Whatever you do today, do it with kindness in your heart.
Today you could be standing next to someone who is trying their best not to fall apart.
Whatever you do today, do it with kindness in your heart.
0 Comments
"The more I love God, the more human I become, for I am made in God’s image. My humanity mirrors the One who made me. If on the other hand, my love is primarily for {the church or my work or someone other than God, I begin to lose my humanness, for I have set up an idol in the place of my Creator, and I begin to resemble the idol. My humanity is tied closely to divinity, for to be human is to be like God in whose image I am created. The more God-like I am, the more I am myself. But the more myself I am does not necessarily mean the more God-like I am. For often in striving to be myself, I can be setting up another idol, namely a false image of who I think I am. I find myself in God, but I do not necessarily find God in finding myself. The self cultivated can end up being the most pernicious of all idols. But the cultivation of the love of God invariably leads to the greatest possession of myself."
— from the book Song of the Sparrow: New Poems and Meditations by Murray Bodo, OFM By Maureen O'Brian
When the Branches Catch It All On my cell phone, I keep my “to do” list of all the things I need to keep track of to keep my life running smoothly, and I check it, add to it, or delete things dozens of times a day. I also keep affirmations to read during the busy days, as a way of “ordering my steps in thy word.” I don’t know where this came from, but every time I put something on the list or cross it off, I read, “Gentleness of Christ within. God seeking me instead of me seeking God.” I must have read this hundreds of times, alongside that other favorite quote from John O’Donohue, “May you take the time to celebrate the quiet miracles that seek no attention.” Now, combined with the psalms, it seems there are more tender things in this world. Were they always here? If so, where was I? I’ve noticed that when I read the psalms in the morning now, when I hear that soft sound of the pages turning, so tissue-thin, that it’s not just my fingertips, but even tinier—my fingerprints can flip them. Gentle: as in, dove-like. I’m curious, how do all the words fit together? When I wake up, I begin my day by pulling back the curtains and thinking my favorite line, “This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice in it and be glad” (Ps 118:24). I have this day now. The snow fell last night when I was dreaming, just enough, airy enough, to cling to the trees on top, not fall beneath them, only land in a scallop beyond the wide arms of the branches. There’s no white underneath, just the copper of the dead needles. I want a God like the softest of snowfalls when the branches can catch it all. A God as tiny as the letter “e” at the end of a word, turning “breath” to “breathe.” Wisdom from the Psalms The psalms are somehow able to cover the wide stretch of human experience and emotions, from deepest inner heartache to airborne joy. And yet they also remind us, no matter where we are in our lives, all we have is now, and it’s wonderful. Today, see if you can let go and appreciate that truth. “This is the day the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad” (Ps 118:24). By Maureen O'Brian
Crosses on the Highway I’ve never forgotten the beauty of the bold white crosses on the highway. One of the most life-altering displays of faith I’ve ever beheld occurred on US-84-285 outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, on Good Friday twenty years ago on a family vacation. It set in motion my awareness of seekers as I counted hundreds, maybe thousands, of Catholics from Indian, White, and Hispanic cultures walking north together, praying and reflecting, over twenty-six miles to El Santuario de Chimayo, a sacred church with healing dirt. Some started this annual pilgrimage from closer towns, but the striking image was the procession of halos of black hair and the white wooden crosses tilted on their backs. Regular people carrying crosses that looked made of pieces of painted snow fence. In the endless expanse of cerulean sky, I was transformed by their outward declaration of their following of Christ. Later, I found the lines of Psalm 119:45, “For all time and forever, I will walk freely in an open space, because I cherish your precepts.” I don’t walk that freely. I think of myself as careful about revealing my beliefs, though it’s no secret I value my relationship to God. I wear a silver Celtic cross on a chain around my neck that I never remove. A tattoo of a Renaissance image of Mary cradling infant Jesus covers my upper left arm. But this isn’t so much a declaration of faith as it is evidence I am afraid of people; the truth is, I put symbols on myself because I refuse to go into the world unprotected and unadorned. I’m endlessly drawn to those who declare their love of God in front of others. It takes mettle. When I first joined a Franciscan Church, I was (and still am) enthralled with the coarse brown robes and rope belts the friars and priests wear to honor St. Francis of Assisi, the Italian medieval saint who lived almost a thousand years ago. For that matter, I also love watching the communion line, though of course, that’s less of a risk, being in a church, not wandering out in the world. I love the slow shuffle toward the chalice, the way some don’t bother to fold their hands in prayer but just awkwardly let their long arms dangle and hang. I love how everyone receives their share, blessing themselves as the wafers melt in their mouths. It almost seems unreal to me, at times, that so many believe. It never fails to touch me when, at the end of Mass, the priest kisses the altar. I carry what I believe inside me, not on my back. When I’m walking into my school, one arm loaded with books and lunch swinging from my other hand, you can’t see the prayers swirling in my head as I buzz myself through the door: I