"Where the Pictures Came From"

Angels are seldom overheard.  But try.  Go listen.

They might be remembering.
They might be whispering about the night
they seeded the sky with embers
and it caught.

All over the place, the sky took fire.
Astronomers, on various corners of the earth,
reported a shower of burning embers.

This was the night --the angels will tell you--
when they clambered over the poles
and raced each other through the tundra,
and swam a hundred mountain lakes,
shaking the water off like seals, 
and kept on going.

They knew they were wanted.

It had to be night, they'll tell you,
because the night is so simple, so all one thing,
even when burnt with embers.

And God had poured himself so flawlessly
into a human heart
that nothing less simple than night
could venture an explanation.

The angels got there, they will tell you.
They ran up the hill, singing a song the color of darkness,
chanting like sea bells
in places of no horizon.

They stood in a circle on the floor of a cave,
and drew pictures on its walls
to entertain the visitors.

And rocked in their song
an infant of one hour's age,
who was as old as God.

--Sister Miriam Pollard, Cistercian Santa Rita Abbey, Sonoita, Arizona

A Light Unto my Path ~ Meditation

John the Baptist uses an image that is puzzling to us but that would have been powerful indeed to his original audience.  Speaking of the coming Messiah, he says, "His winnowing fan is in his hand.  He will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into his barn, but the chaff he will burn" ....

  A threshing floor was a flat piece of ground on which stalks of harvested grain would be laid and subsequently pressed or crushed, so as to separate the edible wheat from the inedible chaff.  A winnowing fan was a kind of pitch-fork that a farmer would use to throw the mixture of wheat and chaff into the air, so that the wind would carry off the lighter material and leave the heavier substance behind.  This act of separation was indispensable to the preparation of good bread.

The Messiah, John the Baptist, is telling us, will perform a similar work on our minds and hearts.  He will separate the good from the bad, the loving from the wicked, the godly from the self-absorbed.  Most of us allow the better angels of our nature to exist alongside our inner demons, and the result is a spiritual hodge-podge.  When Christ approaches us, he comes with his winnnowing fan, which means he will toss things around a bit! This helps to explain why the Lord says he has come with a sword and why the author of the Letter to Hebrews insists, "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God."

~Very Rev. Robert Barron

How can we offer comfort to others who are suffering?

Some people think that to be strong and manly you must be tough...perhaps "to toughen someone else up who is struggling with a trial that they don't know how to handle themselves." 

 They cannot possibly offer a kind and loving, empathetic word to someone who just needs to hear a comfortable word of encouragement. That's too bad ...because they are missing a chance to help someone else to see what they can't see on their own, and through their own pain: 

 
...Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.....

Oh!  and YES, of course we should turn to our Lord in times of trial, trouble, and grieving because, YES!!---He is the only one to help in times like this.  But those who we love, and love us, or those who just know us can offer comfort and encouragement and loving kindness instead of more heartache and sadness.


 

Meditation--Not Our Talents

Let us ever bear in mind...that we in this place are only then really strong when we are more than we seem to be.  It is not our attainments or our talents, it is not philosophy or science, letters or arts which will make us dear to God.  It is not secular favor, or civil position, which can make us worthy of the attention and the interest of the true Christian.  A great university is a great power, and can do great things; but unless it be something more than human, it is but foolishness and vanity in the sight and in comparison of the little ones of Christ.  It is really dead, though it seems to live, unless it be grafted upon the True Vine, and is partaker of the secret supernatural life which circulates through the undecaying branches.

"Unless the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it." Psalm 127:1

Idle is our labor, worthless is our toil, ashes is our fruit, corruption is our reward, unless we begin the foundation of this great undertaking in faith and in prayer, and sanctify it by purity of life.

John Henry Newman

Meditation~Carrying Our Cross

Christ intends no man ever to carry the cross alone.  We cannot remind ourselves too often that our life in the Risen Christ is an interchange between us of his love.  In the power of his love in ourselves, we give to him in our neighbor.

There is nothing Christ asked for more urgently in his earthly life than sympathy, nothing he asks for more often and receives less often in those in whom his Passion is lived today in its deepest humiliations and derelictions.

