Category: Meditations

Daily meditations to provide inspiration

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Minute Meditation – Share Your Memories With Jesus

How many things have we hidden away in our memories, afraid to look at them, to bring them to the surface and disarm them by facing them and seeing that they are not as bad as we thought? And if we look at them with Jesus at our side, it is easier still because they are healed by his sharing the memories with us. We are sometimes so successful in suppressing what we do not want to remember that to our conscious mind the experience is as if it never happened. But it smolders beneath the surface, burning little holes in our will when we want to do something and find we cannot do it. If we let Jesus share these memories with us, they lose all their power to scare us into inactivity. And this healing process frees us from the past.

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

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Minute Meditation – Forgive and Begin to Live

Until we learn to forgive deeply and sincerely, we remain only on the threshold of real union with God, we remain essentially imprisoned and unfree. In the course of a lifetime, we gradually accumulate countless little resentments which, if allowed to grow, become big hates and seemingly insoluble differences. If, however, we do not allow these jealousies and hatreds to grow, but instead try always to purify our hearts, we enter into the mystery of love, the mystery of God. We have so much to forgive: life, maybe, certainly those who have hurt us and even ourselves (perhaps most of all, ourselves). Often we are hardest on ourselves and need to forgive ourselves for failing, for being less perfect than we would like to be. God forgives us much more readily than we forgive ourselves, and this inability to forgive ourselves is the cause of much of our pain and inability to grow. Forgive, then, and we will begin to live. 

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

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Minute Meditation – Finding God in Our Experience

More valuable than any proof for the existence of God demonstrated in books is a personal experience of God. People of prayer and interiority know God mainly through God’s working in their lives. They have known God in the prayers that were answered, in problems and in difficulties overcome that only the power of God’s Spirit can explain, and above all in the charity of their lives that transcends human patience and love and reaches a level of selflessness that faith alone makes possible. The witness of a selfless God-centered life, therefore, is the greatest proof of the existence of God. People find God in people who have already found God and live in that love.

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

//Franciscan Media//

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Minute Meditation – What Does It Mean to Be Sacred?

What does it mean to be sacred—to be woven, warp and weft, of divine fabric? For one, it means that all the raw material of this world and all the human and other-than-human creatures of this world are divinely given gifts, deserving of reverence and respect for their place in the Great Economy, and therefore not simply expendable. To be sacred also means to participate fully—even if not consciously—in the ongoing dance of relationships, which are the fundamental divine reality, as good Trinitarian theology claims. To be sacred means that everything and everyone (human and non-human) can be a conduit and a container for beauty and meaning. Everything, if we just learn to see with the right eyes, is shining like the sun. And it means, in an important way, that ownership and possession are ultimately a fiction. 

— from the book Making Room: Soul-Deep Satisfaction through Simple Living
by Kyle Kramer

//Franciscan Media//

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Minute Meditation – Everything is Holy

To be a materialist is to believe fully in the Incarnation: that God so loved the world that God became the world, dwelling within it from the very beginning of creation, and that God delights in and sustains the cosmos at every moment. When you begin to see the world in this way it’s possible to make the leap from experiencing stuff as mere possessions, which implies zero-sum individual ownership and control, to experiencing stuff as sacramental. In the Catholic imagination, a sacrament is something perceivable to the senses—something material—that is at the same time a spiritual reality, opening a window into the presence of the divine. The Eucharist, for example, is bread and wine: fully material, fully the fruit of the earth and the work of human hands, but also shot through with spiritual significance. We know the official sacraments of the Church, but there’s also a broader sense of the sacred. Thomas Merton, the Cistercian spiritual master, captured it well in this simple phrase: “Everything that is, is holy.”

— from the book Making Room: Soul-Deep Satisfaction through Simple Living
by Kyle Kramer

//Franciscan Media//

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Minute Meditation – Practice Letting Go

Letting go of our external attachments through simple living does help us to show up with our best selves. Finally, though, such lettings-go are prelude and path to the ultimate letting go, which costs not less than everything: our attachment to our own self. Of course, all of us will have to do this at the end of our days. But as Jesus, St. Francis, the Buddha, and plenty of other mystics and spiritual masters have taught and shown us, it’s possible through practice to let go even in this life, to stop taking ourselves so seriously, to walk in the spacious freedom that comes from having nothing to prove, nothing to grasp at. In that condition of complete simplicity, which we may only experience in glimpses during this life, we find our truest belonging in and among all things and their Maker. And we know, as St. Julian did, that “all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.” 

— from the book Making Room: Soul-Deep Satisfaction through Simple Living
by Kyle Kramer

//Franciscan Media//

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Minute Meditation – Having Enough

Many of us think about money in terms of scarcity: the fear of losing it, of not having enough, and therefore the need to hold on to it tightly. Behind the veil of scarcity, though, there are more gracious ways to engage with money. What if we understood money as a form of energy that is meant to flow through our lives and through the world, rather than be hoarded and so become stagnant? To see money this way, to be willing to let it flow, requires letting go of fear and trusting instead that there is and will be enough for us and for others. Sufficiency—enoughness—is the middle way between scarcity and exploitative wealth. As Gandhi put it, the world has enough for everyone’s need, but not enough for everyone’s greed. Sufficiency is the way the birds of the air live, and the lilies of the field.

— from the book Making Room: Soul-Deep Satisfaction through Simple Living
by Kyle Kramer

//Franciscan Media//