Tuesday, June 7, 2022

To live with the Spirit of God (Sr. Miriam of the Holy Spirit)


   To live with the Spirit of God is to be a listener. It is to keep the vigil of mystery, earthless and still. One leans to catch the stirring of the Spirit, strange as the wind’s will. The soul that walks where the wind of the Spirit blows turns like a wandering weather-vane toward love. It may lament like Job or Jeremiah, echo the wounded hart, the mateless dove. It may rejoice in spaciousness of meadow that emulates the freedom of the sky. Always it walks in waylessness, unknowing; it has cast down forever from its hand the compass of the whither and the why. 

   To live with the Spirit of God is to be a lover. It is becoming love, and like to Him toward Whom we strain with metaphors of creatures: fire-sweep and water-rush and the wind’s whim. The soul is all activity, all silence; and though it surges Godward to its goal, it holds, as moving earth holds sleeping noonday, the peace that is the listening of the soul. 

--Sister Miriam of the Holy Spirit (Jessica Powers), O.C.D. 

Monday, June 6, 2022

Are we open to God's surprises? (Pope Francis)

   Let us ask ourselves today: are we open to God’s surprises? Or are we closed and fearful before the newness of the Holy Spirit? 

    Do we have the courage to strike out along the new paths which God’s newness sets before us, or do we resist, barricaded in transient structures which have lost their capacity for openness to what is new? 

--Pope Francis, Pentecost 2013 

Image source: https://beasone.org/tag/holy-spirit/ 
Quotation source

Sunday, June 5, 2022

Breathe on me, breath of God (Brother Isaiah)


Breathe on me, breath of God:
fill me with life anew,
that I may love as you have loved
and do as you would do.

Come breathe on me
Come breathe on me

Breathe on me, breath of God,
keep breathing till my heart is pure,
until with you I have one will
to live and to endure. 

Come breathe on me, breath of God
Whisper words of life, Lord
Whisper words of life, Lord
Over me

Breathe on me, breath of God; 
my soul with grace refined, 
until every earthly part of me 
glows with your fire divine. 

Come breathe on me, breath of God 
Whisper words of life, Lord 
Whisper words of life, Lord 
Breathe on me 

Whisper words of life, Lord 
Whisper words of life, Lord 
Whisper words of life, Lord 
over the waters, God 

Whisper words of life, Lord 
Whisper words of life, Lord 
Whisper words of life, Lord 
over the fearful soul 

Whisper words of life, Lord 
Whisper words of life, Lord 
Whisper words of life, Lord 
over my stony heart 

Whisper words of life, Lord 
Whisper words of life, Lord 
Whisper words of life, Lord 
over the whole wide world 

Whisper words of life, Lord 
Whisper words of life, Lord 
Whisper words of life, Lord 
over the troubled soul 

Hallelu, over my stony heart, Lord 
and I shall live… 

To hear Brother Isaiah (soon to be Fr. Isaiah!) sing Breathe on Me, Breath of God, click on the video below: 


Saturday, June 4, 2022

God in us (Robert Baer)


 

Bethlehem was God with us,
Calvary was God for us,
and Pentecost is God in us. 

--Robert Baer 


Image source: El Greco, The Pentecost (ca. 1600), https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pentecost%C3%A9s_(El_Greco,_1597).jpg Quotation source

Friday, June 3, 2022

Access to the holy heart of God (Bishop Robert Barron)


   Jesus says that the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in Christ’s name, will teach his disciples everything. The Holy Spirit is the love shared by the Father and the Son. We have access to this holy heart of God only because the Father sent the Son into the world, into our dysfunction, even to the limits of godforsakenness—and thereby gathered all of the world into the dynamism of the divine life. 

    Those who live in Christ are not outside of God as petitioners or supplicants; rather, they are in God as friends, sharers in the Spirit. And this spiritual life is what gives us knowledge of God—a knowledge, if you will, from within. 

    When the great masters of the Christian way speak of knowing God, they do not use the term in its distanced, analytical sense; they use it in the biblical sense, implying knowledge by way of personal intimacy. This is why St. Bernard of Clairvaux, for one, insists that initiates in the spiritual life know God not simply through books and lectures but through experience, the way one friend knows another. That knowledge is what the Holy Spirit facilitates. 

 --Bishop Robert Barron, Gospel Reflection, May 22, 2022 

Thursday, June 2, 2022

Sunday Gospel Reflection, June 6, 2022: The Spirit comes to the aid of our weakness...

How do we come to unity in community?

    Human beings often live in a state of constant discontent, sometimes heightened by pain and suffering. Frequently, that discontent is of our own making. Witness the actions of the people migrating in the east in the Book of Genesis, who decide to stop in Shinar and build a tower there. God recognizes their self-centeredness and arrogance and scatters them from there all over the earth. Creation has forgotten that God and only God is the source of all, that God is responsible for all that is. Recognizing the manifold works of God, Psalm 104 asks the Lord to send out his spirit, and renew the face of the earth. Even after Jesus’ death and rising, the Romans still experienced discontent: all creation is groaning in labor pains even until now, Paul writes to them. But the Spirit comes to the aid of our weakness, Paul reassures them, interceding for the holy ones according to God’s will. Moreover, as Jesus had promised at the Jewish feast of Tabernacles in John's Gospel, Rivers of living water will flow from within him who believes in me. We thirst for the fullness of God; if we believe in Jesus, we will find what we seek and that source of life that is the Spirit will flow from us into other people’s lives. The promise of the Spirit is that unity that will heal the disunity of Babel in Shinar; what God reveals in Jesus transcends all human limitations, eliminating division and allowing all to become conduits of the Spirit. 

    The confusion of Babel gives way to the unity of understanding when, in the Acts of the Apostlesthe time for Pentecost was fulfilled. In Jerusalem on that day, each one hears the disciples speaking in his own language. Their proclamation of the good news is meant by all and understood by all, to bring them all together in belief in Jesus as the Messiah. Something extraordinary is happening, something that defies their ability to explain. Psalm 104 notes that when you send forth your spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the earth. In Jerusalem that day, all can say Jesus is Lord thanks to the Holy Spirit active in their midst. The Spirit may work in each of us differently, Paul tells the Corinthians, but it is all for the sake of the whole; the purpose of the Spirit is to draw us together into one body. When the disciples receive the Spirit directly from Jesus on the evening of that first day of the week, in John's Gospel, they are not yet ready; the doors are locked and will still be locked a week later. We know that the Spirit is in us as well; we know that Jesus believes we have it in us to be his disciples. We may need to grow into it, to grow away from our fundamental discontent, but we have what we need because we receive his Spirit in baptism, and we are thus a new creation. And then? We must live Christ, giving witness to the mercy of God, remaining fully present in him and allowing him to be fully present is us. Our job now is to love the world and to let love do what it is meant to do, serving our larger community through our unity, thanks to the Spirit, in the Body of Christ.

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

Wednesday, June 1, 2022

The paradox of expectation (Henri Nouwen)


   Whereas patience is the mother of expectation, it is expectation itself that brings new joy to our lives. Jesus not only made us look at our pains, but also beyond them. You are sad now, but I shall see you again and your hearts will be full of joy. A man or woman without hope in the future cannot live creatively in the present. The paradox of expectation indeed is that those who believe in tomorrow can better live today, that those who expect joy to come out of sadness can discover the beginnings of a new life in the center of the old, that those who look forward to the returning Lord can discover him already in their midst.