Minute Meditation – Life and Love Within Myself

In my best, my most alive moments—in my mystical moments, if you want—I have a profound sense of belonging. At those moments, I am aware of being truly at home in this universe. I know that I am not an orphan here. There is no longer any doubt in my mind that I belong to this Earth Household, in which each member belongs to all others—bugs to beavers, black-eyed susans to black holes, quarks to quails, lightning to fireflies, humans to hyenas and humus. To say “yes” to this limitless mutual belonging is love. When I speak of God, I mean this kind of love, this great “yes” to belonging.

I experience this love at one and the same time as God’s “yes” to all that exists (and to me personally) and as my own little “yes” to it all. In saying this “yes” I realize God’s very life and love within myself.

—from the book The Way of Silence: Engaging the Sacred in Daily Life by Brother David Steindl-Rast, OSB

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Minute Meditation – Boundless Graces

One of the fundamental laws of human life and of the spiritual life is that the measure we give to others will be the measure we will receive. If I give love and forgiveness, I will receive it, perhaps from others, but most certainly from God. If we refuse to love, or to forgive, we will sooner or later become victims of our own lack of love. The evil we do or wish to others will end up turning against ourselves. God does not punish anyone. People punish themselves. Today, make up your mind to love, to give of yourself to God and to others. Forgive someone. Let your measure to others be bountiful love and sincere forgiveness, and that love and mercy will be poured back to you bountifully.

Prayer: Lord, right now I pray for someone I need to forgive, someone I need to love. Amen.

—from the book Three Minutes with God: Reflections to Inspire, Encourage, and Motivate by Monsignor Frank Bognanno

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Minute Meditation – Embrace the Beatitudes

At the heart of Francis’s and Clare’s biblical vision was the Sermon on the Mount, and most especially the Beatitudes. Just as Jesus turned the world upside down, ushering in God’s new age of shalom, liberating captives, and proclaiming God’s shalom (see Luke 4:18–19), Francis’s message of peace and simplicity turned upside down the divisiveness and violence of twelfth-century Italy and the opulence of the Roman Catholic Church.

Francis lived out the prophetic spirit of the Beatitudes, presenting an alternative vision to both church and state, as he sought to be God’s companion in healing the world, beginning with the transformation of church, and expanding his mission to include healing the whole earth, Christian and non-Christian, human and nonhuman. Francis invites us to embody the Beatitudes in our time.

—from the book Simplicity, Spirituality, Service: The Timeless Wisdom of Francis, Clare, and Bonaventure
Rev. Dr. Bruce G. Epperly

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Minute Meditation – God’s Tears

God hears the cries of the poor, the anguish of parents whose children are victims of gun violence, and the anger of those who have been marginalized and oppressed and whose history has been hidden by people of privilege and power. God also delights in the singing of sparrows in the early morning and the flashing of fireflies on a summer evening. God feels the pain of an injured baby bird, fallen out of its nest, and the loneliness of a pet mourning the death of its human companion.

God’s experience of the world is cruciform in nature. The cross is more than an event on Calvary’s hill. The cross reveals God embedded in all creation, sharing our joys and sorrows. When Jesus wept over Jerusalem, he was crying God’s tears. When Jesus died on the cross, his pain was real, and so was God’s. God feels the anguish of those who have been abandoned and persecuted. God has not abandoned you. Do you feel that?

—from the book Simplicity, Spirituality, Service: The Timeless Wisdom of Francis, Clare, and Bonaventure by Rev. Dr. Bruce G. Epperly

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Minute Meditation – Choose to Love

If we choose to love, if we decide to accept the demands of being a loving person, we immediately take on the responsibility of being for others, in service and in times of opposition, in trials and persecution, also in peace and joy. We accept this dynamic not in the way we would like, but as determined by the needs of others around us. Frequently, this means putting more heart into what we are about in all the ordinary tasks of daily life; it means reaching deeper into the source of our energy when it seems like it is too hard to allow the ministry or a child or another to keep making demands.

It takes a self-possessed, mature person to respond thus. But these same people know freedom; they are free from self and free for others, free to live the challenge of the gospel and open to the most that life can call forth. Such people know joy!

