Tag: relationship

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Minute Meditation – Right Relationship is Key

Jesus is teaching that right relationship is the ultimate and daily criterion. If a social order allows and encourages, and even mandates, good connectedness between people and creation, people and events, people and people, people and God, then we have a truly sacred culture: the Reign of God. The world as it would be if God were directly in charge would be a world of right relationship. It would not be a world without pain or mystery, but simply a world where we would be in good contact with all things, where we would be connected and in communion. Conversely, the work of the Evil One is always to separate, divide, and throw apart (dia-bolical).

Right relationship is all about union and communion, it seems, which means that it is also about forgiveness, letting go, service, and lives of patience and simplicity. Who can doubt that this is the sum and substance of Jesus’ teaching? He makes right relationship desirable, possible, and the philosopher’s stone by which everything else is to be weighed and judged.

—from the book Jesus’ Alternative Plan: The Sermon on the Mount
by Richard Rohr, OFM

//Franciscan Media//

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60 Second Wisdom – How Your Greatest Fear is Affecting Your Relationships

“You may be afraid of flying, spiders, heights, and snakes, but there is one fear that dominates the human experience. We all have it. It’s our greatest fear. It sabotages relationships. It produces existential loneliness.

We’re afraid that if people really knew us, they wouldn’t love us. That’s our greatest fear.

The real tragedy is that by pretending to be the person we think other people want us to be, we destroy our chances at really being loved. Because when someone does come along to say, “I love you” there’s a little voice in our head that says, “No you don’t. You love the person you think I am.”

This is how people end up desperately lonely in a relationship.

Hugh Prather observed, “Some people are going to like me and some won’t. So I might as well be myself, and then at least I’ll know that the people who like me, like me.””

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Minute Meditation – The Heart Longs for God

Spiritual desire is the longing of the heart for relationship with God that brings happiness and peace. Francis of Assisi was a passionate person, a dreamer, a lover and a person of desire. When he felt his desire filled in hearing the gospel, he found the answer to his deepest longings and changed his life accordingly. He became a follower of Christ. Francis’ life shows us that we must be attentive to our desires if we are to find the fulfillment of our lives in God.

— from the book Franciscan Prayer

//Franciscan Media//

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Minute Meditation – Why Do We Need to Ask?

If God already knows what we need before we ask, and God actually cares about us more than we care about ourselves, then why do both Step 7 and Jesus say, each in their own way: “Ask, and you will receive. Seek, and you will find. Knock, and the door will be opened” (Matthew 7:7)? Are we trying to talk God into things? Does the group with the most and the best prayers win? Is prayer of petition just another way to get what we want, or is it to get God on our side? In every case, notice that we are trying to take control. In this short chapter, I will address that one simple, often confused, but important mystery of asking. Why is it good to ask, and what is really happening in prayers of petition or intercession? Do we need, are we encouraged, to talk God into things? Why does Jesus both tell us to ask and then say, “Your Father already knows what you need, so do not babble on like the pagans do” (Matthew 6:7–8)?

Let me answer in a few brief sentences, and then I will backtrack to explain what I mean. We ask not to change God, but to change ourselves. We pray to form a living relationship, not to get things done. Prayer is a symbiotic relationship with life and with God, a synergy which creates a result larger than the exchange itself. (That is why Jesus says all prayers are answered, which does not appear to be true, according to the evidence!) God knows that we need to pray to keep the symbiotic relationship moving and growing. Prayer is not a way to try to control God, or even to get what we want. As Jesus says in Luke’s Gospel (11:13), the answer to every prayer is one, the same, and the best: the Holy Spirit! God gives us power more than answers.

—from the book Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps by Richard Rohr 

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60 Second Wisdom: 10 Questions You Should Never Ask Anyone

“I learned very early about questions nobody should ever ask anybody. When I was a child, it seemed once a week someone would ask my mother, what do you do all day? Because she didn’t work outside the home, even though they knew she was raising eight boys. The questions we ask tend to quickly reveal how smart we are or how lacking we are in emotional intelligence.

Here are 10 questions to delete permanently from your vocabulary:

1. Are you on a diet?
2. Is that your real job?
3. Why don’t you have children?
4. Have you gained weight?
5. Don’t you feel embarrassed about doing that?
6. Why didn’t you invite me?
7. Are you really going to wear that?
8. What are you so angry about?
9. Why are you still single?
10. Do you know how many calories are in that?

The quality of a relationship can be measured by the quality of the questions that pass between two people. By asking people questions, we gain unique insight into who they are, what matters to them, and what they know more about than anything else in the world. Every person is fascinating when asked the right questions. Don’t waste your questions.”

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God is Your Healer

A body riddled with cancer. A heart loaded with grief. A mind addicted to prescription medication. A soul attached to gambling. A heart restless, seeking purpose. A relationship torn apart.

THIS WEEK’S GOSPEL IS MARK 7:31-37

Where do you need healing in your life? Today, Allen reflects on something we all need: God’s healing power.

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Did Somebody Call a Doctor? God is Your Healer

What Part of Your Life Needs Healing?

A body riddled with cancer. A heart loaded with grief. A mind addicted to prescription medication. A soul attached to gambling. A heart restless, seeking purpose. A relationship torn apart.

Where do you need healing in your life?

Today, Allen reflects on something we all need: God’s healing power.

//Dynamic Catholic//

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Minute Meditation – God Shines Through Others

When we allow others to do things for us, God’s goodness shines through them. Poverty is not so much about want or need; it is about relationship. Poverty impels us to reflect on our lives in the world from the position of weakness, dependency and vulnerability. It impels us to empty our pockets—not of money— but the pockets of our hearts, minds, wills—those places where we store up things for ourselves and isolate ourselves from real relationship with others. Poverty calls us to be vulnerable, open and receptive to others, to allow others into our lives and to be free enough to enter into the lives of others. While Clare calls us to be poor so that we may enter into relationship with the poor Christ, they also ask us to be poor so as to enter into relationship with our poor brothers and sisters in whom Christ lives.

— from the book Clare of Assisi: A Heart Full of Love by Ilia Delio, OSF

//Franciscan Media//