Minute Meditation – God Wants Useable Instruments

God wants useable instruments who will carry the mystery, the weight of glory and the burden of sin simultaneously, who can bear the darkness and the light, who can hold the paradox of incarnation—flesh and spirit, human and divine, joy and suffering, at the same time, just as Jesus did. Watch what Jesus does and do the same thing! That, indeed, is hard… This is the only goodness that is available to humans, but it is more than enough. As Jesus himself will later say, “God alone is good” (Mark 10:18). Such a text gives us both glorious and non-inflating goals. There is no appeal to the ego here, only to our need and desire for union—with our own selves and with God.

— from the book Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality by Richard Rohr, OFM, page 34


Minute Meditation – God Wants Usable Instruments

God wants useable instruments who will carry the mystery, the weight of glory and the burden of sin simultaneously, who can bear the darkness and the light, who can hold the paradox of incarnation—flesh and spirit, human and divine, joy and suffering, at the same time, just as Jesus did. Watch what Jesus does and do the same thing! That, indeed, is hard… This is the only goodness that is available to humans, but it is more than enough. As Jesus himself will later say, “God alone is good” (Mark 10:18). Such a text gives us both glorious and non-inflating goals. There is no appeal to the ego here, only to our need and desire for union—with our own selves and with God.

— from the book Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality by Richard Rohr, OFM

//Franciscan Media//


Meditation of the Day – Out of the Darkness

“Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: The Blessed Sacrament … There you will find romance, glory, honor, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves on earth, and more than that: Death. By the divine paradox, that which ends life, and demands the surrender of all, and yet by the taste (or foretaste) of which alone can what you seek in your earthly relationships (love, faithfulness, joy) be maintained, or take on that complexion of reality, of eternal endurance, which every man’s heart desires.”— J. R. R. Tolkien, p. 119

//Catholic Company//


Meditation of the Day – We Feel Humiliation Keenly

“Although we feel the humiliation keenly when we are insulted, persecuted, or calumniated, this does not mean that we cannot suffer such trials with sentiments of true humility, subjecting nature to reason and faith, and sacrificing the resentment of our self-love to the love of God. We are not made of stone, so that we need be insensible or senseless in order to be humble. Of some martyrs we read that they writhed under their torments; of others, that they more or less rejoiced in them, according to the greater or lesser degree of unction they received from the Holy Ghost; and all were rewarded by the crown of glory, as it is not the pain or the feeling that makes the martyr, but the supernatural motive of virtue. In the same way some humble persons feel pleasure in being humiliated, and some feel sadness, especially when weighted down with calumny; and yet they all belong to the sphere of the humble, because it is not the humiliation nor the suffering alone which makes the soul humble, but the interior act by which this same humiliation is accepted and received through motives of Christian humility, and especially of a desire to resemble Jesus Christ, who though entitled to all the honors the world could offer Him, bore humiliation and scorn for the glory of His eternal Father.”— Fr. Cajetan da Bergamo, p. 19-20

//Catholic Company//