I am sorry.
Please forgive me.
Thank you.
I love you.
[for more information on the hooponopono prayer:
https://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/lessonsfromarecoveringdoormat/2010/10/solo-forgiving-with-hooponopono.html
Hope
love your enemies
Especially difficult gospel reading given the shameful, heartless actions of our president.
Saint Matthew 5:43-48.
Jesus said to his disciples: “You have heard that it was said, You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.
But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you,
that you may be children of your heavenly Father, for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.
For if you love those who love you, what recompense will you have? Do not the tax collectors do the same?
And if you greet your brothers only, what is unusual about that? Do not the pagans do the same?
So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.
change
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. It is the inherent experience of love that becomes the engine of change.
–Richard Rohr
There was a child named Bernadette…
Living simply like St. Francis of Assisi
community
if you offer
if you offer your food to the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the afflicted,
then your light shall rise in the darkness
and your gloom be like the noonday.
– Isaiah 58:10
Photo: Prout’s Neck, Maine – November 2016
on Merton’s birthday
But life is a gift I am glad of, and I do not curse the day when I was born. On the contrary, if I had never been born I would never have had friends to love and be loved by, never have made mistakes to learn from, never have seen new countries, and, as for what I may have suffered, it is inconsequential and indeed part of the great good which life has been and will, I hope, continue to be. – Thomas Merton journal entry, January 31, 1960
To say that the world is not worth anything ..
“To say that the world is not worth anything, that this life is of no value and to give evil as the proof is absurd, for if these things are worthless what does evil take from us?
Thus the better we are able to conceive of the fullness of joy, the purer and more intense will be our suffering in affliction and our compassion for others. What does suffering take from him who is without joy?
And if we conceive the fullness of joy, suffering is still to joy what hunger is to food.
It is necessary to have had a revelation of reality through joy in order to find reality through suffering. Otherwise life is nothing but a more or less evil dream,” – Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace.
Edge of Atlantic 