Category: Meditations

Daily meditations to provide inspiration

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Minute Meditation – The Body Does Not Lie

To keep our bodies less defended—to live in our bodies right now, to be present to others in a cellular way—is also the work of healing past hurts and the many memories that seem to store themselves in the body. The body never seems to stop offering its messages. Fortunately, the body never lies, even though the mind will deceive us constantly. Zen practitioners tend to be well trained in seeing this. It is very telling that Jesus usually physically touched people when he healed them; he knew where the memory and hurt were lodged: in the body itself.

—from the book Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps by Richard Rohr 

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Minute Meditation – Finding Our Calling

Christianity isn’t an abstract philosophy. It’s a complete way of life. Consequently, profession of belief in Christianity isn’t simply an intellectual nod of the head, but a commitment to live in such a way as to express concretely one’s convictions in the everyday world. Such engagement demands a sense of direction, a sense of individual mission and purpose. This is supplied by the particular vocation each of us is given. When we discover our own unique calling, regardless of what it may be, we find the spiritual true north by which to plot our course.

— from the book Perfect Joy: 30 Days with Francis of Assisi  by Kerry Walters

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Minute Meditation – The Questions We Choose

The scope of every life is indeed defined by the questions we choose to live into, and if we are blessed to live long enough, we will inevitably end up shaped like a question mark. Since quest is also the start of every question, it is questions, not answers, that are the surest guideposts for any journey of faith—which necessarily means moving into the unknowable. Always trust the open, heartfelt question that lays bare the soul to unknowing.

Whether they are simplistic or sophisticated, handle answers with care, for they often reflect and display, for all the world to see, the broad sweep of our ignorance. Perhaps, for this reason, wisdom teachers use stories, ballads, parables, or poems. Such lyrical musings open spaces for fresh appreciations and diverse perspectives. They foster fascination and expose imagination to wider fields of understanding, laced with mystery, which always leads us down and out to face yet another, more penetrating question.

—from the book Wandering and Welcome: Meditations for Finding Peace by Joseph Grant

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Minute Meditation – The Journey Into God

Francis’s long journey into God was, at each step along the way, punctuated by learning again and again another truth that St. Augustine articulates at the beginning of his Confessions: “You have made us for You and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in You.”  It was a journey that involved learning to love anew the things of creation, his love constantly being purified by the overarching love of God. It was like a return to the Garden of Eden seeking again and again to restore the Paradise humans had so cavalierly destroyed. The journey forward into God is a journey backward to an original innocence we never fully recover but where a sort of semi-paradise happens when love turns into charity. This is the highest of all loves, which Christ defined as the love of God and the love of neighbor, the total love of God leading to true love of neighbor and the true love of neighbor leading to the love of God.

— from Surrounded by Love: Seven Teachings from Saint Francis by Murray Bodo, OFM

//Franciscan Media//

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Minute Meditation – Using Our Creativity for Others

A Christian celebration of humanity consists in lovingly midwifing our fellow humans into full being. One of our God-given endowments is creativity, the ability to cooperate with God in the inauguration of the kingdom. We’re called to use this creativity in nurturing our brothers and sisters as full members of that kingdom, and we do this by going out of our way to help them recognize and affirm themselves as images of God. In concrete terms, this means performing the acts of charity listed in the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew: clothing the naked, tending the sick, visiting the imprisoned, giving food and drink to the hungry and thirsty. Celebrating the sheer existence of others often demands that we do the dirty work of easing the material burdens that inhibit them from arriving at a conscious appreciation of their own holiness.

— from the book Perfect Joy: 30 Days with Francis of Assisi  by Kerry Walters

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Minute Meditation – Go and Repair My House

Absence was beginning to be replaced by presence, silence with voices. Or were the voices only in his head? Whatever. They moved him to act, to do positive things with his life, a pattern Francis would follow from then on. Once he knew God’s will, whether from some mystical voice or from listening to the scriptures, he would immediately try to live it out. He was filled with what theologians called, “devotion,” an alacrity in doing God’s will. And that is how Francis began to change. He knew now that Christ is to be found in unexpected places and people. He had experienced the abstract God in the person of Jesus Christ who was the incarnation of the God he thought had abandoned him. And he had experienced this Jesus in the most excluded and feared people of his time, the lepers who, instead of bad things, brought him the greatest good, Jesus Christ. And now he had heard the voice of this Christ. It came from his crucified image in an abandoned church. It was a voice that gave him his life’s task: “Go and repair my house, which, as you see, is falling into ruins.”

— from Surrounded by Love: Seven Teachings from Saint Francis by Murray Bodo, OFM

//Franciscan Media//

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Meditation of the Day -A Man Must Go Through a Great Conflict With Himself

“A man must go through a long and great conflict in himself before he can learn fully to overcome himself, and to draw his whole affection towards God. When a man stands upon himself he is easily drawn aside after human comforts. But a true lover of Christ, and a diligent pursuer of virtue, does not hunt after comforts, nor seek such sensible sweetnesses, but is rather willing to bear strong trials and hard labors for Christ.”— Thomas a’ Kempis, p. 64

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Minute Meditation – My God and My All

An observer once watched as Francis prayed throughout the length of an entire night. To his amazement, Francis spent the whole time simply repeating, over and over, “My God and my all! My God and my all!” This simple act, so undramatic, so seemingly modest, in fact was an incredibly intense celebration. Francis truly believed that God was all, and he realized that the only celebration worthy of God is wonder-filled and grateful acknowledgment of God’s allness. Pageantry and pomp and circumstance aren’t needed to celebrate the living God. All that’s required is the heartfelt conviction that nothing—absolutely nothing—is more real or important. When we reach this point (if  we reach this point) our belief in God is a simultaneous celebration of God. Which is exactly how things should be.

— from the book Perfect Joy: 30 Days with Francis of Assisi  by Kerry Walters

//Franciscan Media//