Lenten Reflection Day 15 (Mar 8): LIFE (from Psalm 121).
SONG: Good Life by OneRepublic: https://youtu.be/fuI0bEdoF30
POEM: Carrie Law Morgan Figgs: Life (excerpt): 1. A moment of pleasure, An hour of pain, A day of sunshine, A week of rain, A fortnight of peace, A month of strife, These taken together Make up life. 2. One real friend To a dozen foes, Two open gates, ’Gainst twenty that’s closed, Prosperity’s chair, Then adversity’s knife; These my friends Make up life.
QUOTE: Nicholas Sparks: I am nothing special, of this I am sure. I am a common man with common thoughts and I’ve led a common life. There are no monuments dedicated to me and my name will soon be forgotten, but I’ve loved another with all my heart and soul, and to me, this has always been enough.
Advent Daily Devotional: Day 6
Fri, Dec 4 – DAY 6
Hope often involves learning from our experiences. Gaining insight from our past, the hard parts and the good ones, and putting them to use.
Hope is controlling the one thing we’re able to affect: our own response to whatever has already happened and what is happening now. How will we react? What will we do with what is going on? How will we make meaning from it, and transform it into something that gives us energy, power, and motivation?
Hope comes from finding the most healing, sustainable, productive, purpose-driven way to name and acknowledge current circumstances. Then to adapt to them as needed. And change them if that is desirable and possible.
And what if we cannot change circumstances, even if its preferable to do so? Sometimes bearing witness is what we can do. By seeing, listening, recognizing a reality, we are remaining present to ourselves and others. That is a form of response, and also a way of cultivating hope. — Rev Gail
Israel, hope in the Lord! For with the Lord there is steadfast love, and with him is great power to redeem. — Psalm 130:7
Be strong and take heart, all you who hope in the Lord. — Psalm 31:24
We dream to give ourselves hope. To stop dreaming – well, that’s like saying you can never change your fate. — Amy Tan
Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. — Victor Frankl
It’s the possibility that keeps me going, not the guarantee. — Nicholas Sparks
Advent Day 6: Daily Devotional
Hope often involves learning from our experiences. Gaining insight from our past, the hard parts and the good ones, and putting them to use.
Hope is controlling the one thing we’re able to affect: our own response to whatever has already happened and what is happening now. How will we react? What will we do with what is going on? How will we make meaning from it, and transform it into something that gives us energy, power, and motivation?
Hope comes from finding the most healing, sustainable, productive, purpose-driven way to name and acknowledge current circumstances. Then to adapt to them as needed. And change them if that is desirable and possible.
And what if we cannot change circumstances, even if its preferable to do so? Sometimes bearing witness is what we can do. By seeing, listening, recognizing a reality, we are remaining present to ourselves and others. That is a form of response, and also a way of cultivating hope. — Rev Gail
Israel, hope in the Lord! For with the Lord there is steadfast love, and with him is great power to redeem. — Psalm 130:7
Be strong and take heart, all you who hope in the Lord.
— Psalm 31:24
We dream to give ourselves hope. To stop dreaming – well, that’s like saying you can never change your fate.
— Amy Tan
Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. — Victor Frankl
It’s the possibility that keeps me going, not the guarantee. — Nicholas Sparks
Meditations on tangible love during Advent 4: holy, messy, stubborn love that moves among us here on earth.
I believe God loves the world through us—through you and me. — Mother Teresa
The three grand essentials of happiness are: Something to do, someone to love, and something to hope for.― George Washington Burnap
The great struggle of … life is to take God’s name for us, to believe we are beloved and to believe that is enough. ― Rachel Held Evans
The roots of a lasting relationship are mindfulness, deep listening and loving speech, and a strong community to support you. — Thich Nhat Hanh
You’ve gotta dance like there’s nobody watching,
Love like you’ll never be hurt,
Sing like there’s nobody listening,
And live like it’s heaven on earth.
― William W. Purkey
Prayer
Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has no body now but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
compassion on this world.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.
— St. Teresa of Ávila
Questions to consider:
- When did you have an experience of holy, stubborn love this week?