—from the book In the Footsteps of Francis and Clare by Roch Niemier, OFM

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Minute Meditation – Love and Triumph

The stigmata Francis received in his final years revealed God’s pain within his pain. The stigmata reflected God’s empathy expanding Francis’s own empathy and circle of love to include all creation. Francis’s God is not aloof or apathetic. God is embedded in the pain and joy of the world. Our calling, as Francis and Clare discovered, is to identify the pain of the least of these as God’s pain. God experiences the pain and joy of creatures, which touch the heart of our immanent and intimate God. As Bonaventure writes, God is “totally submerged in the waters from the sole of the foot to the top of the head…. [God] appeared to you as your beloved cut through with wound upon wound in order to heal you.”

Gazing on the cross, as Clare counseled the royal Agnes of Prague, is not an abstract intellectual exercise, but a personal identification with God’s pain on the cross and in every moment of human misery. Clare’s gazing upon Jesus inspired her own solidarity with the pain of the world, and the divine and human empathy toward those who suffer also encompasses the joy of experiencing Christ’s resurrection, God’s loving triumph that brings healing to all creation and invites us to be messengers of hope to those who have been crushed by suffering and injustice.

—from the book Simplicity, Spirituality, Service: The Timeless Wisdom of Francis, Clare, and Bonaventure by Bruce G. Epperly

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Minute Meditation – God Loves Our Imperfections

God, to me, is a mystery, but in my better moments, I feel fairly sure that God loves us in the way I am trying to love my kids. That is to say, I think God looks at us and sees the beauty of who we are, and that beauty is not a result of our being perfect. It’s a result of our being a whole, unique mess—the good and the bad together. God delights in our discolored strands—at our wild imperfections. As a father myself, I am learning to do the same.

—from St. Anthony Messenger‘s “Faith Unpacked: Embracing Our Imperfections“ by David Dault, PhD

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Minute Meditation – Blessed Are the Meek

Francis came to view his whole life as a prayer. As we will discover in our reflections on Francis’s “Canticle of Creatures,” prayer joins us as healing partners with all creation. In a world where everything fits together seamlessly, every thought, word, and act can bring healing and beauty to the world. All creation praises its Creator. All things find their origin and completion in God’s love.

The meek are blessed precisely because they recognize their dependence on the generosity of God and creation, and out of their dependence, the humble commit themselves to be Christ to others, claiming their vocation as God’s companions in healing the earth. The privileged become blessed in prayerfully letting go of their sense of superiority and seeing themselves as united with humanity and all creation, sharing their possessions and working for a world in which everyone has a fair chance to enjoy the fruits of this good earth.

—from the book Simplicity, Spirituality, Service: The Timeless Wisdom of Francis, Clare, and Bonaventure by Bruce G. Epperly

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Minute Meditation – Radical Honesty

St. Francis knew the Psalms by heart, and those who followed him quickly did so too. They learned the Bible’s other most famous prayers and could pray them as they walked from place to place, reflecting on what God had accomplished through them in their previous location and preparing for what God might be asking from them in the next place.

Francis was as much subject to self-doubt as any of us. His motives were purified in prayer; his ego became right-sized there. His prayer was both private and public; one without the other tends to lead the person praying into some type of illusion. Instead, prayer leads us into deeper and more radical honesty while enabling us to deal with the consequences of any newfound honesty.

—from the book Peace and Good: Through the Year with Francis of Assisi by Pat McCloskey, OFM

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Minute Meditation – Treasures of the Kingdom

In recognizing his vocation to live the Gospel, Francis of Assisi knew that he could no longer identify himself with the wealthy and powerful of his day; rather, he desired to live among the minores, the poor, marginalized, and powerless and those without a voice in society.

More than anything, Francis longed to live like Jesus Christ: “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9). For Francis and his brothers, minority was the one thing necessary for entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven. Living this way, Francis conformed himself to Christ who exchanged the richness of heaven for the poverty of the earth, in order that we, becoming like Christ, could be rich with the treasures of the Kingdom.

—from the book Franciscan Field Guide: People, Places, Practices, and Prayers by Rosemary Stets, OSF

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