Monday, March 18, 2024

A HEART alone (George Herbert)

A broken ALTAR, Lord, thy servant rears,
Made of a heart and cemented with tears;
Whose parts are as thy hand did frame;
No workman's tool hath touch'd the same.
                       A HEART alone
                       Is such a stone,
                       As nothing but
                       Thy pow'r doth cut.
                       Wherefore each part
                       Of my hard heart
                       Meets in this frame
                       
To praise thy name.
That if I chance to hold my peace,
These stones to praise thee may not cease.
Oh, let thy blessed SACRIFICE be mine,
And sanctify this ALTAR to be thine.
 

--George Herbert, The Altar             

Image source 1: https://mybrightideasblog.com/heart-shaped-beach-stones-pebble-art/
Image source 2: Altar, Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Mill Valley, https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1732773300117418&set=a.1726464817414933
Poem source

Sunday, March 17, 2024

The Lord is greater than all (St. Patrick / Pope Benedict XVI)


The Lord is greater than all:
 I have said enough.

 --St. Patrick 

    If we look to the saints, this great luminous wake with which God has passed through history, we truly see that here is a force for good that survives through millennia; here is truly light from light. 

--Pope Benedict XVI 

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! 

Image source: Patrick banishes the snow and darkness with which a druid has cursed the land, Scenes from the Life of Saint Patrick, https://www.nationalgallery.ie/art-and-artists/highlights-collection/scenes-life-saint-patrick
Quotation source 1
Quotation source 2

Saturday, March 16, 2024

Feeling with our hearts (Helen Keller & Annie Sullivan)

   The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart. 

--Helen Keller & Annie Sullivan 

Image source: https://designshack.net/articles/trends/fractal-art/
Quotation source

Friday, March 15, 2024

The voice that speaks to our heart (Henri Nouwen)

   In the biblical understanding, our heart is at the center of our being. It’s not a muscle, but a symbol for the very center of our being. Now the beautiful thing about the heart is that the heart is the place where we are most ourselves. It is the very core of our being, the spiritual center of our being. Solitude and silence, for instance, are ways to get to the heart, because the heart is the place where God speaks to us, where we hear the voice that calls us beloved. This is precisely the most intimate place. 

   In the famous story, Elijah was standing in front of the cave. God was not in the storm, God was not in the fire and not in the earthquake, but God was in that soft little voice (see 1 Kings 19: 11–12). That soft little voice... speaks to the heart. Prayer and solitude are ways to listen to the voice that speaks to our heart, in the center of our being. One of the most amazing things is that if you enter deeper and deeper into that place, you not only meet God, but you meet the whole world there. 

--Henri Nouwen 

Image source: https://parpools.typepad.com/notes/2012/01/prayer-101-silence-solitude-2.html
Quotation source

Thursday, March 14, 2024

Sunday Gospel Reflection, March 17, 2024: I will place my law within them and write it upon their hearts...

What has God written upon our hearts?

    Jeremiah prophesies during the time of the demise of the kingdom of Judah, but the people of Judah resist his message of doom. Yet, even as their exile is upon them, the Lord promises the people that one day, there will be a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, a covenant more intimate than all previous covenants, for, the Lord says, I will place my law within them and write it upon their hearts. The new covenant will bind the people from within rather than from without; it will reside at the center of their beings, moving them from the depths of who they are to attend to their relationship with God. They might well pray Psalm 51, Create a clean heart in me, o God, expressing their desire to start over with a clean slate, that they might know the joy of God’s salvation. Their faith may have ebbed for a time, but they can regain that faith in the God who loves them, through prayer. 

    In John’s version of Jesus’ agony in the garden, Jesus acknowledges that he himself is the grain of wheat that will fall to the ground and die, but yet will produce much fruit. The Letter to the Hebrews reminds us that Jesus knew very human struggles; when he was in the flesh, he offered prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears to his Father. Through prayer, Jesus was able to go to his own heart, as we must learn to do, for to pray is to open ourselves to the God who loves us. As he falls to the ground and dies, Jesus is leading us to our own transformation, a dying to self, that we might follow him. What is written on our hearts can win out. 

    As in Jeremiah’s prophecy, Jesus’ promise also looks to the future: Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will preserve it for eternal life. The joy of the eternal salvation Jesus obtains for us lies in our recognition that this life is not what it’s all about; we endure its difficulties, but the promise of life to come makes it possible for us to endure them. Our access to faith ebbs and flows throughout our lives, as does our access to our own hearts. A closed heart is a sign of the ebbing tide of faith. At such times, the covenant God wrote upon it is still there; we just don’t have access to it. What God writes is that he loves us, and that love is absolute. To access the absolute love of God, we need to be willing to go to our hearts, where he dwells, and we do so as we open, turning to him in prayer, and journeying with him, through death to new life. 

This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture class.
Image source: www.wordclouds.com

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

The same kind of mercy (Rudy Francisco)

She asks me to kill the spider.
Instead, I get the most
peaceful weapons I can find.
I take a cup and a napkin.
I catch the spider, put it outside
and allow it to walk away. 

If I am ever caught in the wrong place
at the wrong time, just being alive
and not bothering anyone,
I hope I am greeted
with the same kind
of mercy. 

―Rudy Francisco, Helium                   

Image source: 
https://www.reddit.com/r/spiders/comments/qvpkbg/im_allowing_this_spider_to_live_in_my_kitchen/
Poem source

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

If we walk in the light (Fr. Patrick Summerhayes / Henri Nouwen)


They say that in faith, the longest journey
you will ever take is
from your head to your heart.

--Fr. Patrick Summerhays,
 Homily, OLMC, Mill Valley,
December 11, 2022 

    Trusting in the unconditional love of God: that is the way to which Jesus calls us. The more firmly you grasp this, the more readily will you be able to perceive why there is so much suspicion, jealousy, bitterness, vindictiveness, hatred, violence, and discord in our world. Jesus himself interprets this by comparing God’s love to the light. He says: 

Though the light has come into the world people have preferred darkness to light because their deeds were evil. And indeed, everybody who does wrong hates the light and avoids it, to prevent his actions from being shown up; but whoever does the truth comes out into the light, so that what he is doing may plainly appear as done in God. 

    Jesus sees the evil in this world as a lack of trust in God’s love. He makes us see that we persistently fall back on ourselves, rely more on ourselves than on God, and are inclined more to love of self than love of God. So we remain in darkness. If we walk in the light, then we are enabled to acknowledge that everything good, beautiful, and true comes from God and is offered to us in love. 

--Henri Nouwen 

Image source: Lauren Wright Pittman, Born Again, https://www.churchsp.org/nicodemus-in-art/
Nouwen quotation source