Tag: Meditation

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The Beauty of the Beatitudes

The Beauty of the Beatitudes

As Christians, the beauty of the beatitudes is that they remind us that this world is not our home. What we have in this life does not define our worth, nor does it represent anything that is lasting. The reason that Jesus says that those who are truly blessed are those who suffer (poverty, mourning, and the like) is not because he wants us to suffer; it’s because he wants us to realize that nothing in this world can ever fully satisfy. Only he can.

And so, even though suffering may appear at first to be without benefit, if it helps us depend more on God, grow in empathy, and focus us on what really matters, how can it be anything but a blessing?

—from St. Anthony Messenger‘s “Acting on the Beatitudes“
by Casey Cole, OFM

Franciscan Media: https://www.franciscanmedia.org/

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God Wants Our Truest Selves

God Wants Our Truest Selves

Jesus does not want masks. He does not want projections of our superficial selves that bear no resemblance to who we really are. When he calls us to follow after him, he does not want the person we wish we were or the person we pretend to be. No, when he calls us, he wants the person he created, the person we are becoming in his love, our truest selves.

If we want to follow after him, we must strip ourselves of everything that is superficial, inauthentic, forced, or pretend. We need to let go of all those partial and superficial selves. They just get in the way.

—from the book Let Go: Seven Stumbling Blocks to Christian Discipleship
by Casey Cole, OFM

Franciscan Media: https://www.franciscanmedia.org/

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God is Wild

God Is Wild

The prophets were a wild bunch. They had to be because they were the spokespeople of a wild God, a God who didn’t care much about temples and offerings but who cared a lot about the way people were treated and the opening of the human heart.  We tend to think the prophets were fortunetellers predicting the Christian future, but they were much more. They named the ever-present illusions and self-deceptions. They were non-clergy with a radical message from a God seeking intimacy, and for all their efforts, they largely got persecution and death, down to the last of the prophets, John the Baptist.

Nice religion is always threatened by the “glorious freedom of the children of God” (Romans 8:21). Suddenly, God is in charge instead of our explanations of things. I love to remind people that the word “nice” is never found in the Bible. God is not nice, it seems; God is wild.

—from the book From Wild Man to Wise Man: Reflections on Male Spirituality
by Richard Rohr

//Franciscan Media – 4/2/2024//

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Minute Meditation – Godly Moment

In keeping his eyes on the leper, in thinking only of this person before him, Francis forgot himself, he forgot the chasm beneath him, and he ran straight across the void into the arms of love and happiness. And all his life he struggled to preserve that original insight into love and to act it out daily. Love was looking into the eyes of the other; and forgetting the dark void between you and forgetting that no one can walk in a void, you start boldly across, your arms outstretched to give of yourself and to receive of the other.

In his last words to his brothers, his Testament, he said: “When I was in sin, it appeared too bitter to me to see lepers; and the Lord himself led me among them, and that which seemed bitter to me was changed for me into sweetness of soul and body.” It was all there in those words: the walk to the leper was the Journey; what happened to you then was the Dream come true.

—from the book Francis: The Journey and the Dream
by Murray Bodo, OFM

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Minute Meditation – Life and Love Within Myself

In my best, my most alive moments—in my mystical moments, if you want—I have a profound sense of belonging. At those moments, I am aware of being truly at home in this universe. I know that I am not an orphan here. There is no longer any doubt in my mind that I belong to this Earth Household, in which each member belongs to all others—bugs to beavers, black-eyed susans to black holes, quarks to quails, lightning to fireflies, humans to hyenas and humus. To say “yes” to this limitless mutual belonging is love. When I speak of God, I mean this kind of love, this great “yes” to belonging.

I experience this love at one and the same time as God’s “yes” to all that exists (and to me personally) and as my own little “yes” to it all. In saying this “yes” I realize God’s very life and love within myself.

