Category: Meditations

Daily meditations to provide inspiration

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Minute Meditation – Francis and Clare

Many metaphors have been employed to paint the picture of the relationship between Francis and Clare of Assisi. Clare, having once used the phrase “a little plant” to describe her rapport with Francis, unwittingly contributed to maintaining the image of a passive woman totally dependent on the male leader and teacher for her identity.

Years of study influenced by feminist scholarship and diligent work on sources from that period have allowed Clare’s person to emerge with clearer lines, with far more depth than previously imagined. Still, the desire to find the precise category for the friendship of these two saints continues to haunt us. Father-daughter, brother-sister, master-disciple, soul friend, spiritual lover, actual lover—these descriptions have currency in many narratives and dramatic portraits. What they shared was the mysterious and generous outpouring of God’s Holy Spirit granting each a profound desire to live the teachings of Jesus without compromise. 

— from the book Light of Assisi: The Story of Saint Clare
by Margaret Carney, OSF

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Minute Meditation – Others Can Show Us Our Best Selves

“Do you want to be healed?…Then stand up, pick up your mat and walk!” —John 5:7, 9

In John’s Gospel we see an image of fruitful and healing water, fittingly called Bethesda or “house of mercy.” We have the healing waters available and bubbling, a house of mercy for sure, but a man who is right there not making use of it! He is paralyzed as much in spirit as in his body. This is the real “sin” and tragedy that he must be healed of. He is playing the victim: “I have no one to plunge me into the pool. By the time I get there someone else has always beaten me to it.” And he has been saying this for thirty-eight years! So Jesus orders him up, and tells him to pick up his mat and walk for himself. Jesus mirrors his best self for the man, he empowers him, and gives him back his own power, he “images” him, he gives the man back to himself by giving him His self. This is the way it has to happen, because we all begin to see ourselves as other people see us—for good and for ill. With Jesus, it is always for good, but such perfect mirroring also carries further relationship and responsibilities with it. He warns the man not to turn back to his paralysis, “or something worse will overtake you.” This “regressive restoration of the old persona” is a very common pattern when we are sent out into new and risky worlds when we have to take responsibility for ourselves, when we must courageously face our own lives and stand on our own courageous feet. There are few honest guides, like Jesus, at this point. Most will tell you to “take good care of yourself” and pad your false self. Jesus never does that. We need healing images and courageous people to image us at our best. Nothing else will invite us into the flowing waters from the temple and the always bubbling pool of divine mercy. Many never take the risk, and remain spiritual infants even much beyond “thirty-eight years.” 

“Healing God, give me the courage to move forward, and help me to see that my deepest sin might be my unwillingness to keep growing.” 

—from the book Wondrous Encounters: Scriptures for Lent 
by Richard Rohr, OFM, page 86

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Minute Meditation – Mercy Falls Like Rain

“As the rain and snow come down from the heavens and do not return without watering the earth and making it yield…so the word does not return to me empty, without carrying out my will and succeeding in what it was sent to do” (Isaiah 55:10–11).

Jesus made the essential requirement for the forgiveness of sin rather clear and definitive here: As you do it, it will be done to you. If you do not do it, it cannot be done to you. We are merely and forever inside of the divine flow, just like Isaiah’s “rain and snow.” Forgiveness is constant from God’s side, which should become a calm, joyous certainty on our side. Mercy received will be mercy passed on, and “will not return to me empty, until it has succeeded in what it was sent to do.”

—from the book Wondrous Encounters: Scriptures for Lent
by Richard Rohr, OFM, page 30

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Minute Meditation – Spiritual Vaccination

We have all seen the rod of Asclepius, or its common variation, the caduceus, on medical insignia throughout the world. It was the symbol of this Greek god of healing, but is also found here in our First Reading from the book of Numbers (21:4–9). It is a single or double serpent winding around a pole, and we are not sure if the Greeks or the Hebrews had it first. But surely its meaning was a universal discovery that today we would perhaps call vaccination! In short, “the cause is also the cure”! Who would have thought? It seems to be true both medically and psychologically. At any rate, we have Moses prescribing such medicine to the complaining Hebrews in the desert, who were being bit by winged/fiery serpents. The meaning and healing symbol returns again in John’s Gospel on many levels, all of them significant. The recurring phrase is, “the lifted up one.” It has now become a rallying cry for the Jesus who was raised up on the cross and thus “vaccinated us against” doing the same (3:13 and 19:37). Jesus being “lifted up” is offered as a healing icon of love to all of history (12:32), and finally, as a victory sign of the final resurrection and ascension of all the human ones, as is prefigured in today’s account about the archetypal “Human One,” Jesus (8:28). This is powerful material, just as vaccinations always are. We have a Divine Medicine brought down to a small but potent dosage so we can handle it and it can handle us! That is what true spiritual symbols always do. Remember what we said earlier in Lent: Any direct contact with God is like contact with an electric wire—it burns you unless you have some good filters and a very humble humanity to receive it. No wonder so many Catholics and Orthodox never tired of hanging images of the crucified Jesus in their homes and in their churches. We needed to “lift up” and “gaze upon” the transformative image just as Moses first did in the desert. It can and did and will change many lives and much of history. 

— from the book Wondrous Encounters: Scriptures for Lent
by Richard Rohr, OFM, page 106

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Minute Meditation – Don’t Harden Your Hearts

We have all experienced it. When someone wants to dislike us, no matter what we do, it will be interpreted in the worst possible fashion. As we often say, “You can’t win.” When someone’s heart is hardened already, you could be Jesus himself, and they will seriously see you as wrong, inferior, dangerous, and heretical—which is what is about to happen in Holy Week. At that point, no matter what evil a person decides to do to you, it will be deemed virtuous and praiseworthy by hardened or paranoid people in the hostile camp. “He is a terrorist!” they might say. Never having the humility or honesty to admit that to someone else, looking from a different perspective (which is deemed totally wrong), he probably looks like a sacrificial and dedicated freedom fighter. “I have my conclusions already, do not bother me with any new information that might make me change my judgment.” Most Christians would probably be slow to admit that by these criteria almost all of us would have opposed Jesus. “This is not our tradition, he is not from our group, and he has no credentials!” 