- When has love insisted on showing up, despite whatever should have turned it away, in your life?
- What or who has been transformed by love, in your life?
- When have you served as tangible love in someone else’s life?
- What is your ‘language’ of love? How do you express love to others? Read an article on this concept.
- In what ways are you willing to receive or accept love? When and how is it hard to allow yourself to be loved?
- What songs make your playlist as great love songs? Are they romantic or do they describe a different kind of love?
- Here are a few love songs to get a shared playlist started:
- One Love as performed by Bob Marley and One Love performed as world music by Playing for Change
- What a Wonderful World by Louis Armstrong
- Lean On Me by Bill Withers
- Everybody Needs Somebody as performed by The Blues Brothers
- Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah performed by Pentatonix
- You Raise Me Up by Secret Garden with Brian Kennedy or You Raise Me Up as performed by Josh Groban
- Here are a few love songs to get a shared playlist started:
HOLY, STUBBORN LOVE: Incarnate, Embodied, Among-Us
Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. ― Rumi
Whenever you are confronted with an opponent. Conquer him with love. ― Mahatma Gandhi
Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that. ― Martin Luther King Jr.
Every one of us is trying to find our true home. Some of us are still searching. Our true home is inside, but it’s also in our loved ones around us. When you’re in a loving relationship, you and the other person can be a true home for each other. ― Thich Nhat Hanh
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close. ― Pablo Neruda
The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference. ― Elie Wiesel
When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it–always. ― Mahatma Gandhi
I am nothing special, of this I am sure. I am a common man with common thoughts and I’ve led a common life. There are no monuments dedicated to me and my name will soon be forgotten, but I’ve loved another with all my heart and soul, and to me, this has always been enough … ― Nicholas Sparks
Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love. — Mother Teresa
You don’t love someone because they’re perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they’re not. ― Jodi Picoult
Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could. ― Louise Erdrich
The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater. ― J.R.R. Tolkien
Spiritual Commentary on Love
Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive. ― Dalai Lama
I do not understand the mystery of grace — only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us. ― Anne Lamott
Most of us were taught that God would love us if and when we change. In
fact, God loves you so that you can change. What empowers change, what
makes you desirous of change is the experience of love. It is that
inherent experience of love that becomes the engine of change. ― Richard Rohr
Understanding someone’s suffering is the best gift you can give another
person. Understanding is love’s other name. If you don’t understand, you
can’t love. ― Thích Nhất Hạnh
What I love about the ministry of Jesus is that he identified the poor
as blessed and the rich as needy…and then he went and ministered to
them both. This, I think, is the difference between charity and justice.
Justice means moving beyond the dichotomy between those who need and
those who supply and confronting the frightening and beautiful reality
that we desperately need one another. ― Rachel Held Evans
God’s grace is a gift that is freely given to us. We don’t earn a thing
when it comes to God’s love, and we only try to live in response to the
gift. No one is climbing the spiritual ladder. We don’t continually
improve until we are so spiritual we no longer need God. We die and are
made new, but that’s different from spiritual self-improvement. We are
simultaneously sinner and saint, 100 percent of both, all the time. The
Bible is not God. The Bible is simply the cradle that holds Christ.
Anything in the Bible that does not hold up to the Gospel of Jesus
Christ simply does not have the same authority. The movement in our
relationship to God is always from God to us. Always. We can’t, through
our piety or goodness, move closer to God. God is always coming near to
us. Most especially in the Eucharist and in the stranger.
― Nadia Bolz-Weber
When love awakens in your life, in the night of your heart, it is like
the dawn breaking within you. Where before there was anonymity, now
there is intimacy; where before there was fear, now there is courage;
where before in your life there was awkwardness, now there is a rhythm
of grace and gracefulness; where before you used to be jagged, now you
are elegant and in rhythm with your self. When love awakens in your
life, it is like a rebirth, a new beginning. ― John O’Donohue
Meditations on themes of Advent week 4: Love
Below we offer the 8 categories of love as understood through a Greek lens: eros (erotic love), philia (friendship), agape (universal love), ludus (playful love), storge (family-kinship love), philautia (healthy self-love), mania (obsessive love), pragma (mature, enduring love). From which forms of love do you draw your strength and connection?