am surrounded by pure holy light. Writing this, now, I know these beliefs are moving from the internal. I am letting the words be seen, like fallen oak leaves under ice in winter, quiet and anonymous. Writing about faith is like melting ice, softening the barrier, and when that happens, the water is fresh and birds appear to drink and wash and swim. I love spring. Can I be more like spring in the world? Can I speak not just about love, but what lives within love? Wisdom from the Psalms Psalm 119 falls in the exact center of the Bible, and is one of the most intriguing psalms. “For all time and forever, I will walk freely in an open space, because I cherish your precepts” (45) Reflecting on your life, who or what helps you to keep following a faithful path? What particular congregation, epiphany, devotion, sacrament, practice, or teacher would you say has been “a lamp for my feet” (105)? By Maureen O'Brian
The Place Where Light Enters You Today the sun is aimed at a rare angle on the western horizon, shooting all the way through the narrow window across my dining room into the galley kitchen, and landing on the counter with the wide, flat bowls on top of the microwave. The bowls are empty. No bread and ripening fruit. One bowl is painted with a pair of country rabbits and the other’s glazed with maroon and blue iris with a serrated chip in the edge. I don’t want to throw it out and replace it; it has sentimental value because my dear friend Vicki gave it to me years ago. The bowls are overflowing with light. The sun only finds that corner for a few days of the entire year, and for few minutes in these days. That’s it. I want to pay attention so much to this life that when the elusive light comes to my ordinary home, I stop and dip myself in it. Just as the poet Rumi declares, “The wound is the place where the light enters you.” During those two years of pain, and the seventeen holes in my body, I hung on to that idea of light getting inside me. This changed me, permanently, into a devotee of light. In the time it took to write this down and describe it, the corner of the kitchen is gray again. The bowls hold shadows. Nothing lasts. Except—except the desire for a love everlasting, for love everlasting, for everlasting love. Wisdom from the Psalms David wrote half of the psalms, and his poems are often inclusive of the challenges of the physical body: being sick, getting wounded, aging. “Yet you heard my voice, my cry for mercy, when I pleaded with you for help” (Ps 31:23). Take a moment today and reflect on how God’s light has been there for you or your loved ones during these times of distress. By Maureen O'Brian
What Remains The woods along the Farmington River are clear and quiet, except for my own footsteps on the icy gravel. The overlap of branches, the thatch of it all, and then one lone woodpecker fills the air with tapping into bark, the puncture of a rotting trunk. Pure silence, even more pronounced, when the woodpecker is gone. I was enraged when I first beheld what the hard-hatted workers in green fluorescent vests had done this past year to these woods to build the new bridge at the end of Old Farms Road. My first thoughts were, Oh my God, they raped it. Thousands of old trees were decimated, their tree-trunk bodies swept away, leaving ugly acres of amputated stumps. But astonishingly, as they bulldozed, they found evidence of people having lived here 12,000 years ago. This stunning revelation has become the oldest and largest cache of artifacts—15,000—that’s ever been found in all of Southern New England. The poet in me is intoxicated by this finding, that these ancient people of the Paleoindian Period ate water lilies, left behind jewelry, ate turtles (like the ones sunning themselves in summer on fallen lake-logs), and that during their time—and I can barely get my mind around this—mammoths existed. The psalms are timeless and can help us weather life's storms. “Modern life,” “suburban crawl,” the rising population, whatever we call it, pushes us into secular places where land is ripped apart and the pieces are discarded with no sense of attachment. But pieces returned, unearthed, providing such a sense of wonder that these Native Americans walked on this exact land over 12,000 years ago. I’m breathless imagining who moved through this forest. People have been the same throughout time; I sense the shy boys and girls, way back, growing up, growing older, becoming lovers, time passing, their children shrieking through the vines. This valley is idyllic even with the encroaching prefab housing developments and generic strip malls, but it must have been so peacefully tranquil and perfect back then. One thing I’m certain of: Whoever these people were, they loved this flowing river as fiercely as I do. I feel connected to them in this love. The beauty of being human is to turn to our spiritual ancestors, to cherish what they left behind, what remains. What has lasted? What has endured? Where can we turn for anything permanent when our loves, and our lives, are so exquisitely and heartbreakingly impermanent? Something is shifting in me, very far inside, as I am turning to these old psalms, reading them every day. I am starting to believe, throughout these millenniums, there’s been something unfailing and steadfast. And I think it might be God. Wisdom from the Psalms Isn't it deeply reassuring to know that people have been seeking and finding God within the psalms for thousands of years? Countless generations have found comfort in words such as... “They rejoiced that the sea grew calm, that God brought them to the harbor they longed for” (Ps 107:30). Today, notice how the abundant images of animals, weather, and landscape in the psalms anchor our experience of reading them. |
AuthorFranciscan Musings is the collective blog of the members of the OSFM. Here, our brothers and sisters and friends of the OSFM share their reflections on their Franciscan experiences and their Christian journeys. Archives
September 2022
Categories |