Category: Meditations

Daily meditations to provide inspiration

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Minute Meditation – Dependent Only on God

Poverty reminds us of the deepest truth of our human existence; that we are created by God and are dependent on God in an absolute sense. It is the sister of humility since it prompts us to recognize that all we have is gift. Humility is the acceptance of being what we are, with our strengths and weaknesses, and responding in love to the gift of being. Humility can open one to the renewing spirit of grace and make possible the return of creation to the Father.

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

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Meditation of the Day – Christ is True God and True Man

“Christ is the second person of the Blessed Trinity, true God and true man, eternally united with the Father and the Holy Spirit. Just as there can be no separation within Christ’s human nature, so there can be none within His divine nature. Just as we cannot separate Christ’s body from His blood, or His soul from His body and blood, so we cannot separate Christ from the other persons in the Trinity. Time after time, we hear the priest pray to the Father at the end of the opening prayer of the Mass: We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever.”— Vinney Flynn, p. 25

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Minute Meditation – Rich in Our Poverty

Clare puts forth the tremendous mystery of the human person both as rich and poor. The mystery can be stated in this way: We are rich in our poverty but we must possess poverty to know our wealth in God. Clare does not see the meaning of poverty as living in deprivation but living fulfilled in God. Her understanding of poverty is paradoxical. To embrace poverty is to be endowed with riches; to possess and desire poverty is to receive God’s promise of the kingdom of heaven. The poor person is not the one in need of material things but the one in need of God and the one who needs God possesses God and to possess God is to possess all.

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

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Meditation of the Day – Unite Yourself to Him in Holy Communion

“Oh, how painful it is to Me that souls so seldom unite themselves to Me in Holy Communion. I wait for souls, and they are indifferent toward Me. I love them tenderly and sincerely, and they distrust Me. I want to lavish My graces on them, and they do not want to accept them. They treat Me as a dead object, whereas My Heart is full of love and mercy. In order that you may know at least some of My pain, imagine the most tender of mothers who has great love for her children, while those children spurn her love. Consider her pain. No one is in a position to console her. This is but a pale image and likeness of My love.”— Diary of St. Faustina Kowalska, 1447

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Meditation of the Day – We Trust Ourselves to a Doctor But Not God

“We trust ourselves to a doctor because we suppose he knows his business. He orders an operation which involves cutting away part of our body and we accept it. We are grateful to him and pay him a large fee because we judge he would not act as he does unless the remedy were necessary, and we must rely on his skill. Yet we are unwilling to treat God in the same way! It looks as if we do not trust His wisdom and are afraid He cannot do His job properly. We allow ourselves to be operated on by a man who may easily make a mistake—a mistake which may cost us our life—and protest when God sets to work on us. If we could see all He sees we would unhesitatingly wish all He wishes.”— Fr. Jean Baptiste Saint-Jure, p. 90

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Minute Meditation – Reflect Christ in Your Life

Clare’s emphasis on the person of Jesus Christ is an emphasis on the human person as well, what we are and what we are called to be. Christ crucified is the mirror in which we are to see our reflection, our strengths and weaknesses, our failures and our capacity to love. She wants us to reflect Christ in our lives, to help build up the Body of Christ through transformation in love, and to participate in the church. She is a mystic who calls us to go forward into God by letting Christ take on our flesh so that we may reflect the face of Christ to the world. She tells us not to be dissuaded in the path to God, to be resolute in our convictions and trust the guidance of the Spirit in our lives. Her thought is centered on the essence of human identity: Be yourself and allow God to dwell within you. Christ will then be alive and the world will be created anew.

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

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Minute Meditation – The Cloister of the World

Clare provides the “roadmap” of prayer for evangelical life precisely because she lived under a monastic rule while ardently desiring evangelical life. To really cling to what she believed in, she had to consolidate its meaning for herself and those who followed her. The monastic path to God is quite different from the evangelical path. It emphasizes divine transcendence rather than immanence, the ascended Christ rather than the crucified Christ, spiritual union with God rather than the physical expression of divine love. The monastic quest includes the silence and solitude of the cloister to seek God whereas evangelical life, with its focus on the Incarnation, means that God is to be found in the cloister of the world. 

— from the book Franciscan Prayerby Ilia Delio, OSF

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Minute Meditation – The Poverty of God

Clare desired to follow Francis’s evangelical way of life and may indeed have done so in the early part of her career. Although she described herself as “la piantacella,” the little plant of Francis, she was clearly no wilting flower. She had a strong, independent spirit and a real desire to join in Francis’ evangelical project. Whereas Francis saw poverty as the means for living authentic gospel life, Clare fought for the “privilege of poverty,” because poverty was the key to Christian life. The Incarnation spoke to her of the “poverty of God” manifested in God’s self-giving love. 

— from the book Franciscan Prayerby Ilia Delio, OSF

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Minute Meditation – I Found God in You

We are all, whether we realize it or not, living symbols of the presence of God in the world. By who we are and how we act we can either build up or tear down the kingdom of God. God has chosen to act through us humans, first through God’s son, Jesus Christ, and then through all the members of Christ’s Mystical Body. That God is alive and well is most evident in those who live through, with and in God. No greater compliment could be given a man or a woman than that someone should say, “I found God in you.”

— from the book Song of the Sparrow: New Poems and Meditations by Murray Bodo, OFM

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