All You Need Is Love — Beatles lyrics
All You Need Is Love
Love, love, love … Love, love, love … Love, love, love
There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done
Nothing you can sing that can’t be sung
Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game
It’s easy
Nothing you can make that can’t be made
No one you can save that can’t be saved
Nothing you can do but you can learn how to be you in time
It’s easy
All you need is love … All you need is love
All you need is love, love … Love is all you need
Love, love, love … Love, love, love … Love, love, love
… Nothing you can know that isn’t known
Nothing you can see that isn’t shown
Nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be
It’s easy
All you need is love … All you need is love
All you need is love, love … Love is all you need …
Friendship … considered a love between equals. — Mateo Sol
You don’t love someone because they’re perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they’re not. ― Jodi Picoult, My Sister’s Keeper
Friends show their love in times of trouble, not in happiness. —Euripides
We sometimes choose the most locked up, dark versions of the story, but what a good friend does is turn on the lights, open the window, and remind us that there are a whole lot of ways to tell the same story. ― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet
… friendship is grounded in a feeling that you know exactly who will be there for you when you need something, no matter what or when. — Simon Sinek
One of the most beautiful qualities of true friendship is to understand and to be understood. — Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend. — Martin Luther King, Jr.
Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend. — Albert Camus
There’s a kinship among men who have sat by a dying fire and measured the worth of their life by it. ― William Golding, The Spire
There is on the earth no institution which Friendship has established; it is not taught by any religion; no scripture contains its maxims. It has no temple nor even a solitary column … However, out fates at least are social. ― Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Other Writings
To be with old friends is very warming and comforting. — Ian Ziering
In the outworks of our lives, we were almost strangers, but we shared a certain outlook on human life and human destiny, which, from the very first, made a bond of extreme strength . . . At our very first meeting, we talked with continually increasing intimacy. We seemed to sink through layer after layer of what was superficial, till gradually both reached the central fire … ― Bertrand Russell, Portraits From Memory and Other Essays
EROS
Eros is sexual or passionate love, and is the type most akin to our modern construct of romantic love. — Neel Burton, Psychology Today
The Greeks, it will be recalled, regarded Eros, the god of love, as the eldest of the gods; but also as the youngest, born fresh and dewy-eyed in every living heart. — Joseph Campbell
Eros will have naked bodies; friendship naked personalities. — C.S. Lewis
Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between ‘I love you’ and ‘I love you too,’ the absent presence of desire comes alive. But the boundaries of time and glance and I love you are only aftershocks of the main, inevitable boundary that creates Eros: the boundary of flesh and self between you and me. And it is only, suddenly, at the moment when I would dissolve that boundary, I realize I never can. — Anne Carson
Eros seizes and shakes my very soul like the wind on the mountain shaking ancient oaks. — Sappho
You can’t deny Eros. Eros will strike, like lightning. Our human defenses are frail, ludicrous. Like plasterboard houses in a hurricane. Your triumph is in perfect submission. And the god of Eros will flow through you, as Lawrence says, in the ‘perfect obliteration of blood consciousness. — Joyce Carol Oates
Ludus is playful or uncommitted love. — Neel Burton, Psychology Today
To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope. — Anne Carson
Don’t ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it. ― Toni Morrison, Jazz
on my mind
before reaching
for my waist
my hips
or my lips
he didn’t call me
beautiful first
he called me
exquisite
– how he touches me
― Rupi Kaur, Milk and Honey
Pragma is a love that has aged, matured and developed over time. It is beyond the physical, it has transcended the casual, and it is a unique harmony that has formed over time. — Mateo Sol
To fall in love is easy, even to remain in it is not difficult; our human loneliness is cause enough. But it is a hard quest worth making to find a comrade through whose steady presence one becomes steadily the person one desires to be. — Anna Strong
Love is friendship that has caught fire. It is quiet understanding, mutual confidence, sharing and forgiving. It is loyalty through good and bad times. It settles for less than perfection and makes allowances for human weaknesses. — Ann Landers
She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. ― Toni Morrison, Beloved
Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage. — Lao-Tzu
