I surrender, Lord, all I have and hold (Dan Schutte)

Take my heart, O Lord, take my hopes and dreams,

Take my mind with all its plans and schemes.

Give me nothing more than your love and grace.

These alone, O God, are enough for me.

Take my thoughts, O Lord, and my memory,

Take my tears, my joys, my liberty.

Give me nothing more than your love and grace.

These alone, O God, are enough for me.

I surrender, Lord, all I have and hold,

I return to you your gifts untold,

Give me nothing more than your love and grace.

These alone, O God, are enough for me.

When the darkness falls on my final days,

Take the very breath that sang your praise.

Give me nothing more than your love and grace.

These alone, O God, are enough for me.

To hear composer Dan Schutte’s hymn, These Alone Are Enough, based on a prayer by St. Ignatius of Loyola, click on the video below.

Image source:  https://gregburdine.com/surrender-all-follow-the-call/

Video source

An act of self-surrender (C. S. Lewis)

    Since I am I, I must make an act of self-surrender, however small or however easy, in living to God rather than to myself.

--C. S. Lewis          

Image source:  https://utmost.org/the-surrendered-life/

Quotation source

The gospel asks us to surrender (Fr. Ron Rolheiser OMI)

     If you were to take all of Jesus’ teachings, all that’s said about belief, morality, and piety in the gospel, and boil that down to a single precept, you could put it into one word:  surrender.  The gospel asks us to surrender.

    But to surrender what exactly?  Our individualism, our fears, our security, and our need to stand out and be special.  It asks us to surrender our agendas, ambition, anger, bitterness, and all those things that keep us standing alone, apart.

--Fr. Ron Rolheiser, OMI

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Image source:  https://inspiringbetterlife.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-worst-thought-best-outcome.html

Mind transformation (Bishop Robert Barron)

  The word often misleadingly translated as repent is metanoiete.  This Greek term is based upon two words, meta (beyond) and nous (mind or spirit), and thus, in its most basic form, it means something like, go beyond the mind you have.

  The English word repent has a moralizing overtone, suggesting a change in behavior or action, whereas Jesus’ term seems to be hinting at a change at a far more fundamental level of one’s being.  Jesus urges his listeners to change their way of knowing, their way of perceiving and grasping reality, their mode of seeing.

  What Jesus implies is this:  a new state of affairs has arrived, the divine and human have met, but the way you customarily see is going to blind you to this novelty.  Minds, eyes, ears, senses, perceptions – all have to be opened up, turned around, revitalized.  Metanoia, mind transformation, is Jesus’ first recommendation.

--Bishop Robert Barron, Gospel Reflection, June 11, 2020

Image source:  https://www.earth.com/news/brain-adapts-blind-people/

Humility (Madeleine L'Engle)

  The moment humility becomes self-conscious, it becomes hubris.  One cannot be humble and aware of oneself at the same time… Humility is throwing oneself away in complete concentration on something or someone else.

--Madeleine L’Engle, 

A Circle of Quiet

Image source:  https://holisticunconscious.wordpress.com/2014/03/25/without-complete-humility-joy-is-impossible/

Have you made your soul old? (St. John Chrysostom)

    This is what we do with houses:  we keep constantly repairing them as they wear old.  You should do the same to yourself.  Have you sinned today?  Have you made your soul old?  Do not despair, do not despond, but renew your soul by repentance and tears and Confession and by doing good things.  And never cease doing this.

--St. John Chrysostom    

Image source:  Gerard Hoet, Jesus Upbraidth the Scribes and the Pharisees

https://truthbook.com/jesus/illustrated-stories/the-two-sons-parable

Quotation source

Sunday Gospel Reflection, September 27, 2020: Christ Jesus, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped

Christ Jesus, though he was in the form of God, 

did not regard equality with God something to be grasped…

What are you willing to surrender for the Lord?

