Category: Meditations

Daily meditations to provide inspiration

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Minute Meditation – Growing Deeper Roots

I imagine it will take me longer than the rest of my life truly to meet the world as its own subject rather than as the object of my own plans and priorities. But slowly, slowly, I’m learning. Whenever I take a meandering walk, or watch the hummingbirds at our feeder, or just sit under the trees on our front lawn, feeling the Earth beneath me and the breeze on my skin, I feel that my own roots are growing deeper, intertwining with those of the trees, and all seeking a common Source: the divine power that holds everything together. The more time I spend, agendaless, in and with the rest of nature, the broader and deeper grows my sense of connection, my sense of kinship, the feelings of love and the commitments of love. Though native to us, that bond must be nurtured, and its primary nutrient is time. Time is the good soil in which relationships grow and flower. Time, given with presence rather than preoccupation, is the greatest gift. There is no substitute. 

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

//Franciscan Media//

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Minute Meditation – Deep Work Can be Prayer

When you are in a flow state or doing deep work, you have given yourself fully to what you are doing. You’re not checking email or texts or your social media feeds. You’re not browsing streaming services for new content. You’re not snagging the best deal on Amazon. You’re simply doing one thing, whether that is performing a piano concerto, writing a fine paragraph, helping your third-grader with her math, or getting the ignition timing properly set. You have, to borrow a phrase from Thomas Merton, forgotten yourself on purpose. Like Mary, you are truly and fully attentive to the one thing needful, rather than busy with the ten thousand things, like Martha. If approached with intention, such states can indeed be forms of prayer: deep, open attentiveness to the present moment, in which our own egos are emptied out so we have room to be filled with the divine.

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

//Franciscan Media//

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Minute Meditation – One With the Earth

As the Genesis creation story points to so poetically, we are literally made up of the Earth—every molecule of our being ultimately came from the Earth. We are children of Earth, flesh of the Earth’s flesh and bone of her bone. We are not some aliens that fate dropped onto this planet to make shift. We human animals are native to this place and have co-evolved with the Earth for millions of years. We may have isolated and insulated ourselves with technology, but deep in our collective psyche, deep in our instinctual drives and our inherited knowledge, we know that we belong. True, it can sometimes be a contentious relationship. The Earth can be cruel and unforgiving, and survival can be a struggle. But it is the struggle of family, not contention between strangers.

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

//Franciscan Media//

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Minute Meditation – Our Love for Our Children

We care for our children because we love them. We care for our children because in our love for them, we realize that they are unique, amazing creatures— even our identical twin daughters, who had different personalities right from the start. We care for our children because in the eyes of our love, they are beautiful, inside and out. We care for our children because in our love for them, we wonder at the people they are, and we hope for the people they are becoming. We care for our children even though they may break our heart—and in each breaking, our heart grows larger and more capable of care. Our love creates and preserves the best in them and the best in us.

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

//Franciscan Media//

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Minute Meditation – The Spiritual Virtue of Humility

Humility is the hallmark spiritual virtue of letting go. It’s an open-minded, openhearted, openhanded way to move through the world. To be humble is to make room for life as it comes, without the need to grasp too tightly, even (and especially) to certainty. This kind of attitude is what keeps your vision from clouding up and occluding. No one manages this perfectly, of course. That’s why life seems all too willing to deal us periodic humiliations that knock down our towers of Babel and drop us back onto the ground of our being: the truth that we are held in divine and loving hands, without being able to do anything to deserve or ruin it. 

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

//Franciscan Media//

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Minute Meditation – For Love of the Poor

You don’t need a lot of elaborate statistics to know that there are billions of people who are suffering crushing poverty at this very moment. If you start to pay attention, you feel this inside yourself. We may often distract ourselves or deny it, but there’s no getting around the fact that we are connected in more ways and to a greater extent than we can ever fathom. The deeper we go in our spiritual practice, the more obvious and undeniable these connections become.

Being present to the poor through friendship, solidarity, and service isn’t just a helpful set of moral principles. It’s a virtuous circle, with each feeding and amplifying the others, and all leading to a more authentic way of being in the world. Because when we make room for these in our life, we’re making room for love, the common bond that can bridge any gulf poverty may create.

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

//Franciscan Media//

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Minute Meditation – Cleaning the Lens

I believe that all of us are born with the image of God stamped indelibly into the fibers of our being. Despite our personal flaws and the brokenness of our institutions, we all have divine wisdom and goodness inscribed on our hearts. We don’t acquire it from without as much as we uncover it from within. Unfortunately, though, our personal experiences and cultural messages tend to have us believe that our worthiness resides in something external, something we can cultivate, achieve, amass, or purchase. This is a lie, an illusion, which obscures the divine goodness that is the birthright of each one of us. We see through a glass dimly. An important part of spiritual practice, then, is “cleaning the lens”: letting go of the layers of illusion piled up by the ego, which helps us to rediscover the deepest truths of who we are, what the world is, and how we belong. 

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

//Franciscan Media//

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Minute Meditation – Why Do We Need to Let Go?

Jesus didn’t promise his early disciples a life of luxury and ease. Instead, he told them they would have to let go of pretty much everything in order to follow him. The early monastics pared their life down to the barest of essentials out in the deserts of Egypt and Syria. Beloved St. Francis of Assisi let go of his prospects as a middle-class Italian cloth merchant and pledged his allegiance to Lady Poverty instead. Why? Why does letting go seem to be such a necessary element in the equation of transformational spirituality? One answer is as simple as it is painful: because if life inevitably entails loss, and if true spirituality is about fully embracing the (often messy) reality of life, then any authentic spiritual path must make room for loss. Otherwise, spirituality really is just an opiate for the masses or a form of bypass, leading us away from life’s mystery rather than into the heart of it. 

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