A single rose can be my garden… a single friend, my world. — Leo Buscaglia
The best love is the kind that awakens the soul; that makes us reach for more, that plants the fire in our hearts and brings peace to our minds. That’s what I hope to give you forever. — Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook
Love is not a mold that makes two people the same person. Love is the dream that enables both of us to be our own best person—together. Love knows no one can fill up in us what we lack in ourselves. But coming to live what we know about love for the sake of others, as well as for our self, is the one thing that can possibly stop the restless sleep that comes with loneliness. — Joan Chittister, Between the Dark and the Daylight
Storge is primarily to do with kinship and familiarity. Storge is a natural form of affection that often flows between parents and … children … can even be found among childhood friends … — Mateo Sol
It’s a funny thing about mothers and fathers. Even when their own child is the most disgusting little blister you could ever imagine, they still think that he or she is wonderful. — Roald Dahl
Without warning he had become witness to something that stretched back through the eons, ties both elastic and enduring, surpassing death, surpassing life. She was his child. It was as simple as that and that complex. ― Kim Harrison, Into the Woods
You don’t have to have anything in common with people you’ve known since you were five. With old friends, you’ve got your whole life in common. — Lyle Lovett
So it was in Botswana, almost everywhere; ties of kinship, no matter how attenuated by distance or time, linked one person to another, weaving across the country a human blanket of love and community. And in the fibres of that blanket there were threads of obligation that meant that one could not ignore the claims of others. Nobody should starve; nobody should feel that they were outsiders; nobody should be alone in their sadness. ― Alexander McCall Smith
Cousins by chance, friends by choice. — Proverb
I must get my soul back from you; I am killing my flesh without it. ― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. ― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
I love you. I hate you. I like you. I hate you. I love you. I think you’re stupid. I think you’re a loser. I think you’re wonderful. I want to be with you. I don’t want to be with you. I would never date you. I hate you. I love you…..I think the madness started the moment we met and you shook my hand. Did you have a disease or something? ― Shannon L. Alder
Do love. Don’t just think love, say love, have faith in love, or believe that God is love. Give up the idea that your ideas alone can save you. If you know the right words, then bring those words to life by giving them your own flesh. Put them into practice. Do love, and you will live. — Barbara Brown Taylor
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. — Martin Luther King Jr.
Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all. ― Toni Morrison, Beloved
When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.― Jimi Hendrix
The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves. — Victor Hugo
“Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.” AND “I believe God loves the world through us—through you and me.” — St Mother Teresa
There are no strangers here; Only friends you haven’t yet met. — William Butler Yeats
Many can give money to those in need, but to personally serve the needy readily, out of love, and in a fraternal spirit, requires a truly great soul. — Saint John Chrysostom
Love is not really an action that you do. Love is what and who you are, in your deepest essence. Love is a place that already exists inside of you, but is also greater than you. That’s the paradox. It’s within you and yet beyond you. This creates a sense of abundance and more-than-enoughness, which is precisely the satisfaction and deep peace of the True Self. You know you’ve found a well that will never go dry, as Jesus says (see John 4:13-14). Your True Self, God’s Love in you, cannot be exhausted. — Richard Rohr
All friendly feelings for others are an extension of a man’s feelings for himself. — Aristotle
How you love yourself is how you teach others to love you. ― Rupi Kaur, Milk and Honey
It’s all about falling in love with yourself and sharing that love with someone who appreciates you, rather than looking for love to compensate for a self love deficit. ― Eartha Kitt
The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely. ― Carl Jung
The first step is to come home to ourselves. You don’t need to become a Buddha. You need to become yourself. — Thich Nhat Hanh
— Joan Chittister
There is a magnet in a seeker’s heart whose true north is God. It bends toward the Voice of God with the ear of the heart and, like sunflowers in the sun, turns all of life toward the living of the Word.
This listening heart is pure of pride and free of arrogance. It seeks wisdom—
everywhere, at all times— and knows wisdom by the way it echoes the call of the scriptures.
