Category: Meditations

Daily meditations to provide inspiration

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Minute Meditation – Hearts on Fire

Franciscan prayer, lived to its full, is to set the human heart on fire. It is to transform one’s body into a body of love and one’s actions into actions of love. In this transformation is the fire that can set the earth ablaze — the fire of light, peace, justice, unity and dignity. It is to see the wounds of suffering humanity and bind them with mercy and compassion. It is to see and feel for all creation — to love by way of self-gift. It is to live in the mystery of Christ, the mystery of God enfleshed.

— from the book Franciscan Prayer by Ilia Delio, OSF

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Minute Meditation – Daily Glimpses of God

Even we in our ordinary lives can embrace Christ on the cross. We can place ourselves physically and spiritually in a space or place that makes it at least a compatible space for “hearing” God’s voice and “seeing” God’s manifestations, should God decide to show us the divine presence in a way that is beyond the faith we have from our baptism. And whether we actually hear or see anything of God or not, we are there at the foot of the cross letting him embrace us in any way he wills to embrace us. It could be as simple as an increase of the faith we already have; it could be an inspiration to do something further with our lives in order to praise and give thanks to God, or we could be inspired to follow Christ’s way of the cross more faithfully in our own lives. Saint Clare is, I believe, one of God’s chosen ones who shows us Someone we can love who is daily revealing his presence in images – like the cross, like the Eucharistic bread and wine. 

— from the book Mystics: Twelve Who Reveal God’s Loveby Murry Bodo, OFM

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Minute Meditation – To Hear the Word and Act

As she prayed, Clare gradually took on the visage of the very image of the crucified Christ she contemplated; but this happened, not just because she prayed, but because Clare always acted upon the word she was given in prayer. Hers was devotion, a word in the Middle Ages that meant the virtue of hearing the Word of God and then acting upon that Word with alacrity. I hear, and I do what I hear in God’s Word. How many must have been the words given to Clare through a lifetime of prayer! Words that Clare would endeavor to put into practice as she went through her ordinary day, even given her own suffering that was attendant upon an illness that kept her bedridden, off and on for years, an illness that grew worse as she grew older. She and the suffering Crucified Christ became mirrors of each other, a man and a woman who became the poverty of God, both in themselves and in their relating. For the perfect poverty of Christ is the emptying yet filling love and relating of the Blessed Trinity.

— from the book Mystics: Twelve Who Reveal God’s Loveby Murry Bodo, OFM

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Meditation of the Day – Reading Holy Scripture Has Its Benefits

“Reading the holy Scriptures confers two benefits. It trains the mind to understand them; it turns man’s attention from the follies of the world and leads him to the love of God. Two kinds of study are called for here. We must first learn how the Scriptures are to be understood, and then see how to expound them with profit and in a manner worthy of them . . . No one can understand holy Scripture without constant reading . . . The more you devote yourself to the study of the sacred utterances, the richer will be your understanding of them, just as the more the soil is tilled, the richer the harvest.”— St. Isidore of Seville, p. 201

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Minute Meditation – The Mirror of the Cross

Clare looked into the San Damiano crucifix, which had spoken to Francis. Like her, we look into the mirror of Christ on the cross to see God and to see ourselves; who we are, who we can become. As Christ mirrors us, so we, when we contemplate that mirror, begin to mirror him, who is both God and us when we are transformed by virtue. And it all begins with contemplation, which enables us to see, not subject to object, but subject to subject. What we look at begins to look back at us, both of us alive in the Spirit of God. The cross is both the image of God and of us, only if we let ourselves be transformed by contemplating the crucified Christ. Clare gazed on the San Damiano crucifix for over forty years, and it transformed her into Christ’s mirror.

— from the book Mystics: Twelve Who Reveal God’s Loveby Murry Bodo, OFM

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Meditation of the Day – His Purity Shows Our Foulness

“I believe we shall never learn to know ourselves except by endeavoring to know God, for, beholding His greatness we are struck by our own baseness, His purity shows our foulness, and by meditating on His humility we find how very far we are from being humble. Two advantages are gained by this practice. First, it is clear that white looks far whiter when placed near something black, and on the contrary, black never looks so dark as when seen beside something white. Secondly, our understanding and will become more noble and capable of good in every way when we turn from ourselves to God: it is very injurious never to raise our minds above the mire of our own faults.”— St. Teresa of Avila, p. 17

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Minute Meditation – Mary Assumed Into Heaven

Mary is filled with joy as she lies down more tired than usual.  She closes her eyes, and she is inside the new Jerusalem, it seems, that is beyond her home here in Ephesus. She is in a large field that is inside the new Jerusalem, and she is lying down as in a field of golden ripened wheat.  She tries to keep her eyes closed, but the light of the field floods the room where she was trying to sleep, and she is wide awake. She begins to rise.  Or are her eyes still closed and she is but dreaming that His hand is reaching down to her? She is still in the beautiful field but she can still hear John turning in his sleep in the other room, though the sound grows fainter and the light grows brighter around her. The overshadowing cloud is lifting as is she.  She sees John.  He is sitting up in bed, eyes toward heaven, looking at her. He is smiling.  He is lifting his arms as if lifting her, then releasing her like a feather caught on the breath that is the Holy Spirit. Amen. So be it.

— from the book Nourishing Love: A Franciscan Celebration of Mary by Murray Bodo, OFM

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Minute Meditation – God Shines Through Others

When we allow others to do things for us, God’s goodness shines through them. Poverty is not so much about want or need; it is about relationship. Poverty impels us to reflect on our lives in the world from the position of weakness, dependency and vulnerability. It impels us to empty our pockets—not of money— but the pockets of our hearts, minds, wills—those places where we store up things for ourselves and isolate ourselves from real relationship with others. Poverty calls us to be vulnerable, open and receptive to others, to allow others into our lives and to be free enough to enter into the lives of others. While Clare calls us to be poor so that we may enter into relationship with the poor Christ, they also ask us to be poor so as to enter into relationship with our poor brothers and sisters in whom Christ lives.

— from the book Clare of Assisi: A Heart Full of Love by Ilia Delio, OSF

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