still small voice

/ Bill Schulz / Leave a comment

Many voices ask for our attention. There is a voice that says, “Prove that you are a good person.” Another voice says, “You’d better be ashamed of yourself.” There also is a voice that says, “Nobody really cares about you,” and one that says, “Be sure to become successful, popular, and powerful.” But underneath all these often very noisy voices is a still, small voice that says, “You are my Beloved, my favor rests on you.” That’s the voice we need most of all to hear. To hear that voice, however, requires special effort; it requires solitude, silence, and a strong determination to listen.

That’s what prayer is. It is listening to the voice that calls us “my Beloved. – Henri Nouwen

Home by Mosab Abu Toha

/ Bill Schulz / Leave a comment

What is home:
it is the shade of trees on my way to school
    before they were uprooted.
It is my grandparents’ black-and-white wedding
    photo before the walls crumbled.
It is my uncle’s prayer rug, where dozens of ants
   slept on wintry nights, before it was looted and
   put in a museum.
It is the oven my mother used to bake bread and
   roast chicken before a bomb reduced our house
   to ashes.
It is the café where I watched football matches
   and played—

My child stops me: Can a four-letter word hold
   all of these?

Invisible

/ Bill Schulz / Leave a comment

It is taken from Charbon-neaux-Lassay’s very fine book: Le bestiaire du Christ. “People used to think that the hoopoe bird could hide entirely from the sight of all living creatures, which explains the fact that, at the end of the Middle Ages, it was still believed that there was a multicolored herb in the hoopoe’s nest which made a man invisible when he wore it.”

  • Gaston Bachelard