: Karl Nordström
Image from Wikimedia Commons

Quite a lovely image, I think:

It is good and true to think that every ray of the sun touching the earth has the sun at the other end of it. Just so, every bit of love upon God’s earth has God at the other end of it.

- Mark Guy Pearse

Hidden meanings

Artist: Henri Rousseau

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Today I offer you the following. Make of it what you will!

"Everything in this world has a hidden meaning. . . Men, animals, trees, stars, these are all hieroglyphics. . . When you see them, you do not understand them. You think they are really men, animals, trees, stars. It is only years later, that you understand."

— Nikos Kazantskis in Zorba the Greek

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Our challenge

Artist: Ludwig Rösch 

Image from Wikimedia Commons 

I first discovered the recorded talks by John Main back in the early 90s. He was very much a forerunner in the re-discovery, really, of meditative practices in the Christian tradition.

"Our challenge as Christians is not to try to convert people around us to our way of belief but to love them, to be ourselves living incarnations of what we believe, to live what we believe and to love what we believe." 

-- Fr. John Main 

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Learning to see the face of Jesus

Artist: Alexander Beridze

(Image from Wikimedia Commons)

I read on another blog today, the story of someone doing a pastoral internship who was very frustrated by the need to have patience with a mentally handicapped man who liked to hang around the church. Finally the intern asked the supervising priest how he managed so well.

"Well," [the priest] said, "he’s Jesus." 

Before [the intern] could fall into a deep hole of guilt and pointless shame, [the supervisor] added this... The secret to a successful Christian life, he said, is seeing the face of Jesus in others and also knowing that you are Jesus’ face to someone else.  

I was taught this many, many years ago when I was child. I'm not very good at it at all. And, yet, knowing that this is what it's all about brings me great consolation.
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Being itself

12th Century icon 

Image from Wikimedia Commons 

Here's something very, very refreshing by Richard Rohr:

It seems to me that we have made God a being instead of Being itself. Both John Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas said “Deus est Ens,” or “God is existence itself.” That is the first name of God in the Book of Exodus (3:14), which could rightly be translated “I am Am-ness,” or perhaps as Acts of the Apostles puts it: “God is the one in whom we live, and move, and have our being”

God is not A being alongside other beings. To believe that, to assert that, is actually to limit God when you think about it.
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Knowing when we have fallen

Artist: Pieter Bruegel the Elder 

Image from Wikimedia Commons 

Oh, I think this is so very, very true. And, if we let it, this realization can help us cultivate compassion for those who have no idea at all that they are in spiritual darkness:

We stumble and fall constantly even when we are most enlightened. But when we are in true spiritual darkness, we do not even know that we have fallen.

-- Thomas Merton 

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The job of loving

"Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody's business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy." 

-- Fr. Thomas Merton

(Image from Wikimedia Commons)
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Christ Feeding the Multitude

This is a Coptic icon. I found it over on Wikimedia Commons.

Something to gladden your heart

About those troubles

A repost that, undoubtedly, is timely for many.

 

Artist: Vincent van Gogh

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Sometimes it's very difficult to counteract the false message of the "prosperity gospel" that is being so widely preached today. As a result, many people "lose their faith" when they are beset by difficulties. I really like the following:

God has not promised to take away our trials, but to help us to change our attitudes toward them. That is what holiness really is. In this life, happiness is rooted in our basic attitude toward reality.

-- Thomas Keating

Core contemplative principles

Image from Wikimedia Commons

I found the following on facebook:

"In many shamanic societies, if you came to a medicine person complaining of being disheartened, dispirited, or depressed, they would ask one of four questions. When did you stop dancing? When did you stop singing? When did you stop being enchanted by stories? When did you stop finding comfort in the sweet territory of silence?" 

These are excellent questions, I would suggest, to be used by spiritual directors today.
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