Daily Reflection – Our Goal is to Develop Hearts Like Christ’s
Minute Meditation – Don’t Harden Your Hearts
We have all experienced it. When someone wants to dislike us, no matter what we do, it will be interpreted in the worst possible fashion. As we often say, “You can’t win.” When someone’s heart is hardened already, you could be Jesus himself, and they will seriously see you as wrong, inferior, dangerous, and heretical—which is what is about to happen in Holy Week. At that point, no matter what evil a person decides to do to you, it will be deemed virtuous and praiseworthy by hardened or paranoid people in the hostile camp. “He is a terrorist!” they might say. Never having the humility or honesty to admit that to someone else, looking from a different perspective (which is deemed totally wrong), he probably looks like a sacrificial and dedicated freedom fighter. “I have my conclusions already, do not bother me with any new information that might make me change my judgment.” Most Christians would probably be slow to admit that by these criteria almost all of us would have opposed Jesus. “This is not our tradition, he is not from our group, and he has no credentials!”
“God of perfect freedom, open spaces inside of our minds, our hearts, and our memories, so we can just begin to be free. Do not let me be hardened against anyone of your creatures, so that I cannot hear and respect their truth.”
—from the book Wondrous Encounters: Scriptures for Lent
by Richard Rohr, OFM, page 109
//Franciscan Media//
Minute Meditation – Our Hearts Listen and Respond
To have a place of solitude is an inestimable gift. It makes it easy to let the heart expand, to let the senses wake up, one by one, to come alive with fresh vitality. Yet, whatever our circumstances, we need to somehow set aside a time and a place for this kind of experience. We tend to overlook the close connection between responsiveness and responsibility, between sensuousness and social challenge. Outside and inside are of one piece. As we learn to really look with our eyes, we begin to look with our heart also. We begin to face what we might prefer to overlook, begin to see what is going on in this world of ours. As we learn to listen with our ears, our heart begins to hear the cry of the oppressed.
— from the book The Way of Silence: Engaging the Sacred in Daily Lifeby Brother David Steindl-Rast
//Franciscan Media//
Meditation of the Day – Our Ears are Filled with Racket
“When we come into church from the outside our ears are filled with the racket of the city, the words of those who have accompanied us, the laboring and quarreling of our own thoughts, the disquiet of our hearts’ wishes and worries, hurts and joys. How are we possibly to hear what God is saying? That we listen at all is something; not everyone does. It is even better when we pay attention and make a real effort to understand what is being said. But all this is not yet the attentive stillness in which God’s word can take root. This must be established before the service begins, if possible in the silence on the way to church, still better in a brief period of composure the evening before.”— Msgr. Romano Guardini, p. 17
//Catholic Company//
Meditation of the Day – We Cannot Change Ourselves
“However great our efforts, we cannot change ourselves. Only God can get to the bottom of our defects, and our limitations in the field of love; only he has sufficient mastery over our hearts for that. If we realize that we will save ourselves a great deal of discouragement and fruitless struggle. We do not have to become saints by our own power; we have to learn how to let God make us into saints. That does not mean, of course, that we don’t have to make any effort . . . We should fight, not to attain holiness as a result of our own efforts, but to let God act in us without our putting up any resistance against him; we should fight to open ourselves as fully as possible to his grace, which sanctifies us.”
— Fr. Jacques Philippe, p. 14-5
//Catholic Company//
Morning Offering – For True Hearts, There is No Separating Ocean
“For true hearts there is no separating ocean; or, rather, God is their ocean, in Whom they meet and are united; they love, and lose themselves in Him and in each other.”
— St. Théodore Guérin
//Catholic Company//
Morning Offering – The Eucharist Will Transform the Coldness of Our Hearts
“If we but paused for a moment to consider attentively what takes place in this Sacrament of the Eucharist, I am sure that the thought of Christ’s love for us would transform the coldness of our hearts into a fire of love and gratitude.”
— St. Angela of Foligno
//Catholic Company//
Mary’s virginity is not some kind of strained enclosure or an unnatural denial of the body. It is a choice that leads to a new kind of fruitfulness born of love that is human and inclusive and deeply spiritual, as well. St. Francis writes:
We are mothers of our Lord Jesus Christ when we carry him in our hearts and in our bodies, lovingly and with a pure and sincere conscience, and give birth to him through the working of his grace in us which should shine forth as an example to others. We are his spouses when we are wed to Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit. We are his brothers and sisters when we do the will of his Father who is in heaven (“Letter to All the Faithful”).
— from the book Nourishing Love: A Franciscan Celebration of Mary
by Murray Bodo, OFM
//Franciscan Media//
Meditation of the Day – Remove the Obstacles to His Mercy
“Tell souls not to place within their own hearts obstacles to My mercy, which so greatly wants to act within them. My mercy works in all those hearts which open their doors to it. Both the sinner and the righteous person have need of My mercy. Conversion, as well as perseverance, is a grace of My mercy. Let souls who are striving for perfection particularly adore My mercy, because the abundance of graces which I grant them flows from My mercy. I desire that these souls distinguish themselves by boundless trust in My mercy. I myself will attend to the sanctification of such souls. I will provide them with everything they will need to attain sanctity. The graces of My mercy are drawn by means of one vessel only, and that is-trust. The more a soul trusts, the more it will receive. Souls that trust boundlessly are a great comfort to Me, because I pour all the treasures of My graces into them. I rejoice that they ask for much, because it is My desire to give much, very much. On the other hand, I am sad when souls ask for little, when they narrow their hearts.” —Jesus to St. Faustina, Divine Mercy in My Soul p. 560
//The Catholic Company//
Minute Meditation – Prayer Changes Our Hearts
“The Bible says that Moses spoke to the Lord face-to-face, like a friend, and this is how prayer must be: free, insistent, with arguments, even reproving the Lord a little: ‘But you promised me this and you didn’t do it!’ Prayer is like speaking with a friend: in prayer one opens one’s heart. Following his face-to-face with God, Moses went down the mountain reinvigorated, saying, ‘I got to know the Lord better.’ And that strength allowed him to resume his work of leading the people to the Promised Land.”—Pope Francis
During Lent, most of us decide to pray more. We begin the season with a fresh new plan for improving our prayer lives. We might decide we’re going to say the rosary every day or pray the Liturgy of the Hours. We might plan to go to daily Mass more often. We find a new prayer book and commit to using it at a set time during the day. These are all worthy goals, but as we come to the end of the fourth week of Lent, we have to admit that our intentions are often defeated by our inertia or simply by the day-to-day realities of life. Pope Francis reminds us that prayer is not about us and the things we do, it’s about our relationship with God. He describes for us a very vivid image of talking to God as we would talk to a friend, a lover, a trusted confidante, a caring parent. He reminds us not to keep God at a distance, not to behave as though God doesn’t know our innermost thoughts and feelings. Too often our prayer is what we think God wants to hear. And sometimes we do that to keep ourselves detached from our deepest needs as well. Sometimes it takes talking to a close friend to discover what’s really bothering us. Pope Francis reminds us that God can be that close friend, as he was to Moses, to Abraham, to Noah, to Jesus, to all the saints through the ages.
Set aside your formal prayers today and bring before God the deepest desires and fears that you hold close in your heart. Talk to God the way you would talk to your closest friend. And then take time to sit in silence with God. Let yourself be held in God’s love, listening to the divine heartbeat in the world around you and in the depths of your own heart.
— from the book The Hope of Lent: Daily Reflections from Pope Francis
by Diane M. Houdek
//Franciscan Media//