Category: Meditations

Daily meditations to provide inspiration

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Minute Meditation – God is Not Afraid of Mistakes

God is not afraid of mistakes, it seems. God knows that God can turn everything around—into good. There are no dead ends in the economy of grace. So, God allows us to play the field and eat of almost all the trees in the garden. This is scary, but Paul, as usual, offers a crescendo statement of the same: “For freedom Christ has set us free” (Galatians 5:1). Jesus lives it in his climactic forgiving breath (John 20:22), wherein he eternally frees humanity from its shame and guilt. Consider it this way: God’s main problem is how to give away God! But God has great difficulty doing this. You’d think everybody would want God, but the common response is something like this: “Lord, I am not worthy. I would rather have religion and morality, which give me the impression that I can win a cosmic contest by my own efforts.”

— from the book Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality by Richard Rohr, OFM

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Meditation of the Day – What Awesome Mysteries Occur During Mass!

“Oh, what awesome mysteries take place during Mass! One day we will know what God is doing for us in each Mass, and what sort of gift He is preparing in it for us. Only His divine love could permit that such a gift be provided for us. O Jesus, my Jesus, with what great pain is my soul pierced when I see this fountain of life gushing forth with such sweetness and power for each soul, while at the same time I see souls withering away and drying up through their own fault. O Jesus, grant that the power of mercy embrace these souls.” — St. Maria Faustina Kowalska, 914

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Minute Meditation – “God comes to us disguised as our life”

One great idea of the biblical revelation is that God is manifest in the ordinary, in the actual, in the daily, in the now, in the concrete incarnations of life. That’s opposed to God holding out for the pure, the spiritual, the right idea or the ideal anything. This is why Jesus turns religion on its head! That is why I say it is our experiences that transform us if we are willing to experience our experiences all the way through. But it is also why we have to go through these seemingly laborious and boring books of Kings, Chronicles, Leviticus, Numbers, and Revelation. Those books, documenting the life of real communities, of concrete, ordinary people, are telling us that “God comes to us disguised as our life” (a wonderful line I learned from my dear friend and colleague, Paula D’Arcy).

— from the book Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality by Richard Rohr, OFM

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Meditation of the Day – The Soul Desires Happiness

“If the soul will analyze the desire it has of happiness, and the idea of happiness that presents itself to it, it will find that the object of this idea and of this desire is only and can only be God. This is the impression that the soul bears in the depths of its nature; this is what reason will teach it if it will only reflect a little, and this is what neither prejudice nor passion can ever entirely efface.”— Fr. Jean Nicholas Grou, p. 4

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Minute Meditation – No Straight Line to God

Just as the Bible takes us through many stages of consciousness and salvation history, it takes us individually a long time to move beyond our need to be dualistic, judgmental, accusatory, fearful, blaming, egocentric, and earning-oriented. Isn’t it a consolation to know that life is not a straight line? Many of us wish it were—and have been told that it should be, but I haven’t encountered a life yet that’s a straight line to God, including Mother Teresa’s! It’s always getting the point and missing the point. It’s God entering our lives and then us fighting it, avoiding it, running from it. There is the moment of divine communion or intimacy, and then the pullback that says, “That’s too good to be true. I must be making it up.” Fortunately, God works with all of it, and that mercy, or steadfast love.

— from the book Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality by Richard Rohr, OFM

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Meditation of the Day – We Need a Mediator

“Let us say boldly with St. Bernard that we have need of a mediator with the Mediator Himself, and that it is the divine Mary who is the most capable of filling that charitable office. It was through her that Jesus Christ came to us, and it is through her that we must go to Him. If we fear to go directly to Jesus Christ, our God, whether because of His infinite greatness or because of our vileness or because of our sins, let us boldly implore the aid and intercession of Mary, our Mother. She is good, she is tender, she has nothing in her austere and forbidding, nothing too sublime and too brilliant. In seeing her, we see our pure nature.”— St. Louis de Montfort, p. 42

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Minute Meditation – Three Steps Forward, Two Steps Back

The genius of the biblical revelation is that it doesn’t just give us the conclusions; it gives us both the process of getting there and the inner and outer authority to trust that process. Life itself—and Scripture too—is always three steps forward and two steps backward. It gets the point and then loses it or doubts it. In that, the biblical text mirrors our own human consciousness and journey. Our job is to see where the three-steps-forward texts are heading (invariably toward mercy, forgiveness, inclusion, nonviolence, and trust), which gives us the ability to clearly recognize and understand the two-steps-backward texts (which are usually about vengeance, divine pettiness, law over grace, form over substance, and technique over relationship). This is what we cannot discern if we have no inner experience of how God works in our own lives! 

— from the book Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality by Richard Rohr, OFM

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Meditation of the Day – Out of the Darkness

“Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: The Blessed Sacrament … There you will find romance, glory, honor, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves on earth, and more than that: Death. By the divine paradox, that which ends life, and demands the surrender of all, and yet by the taste (or foretaste) of which alone can what you seek in your earthly relationships (love, faithfulness, joy) be maintained, or take on that complexion of reality, of eternal endurance, which every man’s heart desires.”— J. R. R. Tolkien, p. 119

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Minute Meditation – True Spiritual Wisdom

Only when inner and outer authority come together do we have true spiritual wisdom. We have for too long insisted on outer authority alone, without any teaching of prayer, inner journey, and maturing consciousness. The results for the world and for religion have been disastrous. I am increasingly convinced that the word prayer, which has become a functional and pious thing for believers to do, is, in fact, a descriptor for inner experience. That is why all spiritual teachers mandate prayer so much. They are saying, “Go inside and know for yourself!” We will understand prayer and inner experience this way throughout this book. As Jesus graphically puts it, prayer is “going to your private room and shutting the door and [acting] in secret” (Matthew 6:6). Once you hear it this way, it becomes pretty obvious.

— from the book Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality by Richard Rohr

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Meditation of the Day – Action Relies Upon Contemplation

“Action relies upon contemplation for its fruitfulness; and contemplation, in its turn, as soon as it has reached a certain degree of intensity, pours out upon our active works some of its overflow. And it is by contemplation that the soul goes to draw directly upon the Heart of God for the graces which it is the duty of the active life to distribute. And so, in the soul of a saint, action and contemplation merge together in perfect harmony to give perfect unity to his life.”— Dom Jean-Baptist Chautard, p. 62

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