  The prophet Ezekiel has a tough time making the people of Israel understand that God wants them to take responsibility for their own actions:  Hear now, house of Israel:  Is it my way that is unfair, or rather, are not your ways unfair?  Ezekiel prescribes personal accountability because God’s desire is that the people be in relationship with God.  If they take responsibility for their actions, turning from the wickedness they have committed, then God will remember God’s mercies, as Psalm 25 states, and forgive, opening them to relationship.  The psalmist desires to know what the Lord desires of him:  Your ways, O Lord, make known to me, teach me your paths.  Help me to understand what you want, the psalmist is saying, and I will step away from the sins that have dominated my life.

  When, in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus recounts the parable of the two sons, he is speaking to the chief priests and elders of the people who desperately need to turn from sin, to turn to Jesus and believe.  In the parable, one son refuses to work in his father’s vineyard, then relents, while the other says he will go but never does. Jesus is trying to teach the chief priests and elders a lesson about obedience to God’s will, but they do not see that the Lord wants them to turn to him as the way of righteousness because they lack the humility and will to obedience that Paul prescribes to the Philippian community:  have in you the same attitude that is also in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God… emptied himself, humbled himself, becoming obedient to the point of death. 

  We too need the humility Christ revealed throughout his own journey, putting others’ needs before his own.  Paul calls for compassion and mercy as ways of demonstrating what it means to be a Christian community. We too have to suffer for the sake of love; we have to endure for love’s sake, not lose sight of it, not lose sight of Christ’s presence among us.  Every act of humility and obedience is a surrendering to God’s will, an opening of ourselves to his will for our lives.  We must therefore echo the psalmist as we ask the Lord to guide us in his truth and teach us, that we might fully and responsibly participate in the life he has invited us to.

This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture class.

Image source:  www.wordclouds.com

The God who really sees (Amy Grant)

El shaddai, el shaddai,

El-elyon na adonai,

Age to age you’re still the same

By the power of the name.

El shaddai, el shaddai,

Erkamka na adonai,

We will praise and lift you high,

El shaddai.

Through your love and through the ram,

You saved the son of Abraham,

Through the power of your hand,

Turned the sea into dry land.

To the outcast on her knees,

You were the God who really sees,

And by your might,

You set your children free.

           

Refrain

           

Through the years you’ve made it clear

That the time of Christ was near,

Though the people couldn’t see

What messiah ought to be.

Though your word contained the plan,

They just could not understand

Your most awesome work was done

Through the frailty of your son.

Refrain

To hear Amy Grant perform El Shaddai, click on the video below:

Image source:  José de Madrazo y Agudo, Jesús en casa de Anás (1803), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humiliation_of_Christ#/media/File:Jes%C3%BAs_en_casa_de_An%C3%A1s_Museo_del_Prado_Jos%C3%A9_de_Madrazo.jpg

Video source

Those who cannot tell God's will from their own (Barbara Taylor Brown)

  Jesus was not killed by atheism and anarchy.  He was brought down by law and order allied with religion – which is always a deadly mix.

  Beware those who claim to know the will of God and are prepared to use force, if necessary, to make others conform. 

  Beware those who cannot tell God’s will from their own.

--Barbara Brown Taylor

Image source:  James Tissot, Woe Unto You, Scribes and Pharisees, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woes_of_the_Pharisees#/media/File:Brooklyn_Museum_-_Woe_unto_You,_Scribes_and_Pharisees_(Malheur_%C3%A0_vous,_scribes_et_pharisiens)_-_James_Tissot.jpg

Quotation source

Justice means changing systems (Fr. Ron Rolheiser)

   Charity is giving away some of your time, energy, resources, and person so as to help others in need.  And that’s an admirable virtue, the sign of a good heart.  Justice, on the other hand, is less about directly giving something away than it is about looking to change the conditions and systems that put others in need. 

--Fr. Ron Rolheiser OMI,      

 Facebook, June 8, 2020      

Image source:  https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2016/01/401251/poor-health-when-poverty-becomes-disease

An effervescent act of generosity (Bishop Robert Barron)

   God pours out the whole of creation in an effervescent act of generosity, and then, even more surprisingly, he draws his human creatures, through Christ, into the intimacy of friendship with him.  Christianity is a religion of grace that exults in this divine generosity.  Think in this context of the parable of the workers hired at different times of the day or the story of the prodigal son.