—from the book The Way of Silence: Engaging the Sacred in Daily Life by Brother David Steindl-Rast, OSB

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Minute Meditation – Choose to Love

If we choose to love, if we decide to accept the demands of being a loving person, we immediately take on the responsibility of being for others, in service and in times of opposition, in trials and persecution, also in peace and joy. We accept this dynamic not in the way we would like, but as determined by the needs of others around us. Frequently, this means putting more heart into what we are about in all the ordinary tasks of daily life; it means reaching deeper into the source of our energy when it seems like it is too hard to allow the ministry or a child or another to keep making demands.

It takes a self-possessed, mature person to respond thus. But these same people know freedom; they are free from self and free for others, free to live the challenge of the gospel and open to the most that life can call forth. Such people know joy!

—from the book In the Footsteps of Francis and Clare by Roch Niemier, OFM

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Minute Meditation – Love and Triumph

The stigmata Francis received in his final years revealed God’s pain within his pain. The stigmata reflected God’s empathy expanding Francis’s own empathy and circle of love to include all creation. Francis’s God is not aloof or apathetic. God is embedded in the pain and joy of the world. Our calling, as Francis and Clare discovered, is to identify the pain of the least of these as God’s pain. God experiences the pain and joy of creatures, which touch the heart of our immanent and intimate God. As Bonaventure writes, God is “totally submerged in the waters from the sole of the foot to the top of the head…. [God] appeared to you as your beloved cut through with wound upon wound in order to heal you.”

Gazing on the cross, as Clare counseled the royal Agnes of Prague, is not an abstract intellectual exercise, but a personal identification with God’s pain on the cross and in every moment of human misery. Clare’s gazing upon Jesus inspired her own solidarity with the pain of the world, and the divine and human empathy toward those who suffer also encompasses the joy of experiencing Christ’s resurrection, God’s loving triumph that brings healing to all creation and invites us to be messengers of hope to those who have been crushed by suffering and injustice.

—from the book Simplicity, Spirituality, Service: The Timeless Wisdom of Francis, Clare, and Bonaventure by Bruce G. Epperly

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Minute Meditation – God Loves Our Imperfections

God, to me, is a mystery, but in my better moments, I feel fairly sure that God loves us in the way I am trying to love my kids. That is to say, I think God looks at us and sees the beauty of who we are, and that beauty is not a result of our being perfect. It’s a result of our being a whole, unique mess—the good and the bad together. God delights in our discolored strands—at our wild imperfections. As a father myself, I am learning to do the same.

—from St. Anthony Messenger‘s “Faith Unpacked: Embracing Our Imperfections“ by David Dault, PhD

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Minute Meditation – Blessed Are the Meek

Francis came to view his whole life as a prayer. As we will discover in our reflections on Francis’s “Canticle of Creatures,” prayer joins us as healing partners with all creation. In a world where everything fits together seamlessly, every thought, word, and act can bring healing and beauty to the world. All creation praises its Creator. All things find their origin and completion in God’s love.

The meek are blessed precisely because they recognize their dependence on the generosity of God and creation, and out of their dependence, the humble commit themselves to be Christ to others, claiming their vocation as God’s companions in healing the earth. The privileged become blessed in prayerfully letting go of their sense of superiority and seeing themselves as united with humanity and all creation, sharing their possessions and working for a world in which everyone has a fair chance to enjoy the fruits of this good earth.

—from the book Simplicity, Spirituality, Service: The Timeless Wisdom of Francis, Clare, and Bonaventure by Bruce G. Epperly

//Franciscan Media//

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Minute Meditation – Treasures of the Kingdom

In recognizing his vocation to live the Gospel, Francis of Assisi knew that he could no longer identify himself with the wealthy and powerful of his day; rather, he desired to live among the minores, the poor, marginalized, and powerless and those without a voice in society.

More than anything, Francis longed to live like Jesus Christ: “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9). For Francis and his brothers, minority was the one thing necessary for entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven. Living this way, Francis conformed himself to Christ who exchanged the richness of heaven for the poverty of the earth, in order that we, becoming like Christ, could be rich with the treasures of the Kingdom.

—from the book Franciscan Field Guide: People, Places, Practices, and Prayers by Rosemary Stets, OSF

//Franciscan Media//