“God of perfect freedom, open spaces inside of our minds, our hearts, and our memories, so we can just begin to be free. Do not let me be hardened against anyone of your creatures, so that I cannot hear and respect their truth.”

—from the book Wondrous Encounters: Scriptures for Lent
by Richard Rohr, OFM, page 109

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Minute Meditation – Pain of Betrayal

There is a poignant passage in the Servant Song from Isaiah that illustrates and prepares us for two betrayals that are about to happen: “I thought I had toiled in vain and uselessly, I have exhausted myself for nothing” (Isaiah 49:4). Surely that is the human feeling after someone we love turns against us. On some level, we all feel we have made some kind of contract with life, when life does not come through as we had hoped, and we feel a searing pain called betrayal. It happens to all of us in different ways. It is a belly punch that leaves us with a sense of futility and emptiness. And here it happens to Jesus from two of his own inner circle, both Judas and Peter. The more love and hope you have invested in another person, the deeper the pain of betrayal is. If it happens at a deep and personal level, we wonder if he will ever trust again. Your heart does “break.” It is one of those crossroad moments, when the breaking can forever close you down, or in time just the opposite—open you up to an enlargement of soul—as we will see in Jesus this week. What is happening is that we are withdrawing a human dependency, finding grace to forgive and let go, and relocating our little self in The Self (God), which never betrays us. It can’t! It might take years for most of us to work through this; for Jesus it seems to have been natural, although who knows how long it took him to get there. All we see in the text is that there are no words of bitterness at all, only a calm, unblaming description in the midst of the “night,” which is almost upon us. 

“Solitary Jesus, you get more alone as the week goes on, till all you have is a naked but enduring hope in God. Do not bring me to such a test, I would not know how to survive.”

— from the book Wondrous Encounters: Scriptures for Lent
by Richard Rohr, OFM, page 128

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Minute Meditation – Beginnings and Endings

It can be difficult to tell the difference between beginnings and endings. Perhaps one of the strongest lessons in Jesus’s words from the cross is that we must not be as concerned about our time as we are about God’s time. In God’s time beginnings and endings are one in the same, because God’s time is not so much a matter of minutes, hours, and days as it is about a way of living in the world. The way we mark the passage of our life is not the same way that God marks our time. It is when washing the feet of others, the giving of ourselves for the sake of our brothers and sisters, that we live according to God’s time.

—from the book The Last Words of Jesus: A Meditation on Love and Suffering 
by Daniel P. Horan, OFM, page 79

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Minute Meditation – God’s Saving Love

Like the apostles who were sent forth from the Upper Room out into the world, each week, each one of us is sent forth from our parish church to the world to be witnesses to Jesus’ love. Pope Francis writes “every Christian is challenged, here and now, to be actively engaged in evangelization; indeed, anyone who has truly experienced God’s saving love does not need much time or lengthy training to go out and proclaim that love.”

—from the book Meeting God in the Upper Room: Three Moments to Change Your Life 
by Monsignor Peter J. Vaghi

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Minute Meditation – An Attitude of Gratitude

Many were the occasions, when speaking with the friars or other people, that Solanus would extol the importance and necessity of gratitude. His letters express this theme over and over. He calls gratitude “the first sign of a thinking, rational creature.” …To some people asking for God’s help in their needs, he would suggest that they “thank God ahead of time.” This might seem a bold idea, sort of “putting God on the spot,” as he explained to one of the brothers, but certainly a great leap of faith. While Solanus could not get personally involved in the daily work of the soup kitchen, he did keep close to it by urging others to support it, especially when he came into contact with people of means. He considered this charity toward the poor one of the best ways to thank God and obtain heavenly favors. His own fervent prayers on behalf of the poor sometimes obtained remarkable results.

One day Fr. Herman sent word over to Fr. Solanus that they were running out of bread. Solanus left his desk and hurried over to the soup kitchen. He asked the people standing around waiting for the meal to join him in praying the Our Father. As they finished the prayer there was a knock at the door. A man came in with a large basket of bread and said that he had a truck full of loaves outside. After all the bread was brought in and piled up, the man looked at the pile in amazement and said, “That’s more than the truck could hold.”

—from the book Gratitude and Grit: The Life of Blessed Solanus Casey,
by Brother Leo Wollenweber, OFM Cap, pages 51-52

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Minute Meditation – Saint Anthony and the Child Jesus

The image of Anthony holding the Divine Infant is a symbol and model for each of us. The image inspires us to go through life clinging to the wonderful mystery of the humble, self-emptying Christ, who accompanies us as a servant of our humanity and of the world’s healing. This is the kind of love that radiates from the Christ child so often pictured in St. Anthony’s arms. Would it not be a good idea for all of us to go through life carrying an imaginary God-child in our arms—and holding him up to the world? The child, however, is not really imaginary or fictitious. Two thousand years ago, thanks to the Virgin Mary’s “Yes,” the Son of God left behind his divine condition and came to dwell as a human child among us. Our faith tells us that he does accompany us each day like a humble servant—like a vulnerable child. Like St. Anthony, we do well lovingly to carry this image with us on our journey through life.

—from the book Saint Anthony of Padua: His Life, Legends, and Devotions
edited by Jack Wintz, OFM

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