   But we know that the gift is not for us alone; rather, the generosity of God is meant to awaken a like generosity in us.  If amazing grace has saved a wretch like me, I have to become a vehicle of grace to every lost soul around me.

--Bishop Robert Barron, Gospel Reflection, June 6, 2020

Image source:  Vineyard Owner and Laborers Parable, Codex Aureux Epternacensis, detail, https://www.theworkofgodschildren.org/collaboration/index.php?title=File:Vineyard_Owner_and_Laborers_Parable_-_Codex_Aureus_Epternacensis_f76f_Detail.jpg

God's plans (Patrick Ness)

I did not come to heal her, the monster said.

I came to heal you.

--Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls

  In A Monster Calls (book and screenplay by Patrick Ness, after Siobhan Dowd), as young Conor O’Malley struggles with his own response to his mother’s diagnosis of cancer, he is visited in the night by a monster inspired by a yew tree.  But while Conor wants to rely on the monster to save his mother, the monster has other plans…

  How often do we ask God for what we think we need, rather than opening to God’s plans for us?  How often do we insist we know best, when in fact, God has our back all along? How can we open to God's will in our lives, trusting in the mercy of the God who loved us into existence, and who calls us to love, each and every day?

Image source:  https://readthespirit.com/visual-parables/a-monster-calls-2016/

Striving to do his will (Walter Ciszek)

Walter Ciszek, a Jesuit priest who spent 20 years imprisoned by the Soviet Union, said that, even in his darkest hours, his faith helped him survive:

   The circumstances of each day of our lives, of every moment of every day, are provided for us by him.  Let the theologians argue about how this is so, let the philosophers and sophisticates of this world question and doubt whether it can be so; the revealed truth we have received on God’s own word simply says that it is so. But maybe we are all just a little afraid to accept it in all its shattering simplicity, for its consequences in our lives are both terrible and wonderful.

   If it all seems too simple, you have only to try to find how difficult it is.  But you have only to try it to find out as well the joy and peace and happiness it can bring.  For what can ultimately trouble the soul that accepts every moment of every day as a gift from the hands of God and strives always to do his will?

--Walter Ciszek, 

quoted by Billy Critchley-Menor, SJ, 

Jesuit Post 

Image source:  https://www.thenivbible.com/blog/psalm-63-are-you-completely-surrendered-to-god/

Quotation source

Sunday Gospel Reflection, September 20, 2020: For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways...

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, 

nor are your ways my ways…

How tuned in are we to God’s plans?

  Humankind often spins its wheels trying to make things work out our way, forgetting, of course, that it’s not our plans that count, but God’s.  When Cyrus, the King of Persia, sends the people of Israel home from exile to rebuild, they return to devastation, and so they resist:  so much work to rebuild is not in their plans!  And so, the prophet Isaiah reminds them to seek the Lord where he may be found – not where they think he should be, not where they want him, but where he is, near to all who call upon him, as Psalm 145 proclaims.  Love is God’s justice; we haven’t earned it and may not deserve it, but we must open to God’s plans with love, for the Lord is just in all his ways.  We may not fully understand it – so high are his ways above our ways and his thoughts above our thoughts – but if we pray for the fulfillment of God’s plans, we will know God’s love, and God’s justice.

  In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus’ parable of the landowner who hires laborers for his vineyard is another reminder that God’s ways are not fair by human, time-bound, compensating terms – God offers God’s love, God’s justice, as sheer gift.  Justice is not about what is earned but about what is given; love doesn’t require payback for what we have done.  What God invites us to – a relationship of love – may be very different from what we imagine, but God knows better than we do what each of us needs, and provides us with what we need, which is his love, in spades.  It is up to us to realize of what we are made, and live as we are made, so that, as Paul tells the Philippians, Christ will be magnified in our body. We reveal Christ to the world when he is the focus of our life, when we open to God’s plans in love, whether we understand them or not; it is in love that we reveal God’s justice to the world.

