Tag: Meditation

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Minute Meditation – Answer Found in Walking

I am a walker. Indeed, walking is one of my favorite pastimes. I rejoice in sunrise while striding on the beach near my home or through urban landscapes when I’m traveling on business. I delight in an afternoon saunter with my wife, Kate, and our goldendoodle, taking in the beauty of

Cape Cod as my dog gallops across the beach. Knowing my love for walking, a dear friend once gave me a glass paperweight, inscribed with Augustine’s words: solvitur ambulando, “it will be solved in the walking.” Movement awakens novel visions and stimulates creative thinking. It’s difficult to hold onto old ideas when you’re on the move. Walking becomes the place of possibility, intimacy, and service. God is our companion as we venture toward new horizons.

—from the book Walking with Francis of Assisi: From Privilege to Activism
by Bruce Epperly

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Minute Mediation – January 27th, 2021

The first day of my pilgrimage to Assisi was dawning and I wanted to get the lay of the land and reorient my spiritual GPS after three hectic days of sightseeing in Rome. No one stirred, not even a stray cat or dog in search of bounty from a trash can, as I passed the majestic Basilica di San Francesco, the church of Santa Maria Maggiore, the abbey of San Pietro, and the Basilica di Santa Chiara. Too early even for morning mass, I walked the cobblestones and heard sounds of a new day dawning. As I gazed at the verdant Umbrian countryside in the distance, my imagination went back

to a simpler time. I visualized the hilltop village eight centuries ago, without lights or power, phones or internet, insular and isolated, a place where most of its citizens lived and died without traveling more than day’s walk from their Umbrian birthplace. In the still, crisp morning, I experienced the simplicity of a time before climate change, global travel, the novel coronavirus, and the 24/7 news cycle. For a split second, I forgot the machinations of political leaders and the spirit of unrest that has enveloped the globe as I pondered the journey of another pilgrim like myself, trying to make sense of his own inner stirrings and the challenges of his own time and place and looking for a way of life that would nurture his spirit and serve the world. I was looking for a world-affirming way to become a mystic activist for our time.

—from the book Walking with Francis of Assisi: From Privilege to Activism
by Bruce Epperly

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Meditation of the Day – January 27, 2021

“Prayer is, as it were, being alone with God. A soul prays only when it is turned toward God, and for so long as it remains so. As soon as it turns away, it stops praying. The preparation for prayer is thus the movement of turning to God and away from all that is not God. That is why we are so right when we define prayer as this movement. Prayer is essentially a ‘raising up’, an elevation. We begin to pray when we detach ourselves from created objects and raise ourselves up to the Creator.”— Dom Augustin Guillerand, p. 91

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Minute Meditation – January 26, 2021

I believe that Francis’s message is even more important in light of this most recent pandemic. Francis—and his spiritual sister, Clare—remind us we are all connected. The paths of greed, consumerism, individualism, and nationalism endanger the planet and its peoples. In the spirit of Francis, we need to break down barriers of friend and stranger, citizen and immigrant, rich and poor, if we are to survive in this increasingly interdependent world. Nations need to see patriotism in terms of world loyalty as well as self-affirmation. We need the Franciscan vision of all creation singing praises to the Creator if we are to flourish in the years and centuries to come. Like Francis and Clare, we need to become earth-loving saints, committed to our planet and its peoples—in our time and our children’s and grandchildren’s time.

—from the book Walking with Francis of Assisi: From Privilege to Activism
by Bruce Epperly

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Minute Meditations – January 25th, 2021

What we bring to the pursuit of the God of life is what we will get out of it. The regularity of prayer, the depth of our lectio, the embrace of silence, the space we give

to the search for God, the surrender of our own obsessions with self to the concerns of God for the world—all these will determine the quality of the contemplation we achieve. Prayer becomes the olive press we walk, the chafing wheel we tread which, over and over again, breaks open our hearts to the Word of God. Then, finally, after years of immersion in daily prayer, we begin to be what we have prayed for all those years.

–from the book In God’s Holy Light: Wisdom from the Desert Monastics
by Joan Chittister, OSB

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Meditation of the Day – January 25th

“Since all our love for God is ultimately a response to His love for us, we can never love Him in the same way He loves us, namely, gratuitously. Since we are fundamentally dependent on God and in His debt for our creation and redemption, our love is always owed to Him, a duty, a response to His love. But we can love our neighbor in the same way that He loves us, gratuitously—not because of anything the neighbor has done for us or because of anything that we owe him, but simply because love has been freely given to us. We thereby greatly please the Father. God the Father tells Catherine [of Siena]: This is why I have put you among your neighbors: so that you can do for them what you cannot do for me—that is, love them without any concern for thanks and without looking for any profit for yourself. And whatever you do for them I will consider done for me.”
– Ralph Martin, p. 261

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Minute Meditation – January 24th

The great spiritual problem of the day is being “like fish out of water.” A life without spiritual regularity drifts through time with little to really hang onto when life most needs an anchor. Instead, we often get caught up in someone else’s agenda most of our lives. We put the cell aside for work and its never-ending deadlines. We forget the cell when we need it most and make play a poor substitute for thought and prayer. We think that we can run our legs off doing, going, finding, socializing, and still stay stolid and serene in the midst of the pressure of it all. And then we find ourselves staring at the ceiling one night and thinking to ourselves, “There must be more to life than this.”

—from the book In God’s Holy Light: Wisdom from the Desert Monastics
by Sister Joan Chittister

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Meditation of the Day for January 24th

“Scattered about the entire earth, your mother the Church is tormented by the assaults of error. She is also afflicted by the laziness and indifference of so many of the children she carries around in her bosom as well as by the sight of so many of her members growing cold, while she becomes less able to help her little ones. Who then will give her the necessary help she cries for if not her children and other members to whose number you belong?”— Saint Augustine, p. 90