The compass for God implanted in the seeker’s heart stretches toward truth and signals the way to justice.
It is attuned to the cries of the poor and oppressed with a timbre that allows no interruption, no smothering of the Voice of God on their behalf.
These seekers hear the voice of God in the cry of the poor and oppressed, and they “immediately put aside their own concerns” and follow God’s call in their actions.
Monastics cling to the community in order to know a wisdom not their own, to discover the tradition on which they stand, to heed the Word of God together with one heart and one mind—embedded in many shapes and forms, and brought to the fullness of God’s will for them in mind, heart, and soul.
They give themselves to mutual obedience in order to create a common voice— a communal voice— that can be heard above the clamors of self centeredness. And they do the hard work of community-living and decision-making together, “not cringing or sluggish or half-hearted, but free from any grumbling or any reaction of unwillingness”— so that none of the actions taken together are done in vain, so that the Reign of God can come sooner because we have been here.
In a Monastery of the Heart, Benedictine listening honors the function of leadership to point us in the direction of truth, but knows that neither dependence nor license nor authoritarianism are a valid substitute for communal discernment, for seeking truth in the light of one another’s wisdom.
Communal discernment is a holy hearing of prophetic voices among us. It comes out of listening to others and responding to them in the name of God, so that as a community we can move forward together, one heart at a time.
Benedictine spirituality requires careful listening and responding to the Word of God, to the call of the Jesus who leads us, and to the call of the community that is the foundation of our spiritual life.
It is not an obedience that rests on blessed ignorance, or infantile dependence, or reckless irresponsibility, or military authoritarianism, or blind submission in the name of holiness.
A truly listening heart knows that we lose the chance for truth
if we give another—any other— either too much, or too little, control over the conscience that is meant to be ours alone.
And yet, at the same time, mutual obedience, real obedience, holy listening forever seeks the spiritual dialogue holy wisdom demands.
In a Monastery of the Heart, it is the acceptance of wisdom not our own that asks of us the spiritual maturity that listens first and always to the Word of God— and allows the Word to be the testing ground of every other demand made on our lives.
It is obedience to the greater law of love.
An authentic claim to obedience does not deny another person’s independence and autonomy of thought. On the contrary, it hones the seeker for the sake of the growth of the community and the spreading of the Word.
This listening with the heart to the insights of another is not the obedience of children, or soldiers, or servants, or minions. It is the obedience given to a lover, because of love alone.
“As I began to love myself I found that anguish and emotional suffering are only warning signs that I was living against my own truth. Today, I know, this is “AUTHENTICITY”.
As I began to love myself I understood how much it can offend somebody if I try to force my desires on this person, even though I knew the time was not right and the person was not ready for it, and even though this person was me. Today I call it “RESPECT”.
As I began to love myself I stopped craving for a different life, and I could see that everything that surrounded me was inviting me to grow. Today I call it “MATURITY”.
As I began to love myself I understood that at any circumstance, I am in the right place at the right time, and everything happens at the exactly right moment. So I could be calm. Today I call it “SELF-CONFIDENCE”.
As I began to love myself I quit stealing my own time, and I stopped designing huge projects for the future. Today, I only do what brings me joy and happiness, things I love to do and that make my heart cheer, and I do them in my own way and in my own rhythm. Today I call it “SIMPLICITY”.
As I began to love myself I freed myself of anything that is no good for my health – food, people, things, situations, and everything that drew me down and away from myself. At first I called this attitude a healthy egoism. Today I know it is “LOVE OF ONESELF”.
As I began to love myself I quit trying to always be right, and ever since I was wrong less of the time. Today I discovered that is “MODESTY”.
As I began to love myself I refused to go on living in the past and worrying about the future. Now, I only live for the moment, where everything is happening. Today I live each day, day by day, and I call it “FULFILLMENT”.
As I began to love myself I recognized that my mind can disturb me and it can make me sick. But as I connected it to my heart, my mind became a valuable ally. Today I call this connection “WISDOM OF THE HEART”