This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture class.

Image source:  www.wordclouds.com

Still my unforgiving thoughts (Fr. Ron Rolheiser)

Still my unforgiving thoughts,

the grudges I nurse from my past,

from the betrayals I’ve suffered,

from the negativity and abuses

I’ve been subject to.

           

Quiet in me the guilt I carry

from my own betrayals.

           

Still in me all that’s wounded,

unresolved, bitter, and unforgiving.

Give me the quiet that comes

from forgiveness.

--Fr. Ron Rolheiser OMI, Facebook, February 11, 2019

Image source:  https://thriveglobal.com/stories/a-prayer-for-forgiveness/

Mercy goes beyond (Pope Francis)

  Jesus forgives.  But there is something more here than forgiveness. For as a confessor Jesus goes beyond the law, for the law said that she had to be punished. 

  How many of us would deserve to be condemned!  And it would also be just.  But he forgives!  How?  With this mercy, which does not eliminate sin:  it is God’s forgiveness that eliminates it while mercy goes beyond.

  God doesn’t forgive with a decree but with a caress… by caressing the wounds caused by our sins because he is involved in forgiveness, involved in our salvation.  God’s mercy is great:  forgiving us by caressing us.

--Pope Francis

Image source: Emile Signol, Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery (1842), https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%C3%89mile_Signol_-_Christ_and_the_Woman_Taken_in_Adultery_-_79.6_-_Detroit_Institute_of_Arts.jpg

Quotation source

Compassion asks us to go where it hurts (Henri Nouwen)

  Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. 

   Compassion challenges us to cry out to those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. 

   Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. 

   Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.

--Henri Nouwen, 

Daily Meditation, 

August 10, 2019

Image source:  Kintsugi, an art form in which brokenness is repaired with gold,  http://welcome2hope.org/kintsugi/

No matter what they've done (Fr. Greg Boyle SJ)

  Fr. Greg Boyle has been an advocate for at-risk and gang-involved youth in Los Angeles for over 25 years.  His books Tattoos on the Heart and Barking to the Choir chronicle the heartbreaking and also hopeful stories of the homies he has worked with at Homeboy Industries.  In the video below, Fr. Boyle recounts the story of Bendito, a twelve-year-old boy who helped him to understand the depth of our need for forgiveness and compassion.

   Moral outrage doesn’t lead to solutions – it keeps us from them.  It keeps us from moving forward toward a fuller, more compassionate response to members of our community who belong to us, no matter what they’ve done.

--Fr. Greg Boyle,

Barking to the Choir:  The Power of Radical Kinship

Image source:  https://indiablooms.com/news-details/N/45292/man-fires-celebratory-shots-in-air-bullet-kills-8-yr-old-son.html

Video source

Forgiveness is an act of the will (Corrie ten Boom)

   Forgiveness is an act of the will, and the will can function regardless of the temperature of the heart.

--Corrie ten Boom         

   In 1947, Holocaust survivor Corrie ten Boom gave a talk about her experiences in the concentration camp at Ravensbruck.  After the talk, she was approached by a man who had been a guard in the camp.  That encounter prompted the statement above; to read Ms. ten Boom’s story of forgiveness, click here.

Image source:  https://www.john15.rocks/corrie-ten-boom-sermon-forgiving-the-unforgivable/

Quotation source

Dispelling the darkness of September 11th (Fr. Steve Grunow)

  It is this mystery of God become small in Christ, of love penetrating suffering and death, that reveals to us that there is not just a gaping hole in the midst of that empty space we call ground zero, and in all the ground zeros that have beset us from even before the foundations of the world were laid.

  Today we remember those events – the fire, the smoke speckled with bits of paper curled into the cloudless sky, those towers falling straight down like an elevator, the reverberations of the crashing planes that still makes us all unsteady…

  But that is not all we remember…

  We remember the dead, not as lost—but as living in him.  We hope in our faith that in all those moments, when a great darkness descends, God in Christ is with us; he has us all in his view.  It was for their sake, and all our sakes, that he gave himself to us in his Paschal Mystery.  And in that moment of terror when this world gives way to darkness, our hope is that he is there as the Divine Light that dispels the darkness and guides us to that holiest of places, which is his kingdom yet to come.