There are too many "commonsense Christians" afraid to spend themselves on anyone from whom they do not get visible results.  They are ready with hard work for reform, they pour out good advice, they are proud to be realists who repudiate everything that seems to them to be impractical, including the poetry of Christ, but they have no use for those baffling human creatures who won't--or can't--play the game by their rules.  These "realists" refuse to see that there are problems which cannot be solved, griefs which cannot be healed, conditions which cannot be cured.  They are impatient with the suffering they cannot end; unable to accept its reality, they wash their hands of it, because they cannot, so they think, do anything about it.

But we cannot make an end of Christ's suffering, for as long as the world goes on, the Passion of Christ will go on in his members; and he will ask, not for his suffering to be mitigated, but for sympathy.  In Gethsemane Christ tried to awaken his Apostles, not because they could take away his agony, but because they could give him their compassion.

Meditation~Poverty

Poverty is born from the discovery that I belong to Another; I exist because I am loved in an individual way by Another:  My being is from first to last totally relative to Him, though not without the mystery of my freedom.

If I am the work of Another, nothing is mine, because everything is given to me by Him.  At the same time, however--here is the paradox--everything is mine because I have been given to know the purpose for which it exists, a purpose which Jesus revealed at the end of his life:

....That they might know you, Oh Father, and him whom you have sent (John 17:3)

It has been given to me, then, to know the great reason why God made the world.  But I have been also asked to live out every relationship and use everything while keeping this reason in mind.  This apparent paradox is the locus of the thrilling and fascinating secret of poverty.

Everything has been put into my hands for a positive purpose.  To live in the awareness of this fact means to live poverty.  Poverty, then, is not something that grinds man down, but something that lifts him up.  His relations with things acquire a lightness and a freedom that are otherwise unimaginable.  Poverty is the beginning of those "new heavens and new earth" of which Saint Peter speaks ( 2 Peter 3:13), the beginning of a truly human world.

Poverty cannot exist unless it is fed by hope, that is to say, by the certainty that we have been given what really counts in life and that no one can take it away from us.  Everything else is accessory and functional: whether you have a hundred books or one book, a hundred pieces of furniture or one, is not what is important.  The decisive thing is what we need in order to participate in the kingdom of God and to spread it in the world.  The point is not that everything else is no longer valuable.  It is just that its usefulness is measured in function of this goal.

So you see that poverty is freedom from things, the awareness that it is God who fulfills our desires. If I place the hope of my fulfillment in possessing a certain thing, I am no longer hoping in Christ, but in that thing.  If however, I hope in Christ who gives me that thing, then I am free of it.
~Bishop Massimo Camisasca, Diocese of Reggio Emilia-Guastalla, Italy.  Fra. Saint Charles Borromeo.

Western Wildflowers, late summer, early fall

I arrived and began acclimating to this altitude, and decided to pay close attention to valley wildflowers left over from a summer of bloom and drought-- classic in this valley.

Alpine wildflowers are so different, but each day I noticed more and more examples...some in full bloom and some with seed pods, past their prime and waiting for the first snow to come...

Beautiful blue-gray sagebrush that, after a rain, perfumes the valley with the aroma of wild sage; heady and pungent and distinctive.  not blooming but the fine seed heads are wispy and blow in the breeze.....

past its prime, but seed heads are beautiful...

 the seedheads are the beauty of what is left!...

tiny white starflowers...so delicate...in more ways than one way!

the remains after a cold night, just as delicate and beautiful as when it was in bloom.

on the West Bank of the Snake River, closer to our cabin and away from the arid valley we found more lush flowers, but still the same in many ways...tiny, delicate,

the classic nodding heads of the thistle plant....tough yet beautiful!  All of the plants in this high arid plains, with vast extremes in climate, struggle and succeed in their own beauty!

On another day we entered the lake area forest, another story,

Here we were warned of a recent attack on people in this beautiful forest by a calm and quiet lake

armed with bear spray and wearing our "bear bells" we walked through the deep forest in quiet and peace....

it was stormy and moody this day, but beautiful....

and the threatening grey skies gave way to blue skies and quickly moving, heavy white clouds.
The change of seasons has begun!

but the treasure lay deep in the woods on this day....luxurious and green, moist and rich.....

tiny jewels deep in the forest...

this is where my heart resides,  richly blessed and filled with the presence of God.