Category: Meditations

Daily meditations to provide inspiration

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Meditation of the Day – Though Our Feelings Come and Go, His Love for Us Does Not

“On the whole, God’s love for us is a much safer subject to think about than our love for Him. Nobody can always have devout feelings: and even if we could, feelings are not what God principally cares about. Christian Love, either towards God or towards man, is an affair of the will. If we are trying to do His will we are obeying the commandment, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God.’ He will give us feelings of love if He pleases. We cannot create them for ourselves, and we must not demand them as a right. But the great thing to remember is that, though our feelings come and go, His love for us does not. It is not wearied by our sins, or our indifference; and, therefore, it is quite relentless in its determination that we shall be cured of those sins, at whatever cost to us, at whatever cost to Him.”— C. S. Lewis, p. 132

//The Catholic Company//

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Minute Meditation – Good Work is Like a Prayer

It is in work that we find the test of our relationship to the creation because work is the question of how we will use the creation. For Wendell Berry, work done well brings us into a wholeness and cooperation with the creation in which we can find health. Bad work destroys the connections that make life possible. For Berry good work is like a prayer—it is an act of both gratitude and return. Good work accepts the gifts of creation and uses those gifts to further their givenness. There are seeds that lie for decades in the soil, waiting for the right conditions before springing to life. Good work is that which creates the conditions for such life to burst forth from the whole of the creation.

— from the book Wendell Berry and the Given Life 
by Ragan Sutterfield

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Meditation of the Day – Our Tears are Not Enough

“Let us not fancy that if we cry a great deal we have done all that is needed—rather we must work hard and practice the virtues: that is the essential—leaving tears to fall when God sends them, without trying to force ourselves to shed them. Then, if we do not take too much notice of them, they will leave the parched soil of our souls well watered, making it fertile in good fruit; for this is the water which falls from Heaven. … I think it is best for us to place ourselves in the presence of God, contemplate His mercy and grandeur and our own vileness and leave Him to give us what He will, whether water or drought, for He knows best what is good for us; thus we enjoy peace and the devil will have less chance to deceive us.”— St. Teresa of Avila, p.147

//The Catholic Company//

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Minute Meditation – Now and at the Hour of Our Death

That tragic tension between surrender and disbelief that tries to hold on, mirrors all of us who are born reaching out for the food of intimacy and who die trying to lift our arms to embrace and be embraced by our mother who birthed us and our spiritual mother who rebirthed us into a new life in God. Mother. Food. Intimacy. The images of the Incarnation and the death of Jesus. Mary is there, his mother and ours. She is there in our beginning and in our end. And in her Assumption she, with the Father and the Son, is there in our final embrace of the intimacy we were born for. All of it in the Spirit, which overshadowed her and returned at Pentecost to overshadow the disciples and us in our Baptism and Confirmation, our new birth and new life of purpose in the Mystical Body of Christ. Mary. She is the one who is there when we are born and when we live and when we die. Mother. Mary. Intimate Presence. Pray for us “now and at the hour of our death.”

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

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Meditation of the Day – The Soul Becomes Pure and Wiser Through Suffering

“The reason why the soul not only travels securely when in obscurity, but also makes greater progress, is this: In general the soul makes greater progress in the spiritual life when it least thinks so, yea, when it rather imagines that it is losing everything …There is another reason also why the soul has traveled safely in this obscurity; it has suffered: for the way of suffering is safer, and also more profitable, than that of rejoicing and of action. In suffering God gives strength, but in action and in joy the soul does but show its own weakness and imperfections. And in suffering, the soul practices and acquires virtue, and becomes pure, wiser, and more cautious.”— St. John of the Cross, p.149

//The Catholic Company//

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Minute Meditation – The Model of What It Means to Love

Mary is the model of what it means to love because love means helping those who need us, even when we ourselves might be in need. Mary is not self-absorbed. She even teaches her son, Jesus, that those in need take precedence even over the ministry or work we think is all important. 

What about us? Who do we spend most our time thinking about? Whose needs are always on our mind? Isn’t it usually ourselves? But what is Mary telling us? Mary is our spiritual mother, and she is saying to us, as she said to her son, “Don’t forget those who have a more pressing need than you do. Remember to remember others. How can you be of help?”

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

//Franciscan Media//

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Meditation of the Day – We Will Never be Free of Trials & Temptations While on Earth

“We will never be free of trials and temptations as long as our earthly life lasts. For Job has said: ‘Is not the life of human beings on earth a drudgery?‘ (Job 7:1). Therefore, we should always be on our guard against temptations, always praying that our enemy, the devil, ‘who never sleeps but constantly looks for someone to devour.‘ (1 Pet 5:8), will not catch us off guard. No one in this world is so perfect or holy as not to have temptations sometimes. We can never be entirely free from them. Sometimes these temptations can be very severe and troublesome, but if we resist them, they will be very useful to us; for by experiencing them we are humbled, cleansed, and instructed. All the Saints endured tribulations and temptations and profited by them, while those who did not resist and overcome them fell away and were lost. There is no place so holy or remote where you will not meet with temptation, nor is there anyone completely free from it in this life; for in our body we bear the wounds of sin—the weakness of our human nature in which we are born.” — Thomas á Kempis, p. 31

//The Catholic Company//

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Minute Meditation – What Mary Taught Jesus

Jesus was not born and raised in a bubble. He had a mother who showed him manners and proper eating habits and how to act and interact with others… He was obedient to her, as he was disobedient by not telling Mary and Joseph that he was staying behind in the Temple when they went up to Jerusalem together. And when, on that occasion, he was questioned and indirectly reprimanded by Mary, Scripture says that Jesus then “went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them. His mother treasured all these things in her heart. And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor” (Luke 2:51–52). What depths of meditation are here when we open our minds and imaginations to the mystery of the hidden lives of Mary and her son, Jesus, of how they related to one another, and of how they lived together in Nazareth. What spiritual energy is contained and released for us in the images and scenes we create or receive in the silence of prayerful meditation.

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

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Meditation of the Day – If I Had The Tongues of Angels

“Infinite grief I wish from My creature in two ways: in one way, through her sorrow for her own sins, which she has committed against Me her Creator; in the other way, through her sorrow for the sins which she sees her neighbors commit against Me. Of such as these, inasmuch as they have infinite desire, that is, are joined to Me by an affection of love, and therefore grieve when they offend Me, or see Me offended, their every pain, whether spiritual or corporeal, from wherever it may come, receives infinite merit, and satisfies for a guilt which deserved an infinite penalty, although their works are finite and done in finite time; but, inasmuch as they possess the virtue of desire, and sustain their suffering with desire, and contrition, and infinite displeasure against their guilt, their pain is held worthy. Paul explained this when he said: If I had the tongues of angels, and if I knew the things of the future and gave my body to be burned, and have not love, it would be worth nothing to me. The glorious Apostle thus shows that finite works are not valid, either as punishment or recompense, without the condiment of the affection of love.”— St. Catherine of Siena, p. 4

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Minute Meditation – Living a Story

We are not just our minds. We live and move and have our being in and with the world around us. We experience our lives through all of our senses, and all of that experience is conveyed in story, which is more than ideas and beliefs. Story has movement and sound, and portrays how we interact with our environment, with humans and all living things, from plants to animals to the landscape of our lives in time. 

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

//Franciscan Media//