--Fr. Steve Grunow, 

Dispelling the Darkness of September 11th, 

Word on Fire 

Image source:  Chunk of rubble from the Twin Towers with a Bible verse fused to it (Matthew 5:38-39);

https://www.godupdates.com/bible-verse-fused-911-rubble/?utm_content=buffer8831c&utm_medium=fbpage&utm_source=gvpg&utm_campaign=gvupdate&fbclid=IwAR0VnXTDOmnmRe5dYpwHckPbhQppTg4NqdB7nswwX1rWC6OtDdz9S8WLbdY

Sunday Gospel Reflection, September 13, 2020: Forgive your neighbor's injustice...

Forgive your neighbor’s injustice…

Why is it so difficult to show mercy to another?

  The Book of Sirach is full of wisdom sayings, maxims that were intended to help the people of Israel espouse right conduct and build community in the context of a faithful relationship with God.  And so it is not surprising to find advice on dealing with anger and sin:  when we enter into relationship with the Lord, can we live in a state of anger?  Is anger not precisely the contradiction of the love we are called to?  Sirach preaches mercy instead:  Forgive your neighbor’s injustice, he says, and do not refuse mercy to another like yourself.  And if we should sin, we are called to stand before God and request that he forgive us as well.  Psalm 103 assures us that our God is kind and merciful, slow to anger, and rich in compassion, precisely because God desires relationship with us.  God’s capacity for forgiveness exceeds our own; indeed, it is limitless.

  Jesus will expound upon the limitless mercy of God in his parable of the unforgiving servant in Matthew’s Gospel.  Although the man’s master forgives him his entire debt because the servant begged him to, that same servant shows no mercy to those who are in debt to him:  he mercilessly has his fellow servant put in prison until he pays back his debt.  To truly experience the mercy of God, Jesus is saying, we must know our own need for that mercy – we must be able to embrace our own brokenness in order to show compassion to our neighbor.  Such recognition of our own need for mercy is essential to a shared life in community; it is a recognition of our own need for change, an awareness that Christ died to pay the debt for all humankind, for all time.  What good is Christ’s sacrifice if it does not inspire mercy and compassion from our hearts?  If we are baptized into a life in Christ, if we live for the Lord, as Paul tells the Romans, then we need to be ever conscious of how we are connected to the Body to which we belong, for our identity flows from that Body.

  What kind of community are we creating if we cannot forgive?  How can we create a place of mercy in our heart where God can be celebrated if we are unable to show mercy to another?  How can there be mercy for us if there is no mercy for our neighbor?  We all stand in a similar place of brokenness, before God and before one another.  The Lord asks us to recognize the limitations of our neighbors and to be mindful of the unity he espouses, building community and relationship through the forgiveness and mercy he modeled for all.

This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture class.

Image source:  www.wordclouds.com

Liturgy is our entry point (Dr. Tom Neal)

  Liturgy is our entry point into the divine-human labors of the God-Man, the Master Carpenter who forever labors to join heaven and earth, justice and mercy, eternity and time, God and humanity, man and man, creation and Creator.

--Dr. Tom Neal,

Mass and Creation:

See, I Make All Things New

To read Dr. Neal's complete article, click here.

Image source:  https://tellercatholic.org/liturgy_prayer/#liturgy

Quotation source

To order the whole of one's life toward God (Bishop Robert Barron)

  What is so important about worship?  To worship is to order the whole of one’s life toward the living God, and, in so doing, to become interiorly and exteriorly rightly ordered.  To worship is to signal to oneself what one’s life is finally about.  Worship is not something that God needs, but it is very much something that we need.

--Bishop Robert Barron,

Thanksgiving Day Gospel Reflection

Image source:  Easter Vigil 2019, Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Mill Valley, https://www.facebook.com/pg/mountcarmelmv/photos/?tab=album&album_id=2289136414481101